Nuggets of Knowledge Series, Article 4

Blessed morning everyone, our gracious LORD GOD has blessed me with many an article topic this week, so I have been led to do a “double feature.”

As you can see from the title, this article is centered on the question “what does GOD mean to you?”

As you read my answer to this question, I encourage you to answer the question for yourselves; as you do so, take note of where you are now in your own personal walk with Christ Jesus.

I also encourage you to revisit this article and the thoughts it currently provokes in you on a later date to see how they may have changed.

So…what does GOD mean to me?

For a long time, my answer to that question was constantly changing. I thank our gracious LORD that it has settled down and I now see Him as my loving Heavenly Father, my generous provider, my all knowing teacher, my invincible protector and so much more, but most importantly, my gracious and almighty eternal GOD.

It wasn’t always that way, though, as I have stated. I used to not want anything to do with GOD. I used to be absolutely terrified of Him. I used to think He was sitting on His throne, watching me and just waiting to throw me into hell. I used to think that He was just angry at me all of the time, that all He wanted was to be rid of me.

Above, I shared my current answer to today’s question; what I’m going to share with you now is the story behind what influenced the changes in my answer over the years. It is my sincere and fervent hope that you will read through it, and if you feel the way I once did, that this will encourage you to seek the truth about our God.

I started my journey of finding GOD at the age of 8 with my first visit to church.

My family was not full of church going people so I NEVER heard about GOD in any meaningful way. I only ever heard His name when someone in my family (and later, I, myself) would use His name in vain.

At the age of 8, a family member of mine who had young children of their own took me to church with them; that was the first time I truly heard about our wonderful GOD.

At first, I was like any other kid at church, not really paying attention; this was well before churches started the whole “children’s church” thing where kids go out of the sanctuary of the church and do what amounts to an extended Sunday school lesson while the adults listen to the actual sermon.

So I sat with my relatives and their kids, being kind of fidgety, doing a lot of hushed talking, and impatiently requesting some gum to chew on. I would try to listen to the sermon at points, but I would always fall asleep.

It wasn’t until the summertime of that year, when I first went to vacation Bible school (VBS), that I began to truly listen. Why the change, what was the difference? They made it fun. For an eight-year-old, that’s the best thing in the world.

For the next seven years, I went to church sporadically, mostly for holidays like Easter and Christmas, though each of those years I definitely and always went to VBS, without fail.

And that is where I learned the most about God, that is where I truly got to focus on Him.

It was during the year of 2005, when I was 15, that I decided to get baptized, and give my life to Christ.

However, I didn’t truly understand what a commitment that was, nor did I truly understand the meaning of the word salvation.

I started to read my Bible more, started to pray, started to seek more information about God on my own time, not just in church and not just in vacation Bible school.

Most importantly, I started to change my opinion about God; the fear that I had began to subside and I had started to feel as though He actually loved me.

But as many of you have probably predicted, though, I fell off. I fell off because I was a 15, soon to be 16-year-old kid who didn’t really understand what he had gotten himself into, I didn’t understand what a commitment I made.

One of the chief things I did not understand—and what would later become the main reason I drifted away from God—was that, in order to begin to build a relationship with Him, you have to accept the fact that you will have to give up things that make you happy, ungodly things.

On paper, I was a Christian who had given his life to Jesus, but in reality, I was an ill-informed, misguided kid who was on his way to hell. I knew nothing of surrendering to God and submitting to His sovereignty.

In fact, I knew nothing of His sovereignty, because I didn’t even understand what the word meant.

Most importantly though, I knew nothing of the truth of GOD, I knew nothing of His love, nothing of His mercy, nothing of His forgiveness.

Nor did I really know anything about the redemptive powers of the blood of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Who died so that the sins of the world could be forgiven for all time and into eternity.

If any of you read my previous article in this series, Nuggets of Knowledge, you would have read that the devil himself is the father of lies, the deceiver and the tempter amongst so many other things.

What could be easier for him than to deceive, tempt, and lie to a then-15-year-old kid who knows nothing about his faith and the God he supposedly worships?

I’ll tell you now that’s exactly what he did. He took advantage of the naïveté in my young mind, took advantage of insecurities that Younger Me had. He took advantage of my anger. Because I was holding onto sadness that permeated my every thought, he had an open door and a “standing invitation” to torment me. He took advantage of every negative element of my life and used each to further turn me against the one positive element in my life, our benevolent heavenly Father.

I spent the next 19 years living apart From God (and please note that the refusal to submit my free will To Him or obey Him—even if I was “doing good deeds” or looked like a “good person” from the outside—that refusal to Make Him LORD Of my life in both thought AND in deed meant that I was guilty, I was living sinfully, I was ungodly. Just as ungodly as Saddam Hussein, or someone on death row who had confessed to millions of atrocities. All “good deeds” are as filthy rags before His Holy Name, and likewise, every sin also “Weighs” the “same.”).

Despite all this, I persisted in somehow still believing that I was “good” and “right with God.”

Even though I lied, I cheated, I stole, and I refused to submit all control.

Even though I was a deviant in many ways, the devil made me believe that I was spiritually OK.

Such is the “power” of the accuser—when we’ve submitted to him, anyway

If you were to ask me right now if I had truly thought I was spiritually OK at that time, I would say yes, but I know now that I wasn’t. I was actually far from it.

As the years ticked by, I dove deeper and deeper into sin, still thinking that I would walk through the gates of heaven if I was to die. I listened to all manner of ungodly music, watched all manner of ungodly TV shows and movies, had myriad vices (all unrighteous), swore and spoke in such an ungodly way that I could probably make the devil himself blush…and yet I still thought that I would go to heaven.

For 19 years I didn’t go to church, for 19 years I didn’t read my Bible, for 19 years I didn’t pray.

And for 19 years, I did everything I could to hide from and resist God. Why? Because I fell for one of the devil’s lies. Actually, no… I fell for quite a few of them. The chief one, the one that led me away from God for as long as I was, was that God wanted to control me.

I was very stubborn my entire life, I never wanted to be controlled, I never wanted to be stuck under somebody’s thumb and told what to do.

I believed what the devil and his demons put in my head, I believed that God wanted to control me.

I also believed that God was angry with me and wanted to do nothing but toss me into hell.

With those two thoughts in my head for those 19 years, I did everything I could to distance myself from God, all the while still believing somehow I was gonna go to heaven.

What a mess my mind was during that time of my life. What a mess my soul was.

Every single day I thank the LORD that He never gave up on me. Every single day, I thank the LORD that He broke through the fog of lies that the devil and his demons had surrounded me with…

The fog that made me not see what was going on and how far I had drifted away from God.

The fog that hid the truth from me, the truth that I was indeed being controlled and manipulated—but not by God.

The truth that God wasn’t mad at me, but greatly pained and saddened by the decisions I was not only making but walking in.

To this day, I cannot tell you how God broke through that fog.

I can’t tell you what He did.

I can’t tell you what He said.

I can’t tell you because I don’t know.

I just know that He broke me free, and I couldn’t be happier.

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There’s so much more to this story and maybe one day I’ll share it with all of you, but for now I believe this will suffice.

So, what does God mean to me? If I was to put it in bullet points, they would be as follows:

• Love

• Forgiveness

• Grace

• Redemption

• Protection

• Safety

• Happiness

• Joy

• Stability

• Wisdom

• Freedom

Once again, I encourage you all who have read to this point in the article to examine your own lives, and to not only figure out what God means to you, but to also realize what He, our heavenly Father, has brought you through.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for joining me once again for another installment of the Nuggets of Knowledge series here at metanoiameans.com

May God bless you all.