Receiving from God

Receiving from God.

Everyone has received from God. Life, abilities, talents. Everything.
Everyone is born with different talents, inclinations.

But talent is not enough. You need to develop your talents. Beethoven was incredibly talented but he worked extremely hard to write great music.

The same thing applies to spiritual gifts. John Wesley was wonderfully gifted to preach, teach, evangelise and write spiritual literature, but he did not achieve any results without very hard work.

CS Lewis was a wonderful Christian writer and a profound original thinker, but his books did not just fall out of the sky. He was an academic teacher at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was an expert in English literature. He was a professional thinker and writer. God used his talents and skills to win many people to faith in Jesus, people who were not attracted by any form of conventional Christian religion, whether Anglican, Catholic, Evangelical or fundamentalist.

Jesus was not just a preacher but also a story teller. God used story tellers like CS Lewis to show children and adult intellectuals the eternal truths of the Bible.

One Christian writer tells how the Narnia fantasy stories taught him to believe in the Christian values of right and wrong, and the battle of good against evil. He explained that conventional Christianity turned him off.

“Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Barney Zwartz

We can receive from God by responding intuitively to music and stories.

We can also receive from God through prayer and God’s answers to our prayers or the prayers of others for us.

Sometimes answers to prayer come quickly and easily. You are running late for an appointment and you ask God for a place to park in a crowded city. Less than a minute after your prayer, a car pulls out of a parking place in front of you.

Once I cried out to God from the depth of my heart for a friend who had taken a fatal overdose. I prayed non stop for hours. A week later my friend recovered completely without any physical damage.

Then there are persistent prayers. I prayed for my unbelieving parents to believe in Jesus. I prayed for my mother for 25 years and for my father for 40 years. Both made peace with God on their deathbeds.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Mt 7:7–8 NIV