Written by Pastor Mark Driskill
December 9, 2011

Read John 1:12-13

“To all who received him… he gave the right to become children of God.”

One of the great epidemics in our day is the masses who have no sense of connection to a family. Like broken pieces of precious china spilled across the hardwood floor of life, so many live in the pain of alienation. Our streets are flooded with angry broken young people cast out of their homes to make it on their own. Angry and hurt because they have been cast aside or simply neglected by their own, they roam through life seeking someone or something to be connected to. Still others exist within their homes but have no one to listen to them or care for them. Of all the crises in our generation it just may be that the greatest is loneliness.

We are high tech, high activity, high mobility, but at an all-time low in relationships and true community.  Maybe you are lonely . It wouldn’t surprise me to find that you stumbled on this page because you were bored out of your mind and can’t find anyone to talk to or anything meaningful to do.  You know what it’s like to be isolated from everyone else, even in a crowd. In fact you may have felt loneliness and frustration more than anything else.

Maybe you just wish there was someone out there… anyone at all who you could call your own and who would call you their own.  There is an anxious longing within you to call someplace home and to call someone family.  You may have tried to shake that desire with a drug, or the edge of a razor, or a hook up.  But it just will not relent.  Maybe you wonder why God… if there is one, would allow you to feel such pain, such dark gnawing loneliness. But what if I told you that pain you feel just may be a gift?

What if God actually gave you that hunger for friendship, family, love, or whatever you want to call it, for a reason?  What if that ache is really a signal from someone much greater than you can imagine.  What if that signal is God’s way of calling to you?  What if God really is out there waiting for you to answer his call and find your friendship in him?  What if there really is something to all this God stuff you keep hearing about?  What if Jesus Christ is more than a myth or an idea from the past?  What if all you had to do was call on his name sincerely and openly and invite him to fill that crater inside your soul.  What if that feeling you are fighting right now is God calling?  What if?

Our scripture today says that whoever calls on him and receives him by faith becomes, not a convert or a religious nut, but a child of God.  What if you were created to be in a real relationship with God?  What if the thing you have been avoiding and maybe even scoffing at all these years is the very thing you have been looking for? What if? Maybe you should at least think about the possibility.  Maybe even risk trying to pray to this Jesus and just see what happens.  Just try it and see. I dare you.

Pastor Mark Driskill
Web Minister of Begotten By the Word web ministry
See our website at http://ourchurch.com/member/b/bbtw
and
www.facebook.com (to group “begotten by the word”)
Begotten By the Word is a ministry of Helping Hands Christian resources-Evangelism Outreach
www.hhcr05.org
(Feel free to copy in any way that will bring glory to God and further his kingdom.)