God honors this kind of faith

NO GREAT SOPHISTICATION or information about God is required to be reached by God. Edith Schaeffer tells of a man from the Lisu tribe far out in the hills back of China. There was in him a great longing for a God he did not know. One day he found on a mountain path a page torn from a Lisu catechism. He read: “Are there more gods than One?”—“No, there is only One God.” “Should we worship idols?”—“No . . .” And the rest was torn away. He went home and destroyed his altars. Immediately his daughter became very ill and his neighbors taunted him for making the demons angry. The man thought if there was one true God perhaps he could reach that God with his voice. He knew nothing about prayer, but he climbed to the top of the highest peak in the vicinity—twelve or fourteen thousand feet high—and shouted out, “Oh, God, if You really are there and You are the One I am to worship, please make my little girl well again.” It took a long time to climb back down, but upon arriving home he found the little girl completely well, with no time of recuperation needed. She had recovered at the time he had prayed. That man became an effective evangelist across the entire area. 

 Multitudes of people have come to a full knowledge of God because in a moment of complete hopelessness they prayed “The Atheist’s Prayer” or something like it: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul.” When that is the true cry of the heart, of the inmost spirit of the individual, who has no longer any hope other than God, God hears and responds without fail. It is as if he has a “heart monitor” installed in every person. And when the heart truly reaches out to God as God, no longer looking to itself or others, he responds with the gift of “life from above.”

In fact, God is constantly looking for people who will worship him “in spirit and in truth.” What does that mean? It means people who have free-hearted and wholehearted admiration, respect, and commitment to God as the highest being of all. They never try to conceal anything from him and always rely completely on him. God is actively seeking such people, whoever they may turn out to be—even a despised, sixth-hand woman of Samaria, so ashamed that she would dare go to the well for water only in the heat of noonday, to avoid social contacts (John 4:6). God is spirit, we recall, and nothing is hidden from him. So those who worship him must worship him in spirit and therefore in truth (4:23-24). At the level of the human spirit, nothing can be hidden. Lying always depends upon the use of our body.

p. 149, SOURCE


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