Why Is There Communication With God?

We are looking at how to communicate with God, and how God communicates with Wo/Man, whether through direct or indirect communication, through life experiences, and through ordinary people as well as through teachers and prophets and sages. Last week, we studied communication by God from the stories of Jacob. We learned that Jacob found that God’s ways of communicating were not predictable. 

They were highlighted in two stories—the story of the stairway to heaven and the story of the struggle by the brook Jabok. On his way into exile, Jacob encountered God in a dream about a stairway to heaven. This was God initiating communication with Jacob. It was direct communication to heaven. The messages were facilitated by messengers—angels going up and down the stairway. We called it the “Easy Street” connection. But the same situation did not pertain when he returned to his father’s house. Here God communicated through a struggle, through wrestling, through physical impairment, through a loss of mobility. 

Thus, we learned from Jacob that communication with God may be an Easy Street which is direct, refreshing, and divine; but it also may be a struggle, with uncertainty, fear, and physical loss. It also might be anything in between. The message is that God can be—and likely is—in both extremes. 

Don’t expect that when God communicates it’ll always be easy. Even in the struggle of life, you may find a message from God—a transforming message that will leave you more dependent upon him. Jacob sought in his prayers to be protected from Esau and to run away from Esau. But with his hip dislocation, the very thing which he sought most—physical escape from Esau—was exchanged for dependence upon God. 

From these two stories, we learn about communication with God. I put together six lessons that I want you to respond to—six ideas about communication with God that come from the discussion of these two stories. Are they realistic? Are they useful? How do they fit into our understanding about how God communicates with us?

1. Much, if not most, of Wo/Mankind’s communication with God is initiated by God and is the prerogative of God. This is something I think we would do well to consider more. It is, after all, God’s stairway. The angels are God’s messengers. God controls the messages through them. They move in both directions—toward and away from God. 

You cannot build your own stairway to heaven. We seek to initiate contact with God. We want our prayers to ascend to heaven. We have needs, of course; but it’s God’s stairway and it’s already there. His messengers are already at work. He already knows your needs, even before you ask, and even better than you know them. 

We see the same situation in Jacob’s struggle. God finds us; We don’t find God. We mistake the struggle for adversity, when in fact it is the prequel to the blessing which God has for us. It is God’s struggle, it is God’s blessing. Not only do we not understand God: God points out that we don’t even understand ourselves. It is only in God finding us that we have a chance of finding ourselves. 

We need to consider the possibility that prayer is not something that we do but is something that God does to us and for us. 

2. Communication with God comes when we least expect it, and we often mistake it for something else. In our darkness, at the lowest point of our existence—full of fear and doubt and uncertainty—God comes to give us a blessing. We’re looking for physical strength to escape the woes of life, but God exchanges that for reliance upon him. 

This was a lesson that Elijah learned. On Mount Carmel, God came down in fire and consumed the offering in his contest with the prophets of Baal. Elijah then escaped on foot to flee from Jezebel and he encountered God in the wilderness. He saw an earthquake and a fire and a whirlwind and expected to find God there, but God was in a “still, small voice” (Kings 19). God shows up when and where and how he wants to, and when we least expect it. 

Ravens also brought Elijah food (1 Kings 17). They were messengers from heaven—we can tell because ravens are amongst the most ravenous of animals. They’ll eat anything, including roadkill. Only a divine raven would not eat food put into its mouth to take to Elijah. That is itself a miracle. It is God’s message, delivered via God’s Messenger. 

We cannot predict when or where or how God will show up. He may direct ravens to communicate to you the same message he gave to Elijah—that is: “I’m looking out for you.”

3. When God communicates the message, the result may be easy or hard. Don’t think that because you’re in a struggle, God is not with you in the struggle. Night brings darkness, doubt, and fear. The blessing comes at daybreak. Just as surely as dawn follows night, so too blessing follows struggle. 

We intuitively want to hear from God because we feel that our life would be better, less stressful, less distressing. We would be on a smoother path. We have the notion that hearing from God makes things better, that it answers our questions and gives us insight into our lives. But such is not always the case. God communicates throughout our lives, through the good and through the bad. Is it possible that we can find God in our struggles?

4. A true personal encounter with God leaves you changed forever. We should not feel that communication with God leaves us with business as usual. When God shows up, things change. They change physically, spiritually, and personally. Some in this class have shared their own experiences of encounters with God that have changed them. Jacob needed changing: His physical nature, his spiritual nature, even that most personal attribute needed to be changed—his name. 

Do you feel like your life is in a struggle? Apparently God will engage you in a struggle until he changes you. The purpose of the struggle is to elicit change. And God is good for the struggle as long as it is needed, because when God finds us we will find ourselves. We so much wish to find God ourselves. We wish to find God and to call upon his power, his10,000 angels, to help us. But these angels, as we’ve seen, are already working on our behalf as they ascend and descend the stairway of heaven. 

5. Regardless of where you are on the road of life, God is with you. Jacob was fleeing his past, a deceitful and duplicitous past, leaving his father’s house. His flight from his corrupt path was interrupted by God to say (in Genesis 28:15) “I am with you.” But it’s not just “I am with you”—he says “I am with you and I will watch over you.” But he will not just watch over him, either.:He will go with him wherever he goes. 

This promise is made to Jacob running away from his sinfulness and from his evil past. There was no confession, no repentance, no contrition. They came much later at the wrestling match at the brook of Jabok. But the point is made: God will meet you on his terms, wherever he will, on your road of life. Jacob ran away from his past, full of cunning and lying, yet God’s message was “I am with you.” This is God’s grace in action. 

And when Jacob sought 20 years later to turn his life around and engineered a return to his father’s house, God gave him a complete makeover. The blessing is a gracious blessing, a gracious robe of righteousness. You don’t need to clean yourself up to communicate with God. He’ll find you wherever you are on the road of life. He is willing and will help to change you—change your being—no matter where he finds you. 

6. The blessing that God has for you as he communicates with you is not for you alone but in order that you will bless others. The blessing that Jacob received at the brook Jabok on his way back to his father’s house was in the context of the blessing he received from God on his way into exile: 

 Then behold, the Lord was standing above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 28:13-14)

The blessing, you see, is not just for Jacob. The blessing that God gives to us in our communication with him is for everyone. As we’ve noted before, all nine of the personal pronouns in the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6) are plural. It is “our” Father, not “my” Father. It is “give us,” not “give me.” It is a communal prayer. The opening line: “Our father who is in heaven” juxtaposes the two extremes of God: God as father—daddy, abba, a very personal and enduring term—and God as a mighty and hallowed ruler of the universe: “….who is in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Perhaps Jesus intended this juxtaposition to deter us from treating God too much as one or the other, to tell us that God is neither an indulgent celestial Santa Claus who will give us whatever we want, nor an entity so remote as to be unapproachable and so mighty that he has no interest in us. 

The Lord’s Prayer brings out the grace that we must repay by sharing it with others. It is a community prayer and a tool for conflict resolution and kingdom government. Hence, it is a constitution, a set of bylaws showing what it means to be part of the kingdom of heaven. And as such it as a model prayer teaching us that to live a life of prayer is to live a life of blessing of others. It brings us back to the idea that prayer is not something that we do for God, but it’s something that God does for us. 

We so much want to make prayer about ourselves, about “my” needs, about my shortcomings, about my need for forgiveness, about my piety, or the blessings which I have. We always make prayer about us. Even when we talk about the frame of mind of prayer, we talk about aligning our will with the will of God. This is all about me doing something. We talk about leaving time in our prayer for listening so that God can speak to us—again, something that I need to do. No matter what we say, or how we approach prayer, it seems to always come back to be centered on us. 

So Jesus in the New Testament Pater Noster and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Old Testament laid bare this notion: As prayers are centered on others, they bring us the blessing. 

I’d like your thoughts about communication with God and prayer, about the six lessons from the story of Jacob, and about how we might rethink some of our ideas about communication with God.

Donald: It seems to me that, fundamentally, as we look at all six lessons, there are two questions that we have to answer. One is about predestination. What is the purpose of prayer? Is it to change God? Or does God not change? We’re just trying to keep this communication line open and you’re suggesting that God initiates the conversation. That’s a foreign concept to me.

Don: I’m not saying it’s correct. I’m just offering some ideas.

Donald: The whole idea of predestination I think is very important here. If the plan is just rolling itself out, then it really does make prayer a difficult thing. If we only know the answer to the question based upon the way the experience plays out, what’s the purpose of communication? And the second question that I would ask is: Should my prayer be singular, or a prayer from the human race perspective? 

The Lord’s Prayer is plural. Was that intentional? Should my prayer be about us as a group, or should it be about my needs? That comes back down to my needs and my relationship and that brings us back to the first question: If there is predestination, what’s the purpose of prayer?

Bryan: The Lord’s Prayer is a plural versus a singular type of prayer, and we are instructed to love others as we love ourselves. But I think the society we live in right now has evolved into “every man for himself” and I think we can all see that where we are heading is not a good location. This reinforces in my mind that we should not ask God for things specifically. Who are we to know what is best for us? We think we do, but I think we don’t. 

We are not promised a carefree life. There is no promise of benefit by praying and asking for specific things, and it’s selfish, in my mind, to pray for specific things. A lot of times people ask but nothing happens, it doesn’t come true. It reinforces in my mind that asking for things is out of the realm of what God is expecting from us. We should pray for the good of the common man, for our neighbors, as well as ourselves, and be open to his communication, in whatever form that is.

C-J: I didn’t use to think of predestination as Christians do. Some get to go, and God ordained that, and others don’t. But as I live longer I’m beginning to realize that it is not that God put that in their hearts—it’s just their choice. You can talk to them all day long, you can model it for them, you can pray for them, but they are willful and stiff-necked people. I never thought I’d turn my shoulder to those people, but I have. I had a teacher who used to say, “Save your breath to cool your soup.” I’ve just taken that attitude. I’ve done all that I know how to do. It’s their choice, if they want to wallow in the mud, so be it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer in terms of how we as humanity in the finite pray or view others. I think prayer is an internal dialogue that we have with ourselves, because who can understand, in its fullness, this relationship with God? We have moments of clarity, or we think we understand, but I think I become closer to God as I understand more about who I am and the dynamics of how I’ve moved through life and what I’ve learned or still need to learn in the relationships because I believe that everybody is an instrument in the hand of God. 

Predestination is like water stirred by a stone dropped into it. It’s really about my reaction to the ripples. That’s God revealing the potential for me and my choices, I should make good choices, not be selfish, consider not reacting but observing what is unfolding. I think that’s what Jacob did. He ran, he lied, he cheated, he stole; but in the end, he understood. “I want to know who you are!” That was his final thing: “I’m not going to let go until you tell me who you are and bless me!” 

I think that’s part of why we struggle in our relationship with God as we become more devoted to that whole way of being. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t know how to pray, I just seem to repeat the same prayers. Is that showing a lack of faith and understanding in the Lord? Or is that me not dealing with the stuff in myself to see myself in others in pray by my spirit, and not by my flesh; not by my finite mind, but by the Holy Spirit resident within me? 

It’s kind of changing. It’s beginning to change my relationship with God and how I pray, and my expectation of God. “I’ve prayed, and this was the result. What did I miss? Why am I so angry inside?” Because God doesn’t give us anger, God gives us peace.

Don: Are you prepared to leave your prayer life to God? Are you willing to relinquish the notion that somehow God can help you out of difficulty and trouble and distress? Are you willing to say to God: “Check in with me when I need it!”?

Reinhard: The answer depends on us. There are things we have control over to change our lives—our emotions, our prayers. But many times it’s out of our control and we put it in God’s hands to control things for now or for the future. To me, the Lord’s Prayer shows that we are social beings. We have support from family and friends around us. Jesus taught the disciples to pray as a group. It is a universal prayer for goodness and peace for all of. 

But individually, I think we change as we age, God knows us better than we know ourselves. In our Christian life, we are always seeking God’s direction. To maintain a close relationship with God, I think we change—we put more effort in our spiritual life as we age. It is the wisdom that comes with age: The more we live on this earth, the more we learn, and I think that’s the advantage for those who live longer on this earth as we keep seeking God’s help through our prayers and through reading his word.

We may not realize that things change in our life. If we look back in retrospect, I think there are things we realize we shouldn’t have done. But as we age, the dynamic relationship with God in our spirit changes. It goes up and down but in the end, if our motive remains strong and we keep asking God’s guidance and that the Holy Spirit works in us, we will overcome all the hurdles, all the difficulties that we encounter. 

In the end, we are always seeking the best for our future lives under God’s care. And then, of course, we want our family and people we know to have the same belief that we are all together. We unite in one goal to continue to seek his guidance and be saved.

Jay: The problem for me comes with the asking part of praying. There seems to be this notion in the Bible that we should do just that: “Ask and you shall receive”, “Pray without ceasing”—verses that lend themselves to the “ask” part of praying. But with that there seems to be an automatic conflict set up with the will of God. The Lord’s Prayer starts with the sacrificing of your will to the will of God. And yet, there is this notion, or this feeling, that we all have that we should be asking for something. Those two things are always going to be in conflict with one another. 

If I’m going to ask for something, most likely my selfish nature is not going to be in alignment with God’s will and I’ll probably end up asking for something I shouldn’t be asking for. This is the problem. This is the struggle we have with communicating with God—namely, that our communication isn’t typically about relationship building but much more about asking for things. I think you can get to a place where if God says “No,” you can be okay—”Well, God is all loving, all caring, so if he said ‘No’ then I guess I wasn’t supposed to have that.” And you move on. 

But we ask, and the question is, is our asking in alignment with the will of God? In Gethsemane, Christ prayed asking that the cup of suffering be taken from him, but in the end he did not get the answer he hoped for because it was not in alignment with the will of God. The Lord’s Prayer is a model of communication with God because it starts with sacrificing your will.

Donald: I would speculate that most of us in our prayer ask for safety for ourselves and those we love. In our retirement, my wife and I spend little time apart. We both tend to pray: “Bless me and my friends.” Implicit in that is: “Don’t worry about all the other people!” Is that really what we’re supposed to be praying for? 

What’s the purpose in praying that God provides us with safety from danger? Does that mean if we don’t ask we are more likely to confront danger? Or is it for me to feel more confident that God is going to be with me but not really change the outcome?

Don: Or just get God’s attention focused on your need, because otherwise he might be protecting somebody else….

Donald: Yes. “Look at me, Lord.” But, switching gears a little bit. I do think that there’s value in asking and I certainly struggle with the idea that my prayers are redundant. However, that just means I really mean it, and I’m still thinking about it, and I still want that to be the case. “If you want to know my priorities, Lord, here they are.” I’m not sure I have to tell him—he might already know. But prayer is a challenging thing, and the idea that it is initiated by God is really opposite to my way of thinking,

C-J: Because I live alone, I don’t have a prayer partner, even though I oftentimes can find one, and there are times in fellowship when we pray collectively. But my experience, or how I internalize what you’ve just described, when I pray, what’s really going on in my relationship with God… my relationship with God is so… they’re intertwined, they’re braided together. When I’m talking to myself, I’m also talking to God. How I view that relationship is how God reveals what needs to be worked on in me, what would be more beneficial to his will, the divine will, and me in this dimension, and how would it serve others. 

I also find prayers often to be repetitious. My father would say to me: “Don’t beg. It’s unbecoming.” And sometimes I’ll stop and I’ll say, “Lord, you know the beginning and the end: Let me be in agreement.” I think oftentimes, as Christians, we’re taught to do what God said: Be faithful in our prayers, Paul tells us in the Bible: “Be faithful in your prayers, thank you for being faithful in your prayers.” 

Maybe we should just leave it in God’s hands. Should we just say, “Lord, when you need me to do something, I’ll have an ear towards your voice. Let me pray accordingly as you instruct, but led by the Holy Spirit”? That is a different paradigm. But I’ve had that experience where I’m not really paying attention and all of a sudden I see through a different lens.

Don: I think Jay makes an important point that the dilemma of the prayer comes in the asking. And although we have ample instruction to ask, it seems (as Brian pointed out) that we don’t even know what to ask for. We’re ridiculous. I don’t know if I should ask for more money or less money. I don’t know if I should ask for more safety or less safety, more food or less food. The idea that I know something that God doesn’t know and therefore I need to implore him to give me something is on the face of it a pretty ridiculous idea. And yet it’s exactly what our prayer life is centered around, I believe, at least for many of us (I’ll speak for myself) most of the time. 

That’s why we’re having this lengthy discussion about prayer, communication with God, and how we perceive God’s will for us. The idea that prayer could be taken out of our hands and out of our initiative in terms of asking, and placed in God’s hands in terms of providing, is an idea that just occurred to me and seems, as Donald says, pretty radical. 

Jay: The “ask” component seems to be critical, though. Even in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done” is followed by “Give us this day our daily bread.” “Feed me, forgive me”—the “ask” starts. It’s the way human beings are. The Fall of Man is about this currency, There’s the “ask” kind of received currency that we’re in. I don’t know that it’s the ideal state, but it is the state.

It’s almost as if the Lord’s Prayer starts with: “Don’t forget the ideal state”—God’s kingdom, God’s will being done. That’s the ideal state. That’s where we should be. That’s your first, your primary, focus. But in the end you’re going to shift over to the ask. The problem is the balancing act between those. Which one comes first? Which one comes second? Which one should be emphasized more? That’s where, as we communicate or struggle to communicate with God, balancing those things, for me, personally, is where the dilemma comes in. 

As we’ve gone through this last year, and we’ve lost loved ones, and some loved ones are saved, and some loved ones perish, it just seems so odd, about how to pray about those things. How was I praying about those things? Did the prayers, my prayers, corporate prayers, have any influence on those things? And if so, why influence some ways but not other ways? It’s just the dilemma between the ask, which I think is critical. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask. I think we cannot get to a point where we could communicate with others and with God without this kind of ask component. And I think the Bible says to ask. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But balancing that with the will of God is a really tricky thing. 

David: Is the statement in the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy will be done”—an acknowledgment or a question? If it’s an acknowledgement (“Your will is going to be done, we all know that”) then there is no reason to say any more. It’s the end of the story. The whole Lord’s prayer could be: “Our father, which art in heave, thy will be done.” End of story,

But it seems like we turn it into: “We hope your will will be done, but we’re not sure.” It is crucial to determine whether we are asking it as a question, as we typically do. Certainly it’s the way I always did it. But for a person of faith perhaps it’s simply a statement, an acknowledgement, of the way things are: God’s will will be done. In that case, whatever happens is God’s will—including the evil that you see in the world. There’s just no way around that.

Donald: So should our prayer actually help me understand God’s will? Because we’re not going to change God’s will. That would change our prayers radically. I don’t think we can trust our heads. We basically talk about what’s in the heart. We can trust the heart. We can trust action. My head? Don’t trust it! You can say “Thy will be done,” but the reality is, “I’d like it this way please.” So our words are quite cheap. What’s in your heart? Help me understand, and my heart will reveal that.

Jay: I would pivot that a little bit that to be not “understand” but “accept. I think we are incapable of understanding the will of God. It’s definitely what we want—we want to know why things happen the way they do, Unfortunately, we’re incapable of that. That’s why we we’re not supposed to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Because we can’t do that. We’re created. Accepting the will of God accepting that what I perceive as being evil, what I perceive as being bad, is actually the will of God, is a big step. 

Carolyn: I have to go all the way back to why God created us. What was his purpose in creating Man? He wanted fellowship, he wanted to be with us, and for us to be with him. And that means communication. It doesn’t have to mean we ask, or we praise, but it’s all inclusive, because we can talk to him and allow the Holy Spirit to work within us—to give us the communication, and like the angels that went up and down the ladder who had something to communicate, we do too, and God wants to hear it. 

It doesn’t mean that everything we have is a candy counter and may get us a kiss. But I do think God wanted children. And that’s why we were in communication at the very beginning. We are here on Earth to share communication with the Lord and also with others.

Susan: I see prayer as an opening, a vulnerability, to God. I think that’s what he needs from us—the vulnerability. Most relationships improve when you have some vulnerability in them. And that’s where he talks about the humbleness, the meekness, the contrite heart. It’s just being vulnerable to being in his presence. 

There’s no perfect way to pray as a human because we don’t have any type of perfection or anything that’s acceptable. But the Bible says the Holy Spirit makes it acceptable as we’re vulnerable and expose our feelings. God seems to treasure that. He treasured in anyone who was vulnerable to him in the Bible—David, all those were people he treasured deeply.

Neldeson: I think that because of sin we lost that great communication with God, because we’re of his image. Everything else that was created is more like a robot, but human beings have a mind. We can think, we can feel. There’s so many things we can do. The most important one is the knowledge we possess that enables us to think and to decide what we want to do—to serve God or serve the adversary or do the things that we want to do. We as humans have that ability. 

Don: This conversation sounds like it could be just a theoretical conversation. But Jason touched on something that I think makes it more than that, and that is that throughout the course of this last year we’ve had a tremendous number of prayer opportunities within the church, within various families and so forth—people with illness, people who are desperately sick. The elders are called together to pray. In some cases, the person recovers; in some cases the person dies. Nothing seems to make sense. 

The question is, did we pray enough? We had 24 hour, round the clock prayer, we had everyone praying—the elders, the elders and the deacons, the elders, the deacons, and the deaconesses praying. How much is enough? Maybe it wasn’t enough faith, maybe the faith was too weak. Maybe the faith was strong but it wasn’t strong in everyone so there was a weak link in the faith. 

These are the machinations of thought that go through the mind when these things happen. So it’s not just a theoretical discussion, it’s really a question of: When someone is ill, should we pray for them? If we should, what should we pray? Do we need to have 24 hour prayer? Do we need to have all the elders praying? Why can’t the individual’s own prayer be enough? These are real-world questions that affect people’s faith and affect people’s relationship with God. I think that’s the reason why such a discussion and looking at these stories, in my mind, is of such value, or potentially of such value.

Donald: I think that goes back to my first question about predestination. If we’re praying that “Thy will be done” then are we actually asking God: “If I wasn’t here and praying for this, it will go a different way. You’re on your own, God.”

David: Carolyn asked what is our purpose. As a process theologist, I believe part of our purpose is to help God become. I don’t think it’s just a matter of God having created us for companionship. I believe that God is a Being otherwise we could not have been created. There had to be a creator of the time-bound world we inhabit. But God the Being exists in the non-time-bound, eternal world, while God the Becoming exists in this time-bound world and needs our help to Become. 

So to me the prayer “Thy will be done” really is a prayer that expresses a hope—the hope that God’s will will eventually be done. Because it is not always done: How could it be the will of a God of utter goodness that there would be any evil whatsoever in the world? So, in fact, God’s will is not always done. The reason might be that we are not praying enough for God’s will to be done.

Carolyn: It seems like we always go on the fringes, that we are not fighting principalities in this world, and that God sometimes—when he sends his angels—has to fight these principalities (the angels do.) It is spiritual warfare. We heard it from the time we were young Christians. I think that it is out of my realm of thinking. I have always said: “Thy will be done” but I also want nothing to do with the evil side of life. We’re not just asking for someone to get well. We could be asking for something much bigger and greater that we don’t see with our human eyes. 

Bryan: I think the reason we were created, the reason we are here on earth, is to show the universe the character of God. And by that I mean a character of love and forgiveness. I think God knew that heaven would fracture over the rebellion of Satan and his angels. And I think that this world was created to show, in the end, what God’s character can do in the face of sin. We are here to show God’s other creations throughout the universe, that in fact, in the end, God’s love and forgiveness can win over selfishness and sin. 

When Jesus was here on Earth, did he pray for himself? He did. Primarily his prayers were for others, but he did pray for himself—”Lord, take this cup from me if it’s possible.” Did it change God’s decision? No, it didn’t; so maybe that shows the futility of asking for things for oneself. I’ve come to experience that to pray for ourselves really is something we probably shouldn’t do, but to pray for those around us, to pray for the common good, and most of all, to be open to God’s leading.

Donald: I concur, but even before that, did God know that Satan would rebel? Is that God’s will? Or can God’s will actually not be done?

Bryan: I think he knew it was going to happen but that obviously wasn’t his will. But I think he knew it was going to happen—how could he not?

Donald: And he knew the plan of salvation?

Bryan: I think it’s something he formulated, yes, and I think that’s why we’re here, I really do: To show the plan of salvation, and that, in the end, God’s character is what wins out over Satan’s character. 

Donald: It’s a remarkable concept to think that God loves me. It goes back to what Carolyn said, that he wanted a relationship. Think about the idea of being lonely. Was God’s lonely? Was there a need for humanity to be on this earth if we think that there are other planets out there where humanity exists? Was God lonely? Is that it? Is that the purpose of me?

Bryan: No, not for me. I think it’s a lot more than that. God didn’t need us to fill a void in his life. He needed us to show the universe what his character can actually do.

Carolyn: I think we also know that God is love, and he is omnipotent. So he knows the end from the beginning. Thy will be done. Will he listen to me? Is he listening to me? We have to depend on the Holy Spirit (that’s why he gave it to us) to convey the whole spirituality of our relationship with God or with Jesus. They are three in one and we have to rejoice and be thankful and also be able to show that God is love. I think that’s the principle that he’s trying to give the universe.

Don: This is a good transition point, because next week we’re going to talk about the mysteries of God and the secrets of God. We’re promised that the prophets will reveal the secrets of God. We’re going to look at what those secrets are in terms of God communicating with us.

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