How Fresh Is Your Experience with the Lord?  

Last Saturday our church had an event that included a yard sale and bake sale with the proceeds going toward a missions project. One family in our congregation also brought over a few of their animals to create a mini-petting zoo. It included a small goat, a couple of cute rabbits, and two chickens. During the course of the occasion, we were treated to the sight of each of those hens laying an egg. Maybe they were trying to make their own contribution to the event, allowing us to offer fresh eggs for sale. And you can’t get much fresher than that.

We tend to value freshness when it comes to the produce we buy at the grocery store or the food we eat. This time of year, I also often hear people talk about a sense of freshness in the air when cooler weather moves in. When viewing TV programs, people often prefer fresh, new programming rather than reruns of shows they have already seen. We like things to be fresh.

Do we let that desire for freshness carry over into our relationship with God? I am concerned that too often we tend to rest on our past spiritual experiences while failing to have anything current we can look to as evidence of our having a healthy, growing relationship with the Lord. Hopefully, we do have significant moments from previous encounters with God that we can remember as being life-changing and meaningful. Those landmark events in our spiritual history can encourage our faith and provide rocks of stability on which we can stand during turbulent times. We know what God has done for us in the past, so we know He will be faithful in our present and future circumstances.

It is especially important that we be able to look back to a time when we realized our sinfulness, repented, and put our trust in Jesus as the only one who could save us. However, there should be more to our walk with the Lord than simply pointing to something He did for us previously, no matter how wonderful it may have been. We can be grateful for having been baptized twenty years ago, or for a tremendous answer to prayer we experienced ten years ago. Nevertheless, we should also be able to provide some good answers to the question, “What has God done in your life recently?”

   Is there a freshness in the spiritual atmosphere of our lives, like that breeze from an autumn cold front moving through? I am not just talking about being busy in church activities or even being faithful to read our Bibles and spend time in prayer. We all know how those activities can easily degenerate into stale habits that can lose their meaning. Are we hearing God’s voice as we study His Word? Do we sense His presence as we gather with other believers to worship Him? Do we see Him answering prayers and working in our lives today? Are we experiencing God using us in some way to impact the lives of people around us? Are we spiritually fresh?

I have always liked the statement made in one of the psalms about the “righteous”. It compares them to growing trees that are continuing to bear fruit. And it declares that even in their old age, “they shall be fresh and flourishing” (Psalm 92:14). Regardless of what age we are, we should desire to be fresh and flourishing spiritually. And God can enable us to experience such freshness if we will earnestly seek Him and let Him work in us.

Thank God for past encounters with Him, but look for Him to keep working in your life today in fresh and new ways.