My Encounter With God – Who Is God?
By Susan Ream
It has been said that a person’s opinions and views about God are closely associated with their relationship to and experience with their earthly father. If you were raised in a home where your Dad had a relationship with God, you were most certainly blessed to see God’s attributes being lived out daily in your fathers life. But for those of us raised by earthly fathers who had no use or time for God; our picture of God may be warped by an internal impression shaped by how our Dad lived out his life. In God’s word, the Psalmist gives us a snapshot picture of the LORD God, the one who loves us beyond our wildest dreams, hopes and expectations.
“The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:8-14)
When I heard the incredible news of a Father in Heaven who really cared about me I was only 15 years old. I had always believed, in my core, that someone had to have created me and the complex universe I observed around me. As a teenager I was perplexed and disappointed with life and the seeming purposelessness of it all. Without EVER hearing anything about who God was or the plans He had for my life I sought to communicate with him the only way I knew how. I bowed, face down, and cried out to this God I had heard about. I prayed, “God, if you are real, I just can’t believe you would have created me and then plopped me down here on this earth place and then said, now fend for yourself. My heart longs to know you but I don’t know how to find you? Will you please reveal yourself to me?”
Little did I know that soon my best friends father would reveal God to me. One night my girlfriend Debbie asked me over to their home because she knew I had been really down and troubled. After her Dad put the kids to bed that night he said he had something very important to share with me. He opened God’s word and spoke words of life to me. He told me that God created me and that He loved me (tears welled in my eyes and the deepest longings to know God squeezed at my heart). Dad Haworth explained that the Lord God is a Holy God who cannot tolerate sin in His heaven. He then showed me, using God’s very words, that because God so loved me, He gave His only son to die for my sins (in my place) so that I could live eternally with Him. He told me many, many truths I will treasure forever! That very night I asked God to forgive me for my sins and thanked Him for sending Jesus to take my place on the cross. I then invited Him to be the Lord of my life.
My prayer was answered, my soul came to rest and I was fully at peace. I finally knew that the creator God loved me, pursued me and had a plan for my life here on Earth.
Oh how I love Him who first loved me. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Romans 8:31 “How Great is the Father’s love that we should be called the children of God” I John 3:1
Website: Make Friends With God
