Is God Really With Me?
Welcome to my first post!
One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was to share with you the experiences and life lessons I’ve had in my personal walk with Jesus; experiences that have carried me and allowed me to grow during the good and not-so-good times in life. I hope that as the number of articles I publish here increases, so do the content depth and grammatical accuracy in them, as I hope this will allow us to know God in a deeper way.
As I mentioned in the beginning, there are times in our lives where everything seems to be going perfectly; the sun shines illuminating everything around us, and it would seem as if nothing could ever get in our way. But then, all of a sudden, our world starts falling apart; the clouds and rain sweep in and our beautiful day turns dark and sad. And it’s in times like these that our problems and doubts make us ask ourselves: “Is God really with me? Why can’t I hear his voice anymore?”
The answer to the first of these question is an absolute “Yes!”. Not only is he with us but he actually goes before us. In John 10:1-15 Jesus teaches us that he is the Good Shepherd who knows and gives his life for his sheep. Let’s look at verses 2-5 specifically:
I think it’s interesting to see how deep the relationship between Jesus and us, his sheep, really runs. First, He comes, calls us by name, and then we hear his voice. We also see that it’s him who takes us out and goes before us. Finally, we recognize his voice and don’t follow the stranger for it’s our pastor’s voice.
Let’s see the context of this pastor-sheep relationship as it was in Jesus’ times. In Israel, the pastors would travel for days with their sheep as they moved from one city to another. At night, they would take their sheep to a communal sheepfold where all the sheep from all the pastors were put together (think of a sheep hostel!). At daybreak, he would come back to the sheepfold and stand at the door to take them out.
The beauty of it was that in order to take them out, he would call them out one by one, and name by name. Although we can only guess what the sheep names were like back then, we know that if he called “Fiffy!”, Fiffy would come out, if he called out “Johnny”, Johnny would come running towards him. If a different pastor called Fiffy or Johnny, they would not come to the door because they knew that the voice calling them was not their pastor’s.
So the question for us is: Do we really know our pastor’s voice? Jesus knows us by name and calls us towards Him. He calls us to follow him and allow Him to lead our steps. We cannot avoid the daily problems and chaos, but are we able to recognize his voice through the distractions and all the voices around us? If we have a relationship with Him and seek to know Him more through His word, it will then be easier for us to recognize His voice.
What Jesus wants from us is that we become like the 2 disciples mentioned in Luke 24:13-35. These men were on their way to Emmaus when the risen Jesus appeared to them and talked to them about what the Scriptures said about Him:
When Jesus talks to us his words make our hearts burn inside and we know beyond any doubt that he is with us. We will never feel alone because the Good Shepherd is with us and leads us through the good and better times.