We are not co-equals with God.
God is totally good; we're not. God exists beyond time and space; we live within it. God is in charge; we're not.
It is right - that is, true, reasonable and in our best interest - for us to revere God. Revering God means paying attention to him and moving in the direction that he wants us to go.
The more we do this, the more we reach our full potential as human beings because God created us to live in active relationship with him, with him leading and us following.
We are born with defiant spirits, however. We don't want to follow--even when the leader is God.
God gave us the right to control our own lives. But when we do it without recognizing God's existence, we do a poor job of it. We tend to put ourselves in his place, and we aren't up to the job.
Watch an "innocent" two-year old, and you will see our natural character. We want to put ourselves first; as adults we're just more subtle about it.
This desire to satisfy ourselves by ourselves - rather than trusting God with the job - interferes with our coming to know God. We have no room for him in our lives.
Mostly, we think we don't need Him, that we can manage our lives by ourselves. When we realize that we might need some help, we want to decide for ourselves just who God should be and what our relationship to him should be.
But we don't have the ability to do that. We don't get to make up reality.
We can decide to ignore God, but we can't decide who he is.
God is the self-existent being, the one who was not created by anyone or anything else. We, on the other hand, were created by him.
If we seek God with conditions and opinions about what we will accept and what we will not, we are likely to miss him altogether.
Our guide should not be our thoughts on the matter, because we know very little.
Instead our guide can be that deeper sense of truth that we all have. There is a part of us that knows when something is true - even though we don't know how we know it. Listen to those you hear speaking the truth. We all need the wisdom of others who have taken the journey.
There is a real truth. It is our job to seek it.
Read on . . .