Jesus tells us in Matthew 28:20, “Behold, I am with you always.”
The presence and closeness of Jesus is comforting. In truth, it would be overwhelming if He was visible and manifested Himself to us in full force. However, just because He’s not visible does not meant He is absent.
My son once complained to me about being unable to see God. He had just learned about chameleons that week, so I was able to help him better understand that God is camouflaged.
God is right here with you, though you cannot always see or sense Him, like a chameleon blending in with its surroundings to become harder to notice.
Though we can’t always see Him or experience Him, He is always there. This is not to tease us; it’s so we are not overwhelmed by His glory and awesomeness. It’s for our good that He remains hidden so that we can still function. But, this does not mean that He wants to remain hidden.
We are called to seek out this hidden God every day! To discover the One who is always with us. The more we seek, the more is revealed to us, and it becomes hard not to notice Him. You can’t help but see Him. And not just reflected in the beauty of the world, but you really get to know God.
Also in Matthew 28, the soldiers guarding the tomb of Jesus were told to lie about the His body being stolen by some of his followers. Why then did Christianity prevail after this lie was told?
However, the truth is they did not believe the lie because they experienced the truth. Jesus did not remain hidden to them but revealed Himself fully resurrected.
The point of all this is to say that Jesus is with us always not to simply haunt us like a ghost, but to accompany us, to let us know Him, and grow closer to Him. To realize this, we are called to seek Him out. To gain spiritual eyes to see our beautiful camouflaged God.
To do this, to gain spiritual eyes and discover God more in our lives, we need to work. Like a farmer tills the soil to eventually plant the seeds and grow the crops, we need to build a foundation upon which a relationship with Him can grow. This relationship will not simply materialize out of thin air, you need to seek it out. To do this, we can put forth the effort and seek to discover God with our minds, our hearts, and our souls.
Here’s how you can use this to build such a foundation and discover God more:
Our minds are where we can seek God through intellect. The intellect is where we structure our perceptions and our understanding of reality. It’s important that we recognize God is a part of our reality or we will never discover Him.
To help our intellect grasp this truth, we can read Scripture and other spiritual books, use our reason to unpack the things we learn, and the mind is also a place where we can encounter God in prayer. Both in words and in our imagination, we can speak to God or think about Him and His many interaction with humanity. This allows us to come to know more about God, which gives our relationship with Him firm roots.
The heart has also been known as the Will or the part of the person that chooses and brings about his or her actions. This why the heart is associated with love, because we can choose to show people love. This is precisely what we must do for God. We must choose to love Him and our neighbors because of Him. We do this by trying to make God and others happy with our actions. We can also seek to go out of our way for God and essentially show Him love in special ways.
We can do this by sacrificing things, whether good or bad, for God and others, choosing to follow the commandments, and choosing to do what is right even when it is uncomfortable. This may seem hard at first but does get easier over time.
The soul is the holy place of dwelling where God comes to abide with the one in a state of grace. We receive this state through baptism or regain it through confession. We keep it by avoiding grave sins. The one who has God living in his or her soul, has everything. He or she is well on their way to discovering God more and more.
Working on the first two items on this list will eventually lead one to this one. Your soul will slowly be filled, and you will find yourself either getting baptized or in the confession line. After baptism, you can only repeat confession. I recommend this as it keeps your soul as a beautiful throne for God where you can continue to discover Him more and more each day.
This might read like something only for those who want to uncover God to begin a life with Him. The reality is that He is infinite, and we can only grow closer and closer to Him as we discover more and more of Him. It’s endless yet always satisfying. Plus, it puts us the trajectory of heavenly life, which is what we truly crave more than anything.
To bring all of these together, here are five ways to discover God more in your life. Do all of these as often as you can and enjoy the beautiful benefits that come.
- Think about God. Use your imagination to think about different aspects of Him, read the Bible and other religious books so that you know more about Him and thus can think more about Him.
- Sing to God. Whether Praise and Worship or other Religious music, activate your Faith, or what you want your Faith to be, by just letting go and singing to Him. This is just like you might serenade a crush, or your significant other. Singing to God is a way that we grant Him permission to work in our lives. And He will respond to it.
- Invite God to Lead You to the State of Grace. This is the true path to peace and joy. Living in the state of grace. As mentioned above, the sacraments bring this on and help us keep it. Ask God to help you desire this and grant you His help in getting to it.
- Love God through sacrificing for Him and others. This can be seen as living in Lent permanently. If it is hard for you to see God in your life, try offering things up for Him. Go a week without a warm shower, choose a day to only eat fruits, veggies, bread, and water until 4 PM, do something someone asks of you that you really don’t want to do.
- Discover God on a Retreat. Retreats are known for leading people to discover God with their minds, souls, and hearts. They also provide the quiet, peaceful surroundings to best do this. I recommend that if you are serious about discovering God more in your life, you attend a retreat soon. For those of you who live in Georgia, I would like to suggest that you attend our next John 11 retreat taking place on June 5, 2021. Here are the details. Email us at emailzenithministries@gmail.com if you have any questions!
