I have a few questions to ask and, although the answers may seem obvious, they may require a bit more thinking than your instinctive reaction would indicate. I should note that this is being addressed to those who profess to follow Jesus and not those outside of the Church.
1. Do you believe that God - in the form of the Holy Spirit - dwells within you?
2. Do you believe that God is omnipresent - that is, He is everywhere all at once; seeing and hearing everything?
3. Is God at the top of the ladder in your life - is God "God" or is someone/something else for you?
Now the obvious, instinctive answer to all three of those questions would be a resounding "yes, of course", but is that the true answer? Consider the following:
Jim is a believer and when those questions are posed to him, the answer to each one is "yes, of course". Jim has a small problem though. You see, Jim has a real issue with pornography - not just pictures either, but chat rooms, erotic stories, videos...a bit of everything.
So, in the morning, Jim waits as his children head off to school and then his wife goes out to run some errands. He then waits about five minutes, just to be sure the "coast is clear", then runs to his computer where he spends a fair bit of time watching, listening and reading. The sound of his wife's car door closing stops him quickly and he closes out of everything, does a quick clearing of his browser's history, straightens himself up and is in the kitchen making a coffee when she comes through the door.
Now then, going by the above story, is the actual, true answer to our three questions a "Yes" for Jim? You may wonder, how would you know but take a look and it becomes obvious.
IF Jim truly believed that 1) God was omnipresent and 2)that He was fully within Jim's person in the form of the Spirit, then why does he find it okay to indulge after his wife and kids leave for the day? After all, God did not go anywhere - He is still right there with Jim for the entire event.
And if Jim actually does believe that "yes" is the answer to questions 1 and 2, then the answer to 3 must be a resounding "no", since the opinion of his family of his obsession obviously matters to him far more than God seeing - up close and personal - him do it each chance he gets.
Now this may seem a bit overly simplified and surely there are absolute hoards of different directions one could take in discussion from here, but it does help to get the point across. Just because we know what the answers "should" be and we know what to say when we are asked, do we show the reality of those answers in our lives?
This is not meant to shake your faith or make you paranoid or anything else of that nature. However, it should cause us to take a quick glance at what we say we believe and whether or not we merely say it because we have been taught or conditioned to do so or if we actually believe what we are saying. After all, what we actually believe will show itself in our actions.
"But, but what if I check and find that the answer to all three questions is actually a no? What do I do? What does it mean?"
One, it means you cared enough about your relationship with God to take a real stock of yourself - that would be love in action, my friend - so it means you do love God, but you have some unbelief in some areas which, I am afraid to say, makes you completely normal; most people do. And you cannot force yourself to believe anything but God on the other hand, He can show you things in a level of reality that removes any and all doubt for you - all you have to do is ask.
“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” ~ Mark 9:24
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