To know God is to be truly fortunate, to have been handed, through no magnificent achievement of one’s own the only thing of true value ever, the one thing that truly matters, that matters today, will matter tomorrow, will always matter, when all else ceases to count. I was looking at God in prayer this morning, and in that curious place where the reality of God envelops you, I became overwhelmed with an awareness of my extraordinary good fortune in knowing Him. At those moments, you sit before God and realise that ‘this is it’, this is the one thing that humanity needs, the only thing that man needs, that man was made for and will perish without – the knowledge and nearness of God. It is a humbling awareness.
Even more humbling is the understanding that you do not deserve to be where you are, seeing and savouring this, more humbling is the realization that you could very easily not be here, never get here, were it not for God Himself who reached out to you despite yourself, were it not for the individuals who gave their lives for the cause of the Gospel to be instruments in the hands of God to pen the Scriptures and often suffered opprobrium and endured scorn for that purpose, were it not for the individuals who persistently shared the gospel with you even in the face of your unbelief and mockery, were it not for the ceaseless wooing of the Holy Spirit drawing you from slumber to sacrifice, from worldliness to worship and from carnality to contemplation, lifting nuggets of truth from the pages of the Word and feeding a soul He had taken care to stir in desire and hunger for the knowledge of the Master.
So many others besides yourself conspired and laboured to get you to that moment where the reality of God sinks into your being and you think, were it only possible to devote one’s life to this, gazing on the Master, to the exclusion of all else, yes, so many people besides yourself, so many circumstances you did not and could not have engineered, and you think, ‘how did I get here’? I guess there is only one word for it, grace. And one is compelled to breathe the ardent wish that we may also be of those individuals, useful to the Master, who may be woven into the tapestry of other lives, and help, perchance to bring them, as we have been, to this place of the reality of God, this place of consciousness of grace.