Enjoying the Lord

During the 1960's and 70's, there were a lot of break-away church type groups. A lot of them were in the style and attitude of the Hippies. There were so many "alternative" life styles then, that there became alternative church styles as well. The Jesus People were one example. They changed later into a conventional church when their leaders got to be around 40 years old!

I observed a lot of this. I attended many of the different groups from time to time to sample what was going on among the young. I could never hook up with any of them, so much of it was posturing, image searching and chick-chasing. But they did have a few good ideas. One stuck with me. It is the concept of "enjoying" the Lord. This comes from the verse that says "come everyone that thirsts and buy water without paying for it" and "He that eats me has life eternal" and "I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly." The idea was that church is more than evangelism. It is more than ritual. It should be a group that loves God, has fellowship with Him and His Son (as per I John 1) and generally enjoys it. But I could never get anyone to give me some definitions or descriptions of what this entails.

I have written elsewhere that the Lord, the night before He was crucified, asked His own to "remember" Him in eating bread and drinking wine. This, if practiced correctly, can carry our minds to meditation about the person of the Lord Jesus and all His attributes. Especially speaking to one another in words as well as spiritual songs, we can share things that we know of Him and enrich the remembrance service. While this is one tried and true way to enjoy the Lord, it is not the only way.

Since the Hippie days, I have found some more ways of enjoying Him. One is to meditate on works we have seen Him perform in our lives. All of which are miracles in the sense that they could not be accomplished with human talent or means. One night a bunch of my kids and their families gathered at my daughter's home to eat pizza and hang out. My son-in-law was not there. His Dad, who had cancer (under control medicinally) was in the hospital with a constant elevated heart rate. My son-in-law called to say that the docs told him his dad would not live long. Hours or days, maybe. His heart had been up like that (over 120 beats a minute) for a period of three weeks. He could not sleep. It was the equivalent of running for three weeks in all without stopping to catch your breath. His dad's heart could not take much more of this. The docs had tried all kinds of ways to get it down and were unsuccessful.

We all were stunned. We had heard that he was in the hospital and had been having heart problems but we didn't know it was that serious. When the call came through it silenced us. We all know him and think of him as one of the nicer people. Very soon, someone said "Let's pray for him, NOW." So we all got down on our knees and someone led in prayer, begging the Lord to spare him. The next morning the docs tried an electric shock method again. This time it brought his heart rate to normal and two days later he went home and was able to sit up and talk on the phone. For days after that, when I wasn't busy with other things, I just contemplated that event. Here was a person who was not an extraordinary Christian, merely a saved sinner. He suggested prayer and prayed and God answered. All of the story is attributable to God. Even the timing and the conviction of the prayer leader to get us all down to intercede for this sick man. The way the Lord engineered it and how He did it really was full of enjoyable thoughts about Christ. I just sat and rolled them around on my tongue and "tast[ed] and [saw] that the Lord is good." I did that quite a lot over the next weeks.

I was watching a DVD documentary about the position of earth in the universe. It went into how the earth has eleven factors relating to size, distance from the sun, size of its moon, etc, that make it a very unique planet. Scientists agree that these factors must be like earth's in order for life to be found on other planets. The chances of them all being present even if a star could be found with a planet system like ours are very small. But another idea was introduced. It was this: The position of earth in the Milky Way. If our solar system would exist in the middle of the Milky Way we would not be able to observe the rest of the universe as we do. Neither could we if we had a view of the Milky Way from above rather than from the side. It is almost as if the earth was given a front-row seat so that people could view God's handiwork, and in fact there are many verses in the Bible that say that God wants His creatures to look at his works and to glorify Him because of it. The documentary also pointed out that the human mind is capable of analyzing and studying what they see in order to learn more about the wonders of the universe. Had we simply evolved from other animals, how would such a mental capacity have originated? Mankind would only need enough intelligence to know how to find food and how to reproduce.

As I was thinking about this, I expanded the application. There are so many things in the Bible that we don't understand. People have used their minds to try for answers. Usually, they come up with some humanistic system of thought that explains one of the controversies and then they have arguments and become estranged to each other. I think God gave us all the mysteries of science and all the incomplete explanations and seeming contradictions in the Bible so we would have some material for enjoying Him. We can talk about all those things with Christ as the center of our thoughts and we can mediate about what we have learned or what we are in awe of. We can appreciate two sides of all the controversies and not need to come to a conclusion but rather allow them to stimulate our appreciation of the great mind of God who gave them to us. It is not really necessary to our Christian faith to understand so well when and how the rapture will take place. It IS going to happen and Christians will experience it even if they don't believe it will happen, as some do not. We do not need to understand it in order to be in it. It is enough to look at all the truths presented about it in Bible and enjoy Him for it.

One other way to enjoy the Lord is just reading the Bible. If our souls are right with Him and we are not trying to hide anything and we are not afraid of what He might put his finger on through our reading of certain passages, then we can just read along. We can enjoy the stories and the principles and the promises even if we don't learn anything new. When we spend time with a friend, we can enjoy him without learning anything new, isn't it so? In the same way, we read the Bible and it is God talking with us. He never bores us. If Jesus Christ were to come to our town today in bodily form as He did 2000 years ago, everyone would spend all their time sitting around listening. That was the effect He had on people when He was here. They couldn't get enough, but followed Him around. These were the "simple" people. The "learned" ones stayed away and eventually crucified him. Reading the words of God in the Word of God is a way of enjoying the Lord that doesn't depend on anything but ourselves.