The Pursuit of Fellowship
While away at a summer camp recently, I was challenged more so than usual on the idea of friendship and fellowship. This was my third year at TED (Totally English Days) a Bilingual summer camp in France with the intention of sharing the Gospel with Teenagers, and improving their English along the way.
The teaching during the week began with the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve, the fall of humanity and the beginning of Sin in the world. For so long this origin has been very difficult for me to understand and began the question in my life of: Why did God allow us the option of Sin? And after leading a group of young people, with exactly the same question, I really began to understand the position God put us in. There needed to be the option of Sin, in order for there to be the option of God. It is that age old argument of free will, the answer I usually default to, but now I am beginning to understand the love within that option. In order for us to be able to truly love God, the way he truly loves us, there had to and still has to be an option not to. It is sometimes difficult to see, but the grace in this is incredible. We have been invited, not forced but welcomed into a relationship that lasts forever and is with the most desirable being ever to exist, that has always existed. We don't deserve this relationship, and we can even deny it, but still it is laid out as an option to us by our Heavenly Father.
In re-reading this story in genesis I have realised that this event, “The Fall”, that changed humanity and disrupted Adam and Eve's relationship with God, is a story played out constantly in all of our lives. So many times I have been walking in the Garden with God, and I've been distracted, misled and found myself moving towards the tree of knowledge between Good and Evil. As a consequence to our sin we are met with hardship, not because God is punishing us, but because sin isn't of God and we are pursuing it anyway! If you run fast enough into a wall it hurts, and even if you walk slowly toward it, it still stops you in your tracks and disrupts your path. The same is with Sin. God enables, Satan disables. The fall didn't happen just once, that choice wasn't a one time offer and we got it wrong for eternity to come. The fall is a daily choice between God, and not God. It is a simple as that. There will always be another tree in the Garden, for as long as we walk the Earth, Adam and Eve faced that daily choice the same as we do now, that tree was in the Garden everyday before they chose to eat from it. Yet despite our pursuit of Sin, we still constantly have the choice of fellowship with God.
God makes redemption possible, by constantly pursuing you and you alone. He didn't send his only Son to save the whole world at once, he came to save you as an individual whenever you are ready to accept it. And that is true for everybody. The fall created a gap, a space between us and God, and I know I have made choices that should have made that space bigger and more impossible to bridge. But God, with everything he is, has been pursuing me the moment I ran in the other direction. The only space left between God and I, was my choice. My free will to love him back. So one day, I stopped running. I was all out of breath and I plucked up the courage to acknowledge the hand on my shoulder, and finally turned around. Grace is real and God is full of it, it is never too late to turn around and accept the message of the Gospel. Christ died for us while we were still sinners, we didn't earn our freedom and we never will, we were saved by Grace, by God. And even when we turn and run again, when we don’t hold up our end, God picks up his robe and comes right after us. He made that covenant with Abraham, and he has walked through fire for us ever since. (Genesis 15)
God is in pursuit of you, and you as an individual. Just stop running and turn around.
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