The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
“Fish That Swim”
All of life is spiritual. Of every human being, the Apostle Paul declared, “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Certainly, this does not suggest that all know God in the personal terms of His redemption offered through the Lord Jesus Christ. It does mean that whether one knows God by faith or rejects Him through unbelief, all exist as fish that swim in the ocean that is their infinite Creator. “By Him, all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).
Born again believers in the Lord Jesus know this truth as the great reality of our existence. However, we know it only barely. Indeed, the best and the brightest of us in terms of knowing God and His pervasive presence and working see only the scantest trace of that which can be known. Who can understand or explain what it means that “in Him we live and move and have our being?” The most educated students of Scripture, if honest, arrive as the doorstep of this statement and fall to their knees before entering (if they enter at all). As one said, “It’s true, I know, and I believe it with all my heart. Understand it with my mind, however? Well, that is entirely another story!”
Yes, it is. I arrived at the threshold of Acts 17:28 more than a half century ago. I know it to be true, and I know believing it does something deep within us as we realize that God serves as the milieu of our existence. I do not begin to think, however, that fifty years of frequently pondering the wonder has resulted in comprehending much more than our opening proposal… “all of life is spiritual.” This does not discount physical, earthly, and universal realities, of course. As the products of God’s creative process, they are every bit as real and consequential. It does mean, however, that regardless of how challenging it may be to fathom the great fact, we nevertheless do well to frequently direct a thought - or maybe a few - toward the reality that whatever is going in our lives and in the world, the active presence of the God who “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will” pervades all (Ephesians 1:11).
I will conclude this consideration in a moment, pack up my bags, as it were, and go my way into the day, perhaps without another conscious thought of the nearly imponderable truth we presently ponder. The reality will abide, of course, for me and for all. We will swim as fish in the ocean that is God. What this means, we barely know. That it is the most important and vitally consequential reality of our existence is certain. Yes, all of life is spiritual, in the sense that the existence, presence, and working of the invisible, but intimately involved God abides as the essential reality in which all “live and move and have our being.” May we frequently arrive at the doorstep of such wonder, knowing we will barely enter into its light, but knowing even more that its glory will have an eternally consequential effect in our hearts and lives.
“Unto the pure, all things are pure.”
(Titus 1:15)
Weekly Memory Verse
Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”(Philippians 1:6).
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