Challenge:

…remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Eph 2:12 NASB, emphasis mine

“No doubt in Egypt [the Israelites] had come to take the polytheistic outlook for granted, however much or little they may have joined in worshiping the gods of the Egyptians.  But the first commandment clamped down absolutely upon this way of thinking and behaving.” J.I. Packer in Knowing God

I take God for granted.  Even as I type it I shudder at the horror that such a thought could be true.  But it is.  When I reread Eph 2:12 this morning, I forced myself to stop and even try to begin to imagine the concept of being “without God in the world.”  I couldn’t. 

Like the Israelites, I take a lot of the world’s perspective of God and gods for granted.  Like the Israelites, I buck frequently against that first commandment simply by the fact that I do not live my life completely for the purpose of “enjoying” God to the fullest.  (And I use the term “enjoying” loosely to mean an idea of fully immersing myself in Him.)

I hunger to stop taking my Father, the Almighty Creator of all things, for granted.  I hunger to stop taking for granted the fact that He is above all of the gods of this world and the culture in which I live – those things which, in fact, are not truly gods at all, for they themselves are created.  I hunger to “enjoy” Him so fully that I consequently suffer being rejected by this culture in which I dwell. 

I do not have to grasp the concept of being without God in this world because I never have to live that way.  Ever.  I am His.  Permanently and completely.  For eternity.  May I begin today to live in such a way as to not take that for granted!