How do I find God?
How do you find Atlanta? You could go to a public library and ask for a map. You could surf the internet for road directions. You could ask a family member for help. Or you could use Global Positioning System’s navigational technology. This technology is now standard equipment in many new cars or on-sale at most electronic stores. Using satellites positioned many miles above the earth that transmit signals to earth-based GPS units to determine location and direction, GPS helps us get from point A to point B.
A GPS can give you step-by-step directions to Los Angeles. But a GPS can’t help you with life’s most basic question: “How do I find God?” Many people ask this question during a personal crisis that causes us to look for explanation, comfort, or relief. Like looking for road directions, you could go to your public library and ask for books on religion – but there are so many religions that claim to be true even though logically not all of them can be. You could Google for God – but when you do, you will come up with 356,000,000 pages — most of which raise more questions than they answer. Or you could ask a family member for advice about how to seek God – but you probably did that already and feel more confused. Or you can use technology already trusted by millions of people for thousands of years. This technology is not available as standard equipment or on sale from any electronic stores. Yes, it is a different type of GPS known as God Positioning System. This spiritual GPS is simply reading a book known as the Holy Bible. Year after year, more people buy the Bible, read the Bible, trust the Bible, and are inspired by the Bible more than any document on earth. That’s because God himself gave us this book to seek him. It’s a road-map … a road-map to heaven. The Bible is more accurate and trustworthy than any Global Positioning System.
This spiritual GPS informs us that every person is wired to search for God, but God isn’t the one lost. Spiritually, we are. Because of our personal sins we are lost eternally. Hopeless and helpless, we need accurate directions to help us find a fulfilling life now and an eternity in heaven. Simply opening the Bible activates this special spiritual kind of GPS as we start to read the words and apply them to our personal lives. As we read these words of fact and reality, we soon find that the Bible’s central person is Jesus Christ, God’s own Son and our human brother who tells us all that we need to know about God. Jesus tells us simply to believe that he lived a perfect life in our place, died the death we deserved on a cross, and rose physically from the grave to guarantee every believer an eternal life in heaven. We find God as we believe in Jesus as the Savior. As we review the pages of the Holy Bible, God also assures us that he will give us his unlimited Holy Spirit to help us believe what our limited human minds couldn’t possibly understand–that God loves us and also has a plan for our lives right now.
But this Spiritual GPS, the Bible, also directs us to a local Bible-believing, Jesus-centered church. Talk with a pastor, get involved in a regular worship service and Bible study, apply the words of the Bible to your life. Taste and see that the LORD is good. Earth-based GPS has it’s limitations: it needs a power source and doesn’t work if it’s antenna is blocked. But God’s GPS, the Bible, works anytime, anywhere. So use it. Believe it.