Would You Miss Jesus?

To me, the saddest verse in the Bible is Luke 2:43: “After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it.” (NIV) Or, as the New Living Translation puts it, they “didn’t miss him.”

Joseph and Mary were good people. They were godly people. Yet they became so absorbed in the stuff of daily life that they weren’t aware of God’s absence from it.

Something similar happened to Samson. Although he had an ultimately fatal weakness for women, he judged Israel for 20 years and was undeniably favored by God. Yet one day “he awoke from his sleep, and …did not know that the Lord had departed from him” (Judges 16:20, NKJV).

Bottom line: Even as God’s people, we can become so distracted that we fail to notice when He isn’t with us. This means we can go around actually believing that we’re doing God’s will—claiming to represent Him!—when we’re not. How sad!

More important, how scary! It may not affect my ultimate destiny (as far as we  can tell, Mary, Joseph, and Samson will all be in Heaven), but how might my temporary separation from God affect my witness to others? How might it affect their perception of the God I’m claiming to obey?

So how do we prevent such a lapse?

We need to reconnect with God regularly. It’s often been suggested that the daily provision of manna is an object lesson, pointing to our need for daily spiritual bread. Certainly dedicating time to Bible study and prayer every day is a crucial beginning. But the longer I run this spiritual race, the more I wonder if this is enough.

Consider the needs of an athlete; she needs more than breakfast to sustain her during a marathon. She’ll also need to consume more calories—Gatorade, perhaps some concentrated gels or power bars—at frequent intervals throughout the race. And she’ll need to replenish her nutritional stores again when she’s finished it.

Similarly, I need to breakfast with the Lord. I need snacks from His hand through the day. And I need a really substantial bedtime meal.

Your requirements may be different. Just as each athlete works toward a nutritional plan that best suits his particular body, we each must be sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s promptings. With His help, may we never have the sad experience of losing sight of Jesus—and not even realizing it.