..We Found Another Way To Breathe

I watched a fish one time lay on its side immobilized, gasping for oxygen until after a couple minutes it stopped. From the moment that fish was born it lived totally submerged under water because it was created to do so. The anatomy of a fish is built to survive only under water. Outside of the presence of water it slowly dies.
Thought we have been created for Him, created to worship Christ, created to exalt Him with every ounce of our being, created to abide in His presence, We’ve developed an artificial respiratory system which allows us to breath and live outside of His presence.
A fish will know when it leaves it’s source of life; yet we can leave out the presence of God and not know it because it has no effect on our lives. Some can go days without talking with the Lord, hours without even thinking about Him. Reading His Word has become a chore; yet we loose ourselves in sitcoms, reality shows, and websites; time seems to just disappear when we are away from the Father doing what we enjoy; yet time seems to go so slow when we are in His presence. Like that fish, when I am away from Him (not talking to Him, not meditating on His Word) something shouldn’t feel right. If I go five minutes and not say so much as, “Lord, I love you!” I should start gasping for air because He is my source of life.
Jesus said many profound statements, but this one is very unique. He says to His Father, “I have glorified thee on earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was (John 17:4-5). He said glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was. To Jesus the Father was His everything. He did only what the Father asked & desired. He obeyed His Father with perfect submission & excellence. He would often steal away from the crowd early in the morning just to sit with the Father and pray. He couldn’t survive without the Father. Have you ever done this? Have you ever had to just get away from everyone & everything and be with Him. Every moment He lived, He lived to glorify the Father. To be away from the Father was devastating, even for the purposes of redeeming humanity. At the exact moment He finished His work on earth He says to the Father I want everything to go back to the way it use to be, when it was just us (the Godhead). Remember when you first got saved and how zealous you were for God? Everything that came out of your mouth was,” God this, God that.. Christ this, Christ that.” Every service you sat on the front row, on time to prayer. You would spend hours in His Word and get lost in the pages of scripture. Everything else came second to your relationship with the Lord. But then something happened. The amazing thing about material things is that they get old fast, they become obsolete quickly, some thing else takes its place. Though God is awesome in every way, beyond our feble imaginations… in time, we treat Him as though He was a material possession that becomes obsolete, the trill is gone, the newness wears off…. We find another way to breathe; something else to look at.
While Jesus lived His sinless life on the earth He remained in the bosom of the Father, always in close proximity & communion. While on the cross Christ bore the sins of all humanity and for the first time in His life, God wasn’t there. He says at about the ninth hour, “E’li, E’li, La’-ma sa-bach’-tha-ni?” that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Something happened at the exact moment the sins of all humanity feel upon the Son. At that exact moment, for the first time in all of history, eternity.. God turned His face from the Son, and Jesus felt it. He knew at that moment He wasn’t close to the Father. He cries out for the Father and asks why have you forsaken me, yet He receives no answer. To be away from the Father, away from the only One most important.. He had no more strength, no more energy… It wasn’t the nails, the crown of thorns, the exhaustion or suffocation that causes him to breathe His last breath. He was no longer close to the Father. The weight of not feeling the presence of God. “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielding up the ghost” (Matt 27:50).