Spiritual Prescription YOU CAN'T CONVERT YOURSELF
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. John 3:7.
Anyone knows that if you want to go to sleep, there are a couple of things you need to do. You have to put your back against the mattress, as a rule (although I went to sleep one time working on a combine harvester). You should turn out the lights. You can turn your radio down to nothing, instead of forty decibels. And it helps to close your eyes! When my daughter was small, I got into the bad habit of lying down with her until she went to sleep. The situation came to the place where she wouldn't go to sleep until I would lie down with her. Sometimes I would have some place to go, and I'd look out the corner of my eye and say, "LuAnn, close your eyes." She would, but the next time I checked, they would be wide open again. I knew this one thing: if I could at least get her to close her eyes, it would surely help!
In order to have a meaningful relationship with Christ, in order to find value in spiritual things, you have to come to the experience of being born again. You cannot convert yourself. But you can place yourself in the atmosphere where it can happen. You don't have to sit and wait forever for something to hit you. If you are running from God, and find at the same time that deep inside, you want to come into the right relationship with Him, you can at least place yourself in a religious atmosphere where the things of God are being presented.
If you are a student on a campus and realize that you are unconverted, instead of skipping every meeting or trying to sleep or read your way through, you can at least go and listen when the gospel is preached.
If you have found that the Bible is a dull book to you, and have left it to gather dust on the shelf year after year, you could at least take a few minutes each day to consider deliberately some passage on the life of Jesus, inviting God to meet you where you are and do His work in reaching your heart.
The responsibility for meaningful communication with God has to be His, not ours. But we can come to Him. We can place ourselves in the atmosphere where He can get through to us most easily, and then invite Him to work His miracle of regeneration in our lives.
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. John 3:7.
Anyone knows that if you want to go to sleep, there are a couple of things you need to do. You have to put your back against the mattress, as a rule (although I went to sleep one time working on a combine harvester). You should turn out the lights. You can turn your radio down to nothing, instead of forty decibels. And it helps to close your eyes! When my daughter was small, I got into the bad habit of lying down with her until she went to sleep. The situation came to the place where she wouldn't go to sleep until I would lie down with her. Sometimes I would have some place to go, and I'd look out the corner of my eye and say, "LuAnn, close your eyes." She would, but the next time I checked, they would be wide open again. I knew this one thing: if I could at least get her to close her eyes, it would surely help!
In order to have a meaningful relationship with Christ, in order to find value in spiritual things, you have to come to the experience of being born again. You cannot convert yourself. But you can place yourself in the atmosphere where it can happen. You don't have to sit and wait forever for something to hit you. If you are running from God, and find at the same time that deep inside, you want to come into the right relationship with Him, you can at least place yourself in a religious atmosphere where the things of God are being presented.
If you are a student on a campus and realize that you are unconverted, instead of skipping every meeting or trying to sleep or read your way through, you can at least go and listen when the gospel is preached.
If you have found that the Bible is a dull book to you, and have left it to gather dust on the shelf year after year, you could at least take a few minutes each day to consider deliberately some passage on the life of Jesus, inviting God to meet you where you are and do His work in reaching your heart.
The responsibility for meaningful communication with God has to be His, not ours. But we can come to Him. We can place ourselves in the atmosphere where He can get through to us most easily, and then invite Him to work His miracle of regeneration in our lives.
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