What is Real?

We all seem to have our own vision of God ... and Reality seems to be the scarcest thing in the universe!

Years ago Amy Carmichael wrote a list of things which are spiritually suspect.
I don't remember her list, but I am sure that we can all come up with a list of our own.

Suspect things are things which are too easy, 
Suspect are the things which offer instantaneous fail-safe solutions.

It is so tempting to become infatuated with "solutions" which make the Christian life easy.
We are tempted by things which promise to lift us out from the toilsome path through the desert, and set us down safe and sound on the far side of the sands.

How attractive it is to think of an experience which can instantly remove obstacles and land us in a place of spiritual enjoyment without alloy.

Perhaps four hundred years ago William Law affirmed that the greater price we pay for a spiritual truth the greater bargain we obtain.
Alas! we like to read it backward ... and today the less we pay, the better it suites us.

The Bible warns to lay hands suddenly on no man for ministry (1Tim 5.22)
and yet we do it all the time "because we can."
The "latest and greatest" holds an irresistible charm and the slow process of the husbandman who has "long patience" awaiting the fruit is forsaken.

Moses had his forty years in the desert, and Paul had his own experience in Arabia.
Job learnt his lesson in pain, and David cried in his bed.
Down through the history of church biography men have found God when all other sources have proved to be mere mirages without substance.

Saints, there is a realm in God far beyond our present thinking, a realm so vast that it reaches into the reality of eternity.
It is a realm where God Himself opens before us the wonders of the working of His love in the world in which we live.