Biography Of God: A Six-Day Devotional By Skip Heitzigनमूना

Belief Is Your Responsibility

The fact that God exists and wants to know you means you are bound by certain responsibilities. Once you can say, "God is real and He wants me to know Him," then you need to take the next step in your spiritual journey and respond to Him with faith. "Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him" (Hebrews 11:6).

Belief is essential to knowing God. Why? Well, let's be honest: right now, we can't see God or hear His voice. His "fingerprints" are all around us—in nature, in the moral law imprinted on humanity, in our own internal longings—but the common external guideposts that make for effective human communication, such as vocal tones, body language, and facial expressions, are absent.

One day, if you're a believer, you'll see God face to face and hear His voice audibly in heaven. At that point, you won't need faith any longer. You'll be right there with your Maker. But not yet—not now. So in the meantime, as Paul noted, "We live by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7, NIV). We can and should examine the evidence that reveals God to us, but we should do so with the understanding that all the evidence in the world means nothing without the will to believe it.

Faith is more than mere acknowledgement. To move from seeing God as an impersonal higher power or great spirit or "the man upstairs" to loving Him as your Father in heaven takes a paradigm shift in how you see yourself in relation to Him. It's one thing to acknowledge the existence of God; it's quite another to trust in that God. It's like skydiving: it's one thing to acknowledge the greatness of a parachute while sitting in a training session on the ground; it's another to jump out of a plane with nothing but that parachute strapped to your back. Faith is betting your eternal life on Jesus Christ, putting all your eggs in God's basket.

And that kind of belief is what unlocks the door to knowing God. But having faith is more than just an initial entrance, a first step to knowing Him; rather, it's a way of life, an ongoing process of belief built on daily acts of living out that faith. Every day we have to jump out of the airplane, so to speak.

That's why faith takes humility. You can never know everything there is to know about God. He is infinite; we are finite. He is transcendent; we are tethered to time and space. I take almost every opportunity I can to learn about God in His Word, from other Christians, and through the challenges life brings my way. Even so, He will always be beyond my human ability to fully grasp or understand. But I'm good with that. He wouldn't be God if He wasn't way beyond me.

So when I tell you that God not only exists but wants to be known, do you need to embrace that tension and take a step of faith toward Him? Do you need to admit, "I don't know God as well as I thought I did, and I'm willing to change"? When you take a well-reasoned step of faith, God is pleased, and you will be rewarded; He doesn't require you to take a shot in the dark.