Window Shopping

Over the past few months I’ve been reading through the Gospels in my Bible. Starting with Matthew, I’ve read a chapter a day with a deliberate desire for God to reveal His Word to me in a fresh, new way.

By the time I reached the last verse of Luke 19, it dawned on me that God’s Word was so much more relevant and alive than all the times I had read the ancient stories of Christ, the Messiah.

When this revelation fully manifested in my slow brain, I confessed that I had been “window-shopping” through the most significant sections of my Bible.

“Oh, that’s neat,” I would say when reading how Jesus fed 5000+ people with a boy’s lunch.

“Huh, that’s cool,” I would mutter when I’d read that Peter got out of a boat and walked on water to Jesus.

“Wouldn’t that be awesome to see?” I’d think to myself when I read how Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead.

I casually passed over these phenomenal acts of God’s Son with little more than a yawn and headed back to the Psalms where I could better relate to the ‘woe is me’, ‘please change my circumstances, Lord’ and ‘save me from my enemies!’ passages.

Don’t get me wrong, the Psalms are timeless writings of precious, heart-wrenching intimate moments of doomed souls crying out to God for salvation, deliverance, hope and healing. I would never cast a condescending shadow on such sanctified prose. So why all these years have I breezed through the four written accounts of God’s Answer to all those ancient pleas?

I am ashamed to say that I have merely glanced at the eye-witness accounts of God-became-man to save a lost planet. In these newscast-type books is the path, the door, the key, the hope, the fruition of God’s promise to Abraham and all who, by faith alone, would believe.

Something else happened to me when I reached the Gospel of Luke. I met a Christian woman who lives entirely by faith. Her beautiful life drew me like a moth to a flame and instantly God reminded me that once I too lived solely on faith.

I remembered an article called Walking on Water I wrote for this column in March 2000. My son was in college and I lived alone in Peoria. In the article I used a metaphor relating the impossibility of comprehending a human figure walking on water to the impossibility of me being able to pay the numerical figure on the bill from my son’s college.

Supernaturally, a Community Word reader of that article was led by the Lord to send me a cashier’s check—it was the amount I needed to pay the balance on my son’s sophomore year. You must know that I never named the amount I needed in that article, only that I trusted God to provide it. With that check, the reader included a hand-written note that foretold the life my son and I now live, “Glad that you stepped out of your boat and are walking with Jesus. Your lives will change more than you can imagine.”

How prophetic! We now live lives beyond our imagination and spend our time rejoicing at every divine appointment, every miracle, every instance of supernatural healing, protection and provision. There is no time to maintain regrets—only time to forgive, help others, love each other and seek the counsel and direction of God.

We have shelter, food, clothing and each other. It may not appear by “normal” standards that we are well off, but living by faith transcends logic, it is trusting in God for everything.

Now, I’m tearing apart my house like a crazed, madwoman who lost a valuable coin (Luke 15:8-10). I’m selling everything I have to buy a field where I found a priceless pearl (Matthew 13:45-46).

I finally get it. The kingdom of heaven should be pursued. It’s not history. It’s not a shopping expedition for what fits best into our lives. It’s real. It’s here. It’s mine.