George MacDonald’s books have a recurring theme in them that is less than subtle. “Obedience is the key to every door” (253) He is of the mind that the only way to test the truth of what Jesus says is to walk it, to obey him, and see what follows. You cannot dissect the words of the bible, evaluate their truth from afar, put someone on a lie detector and ask them if God really exists. The only way to know if God is true is to act as if he is, and see what follows. Obey him, seek him, love him. Put God to the test.

As a seeking woman asked of a teacher, “But tell me then, Mr Graham, how is it that you know there is a God, and one-one-fit to be trusted as you trust him?” (254). Is this not the question that the world asks of those who believe in Jesus? How can you know? Why do you believe? It is also the thing we sadly try to convince people of. We try to prove, to demonstrate, that God is. The teacher responds, “In no way that I can bring to bear on the reason of another so as to produce conviction.” To moderate the language a bit, one cannot convince another that God exists and is worth loving. “I can do for you what is far better. I can persuade you to look and see whether before your own door stands not a gate-lies not a path to walk in. Entering by that gate, walking in that path, you shall yourself arrive at the conviction, which no man can give you, that there is a living Love and Truth at the heart of your being, and pervading all that surrounds you. The man who seeks the truth in any other manner will never find it.” And again, ”...if I find that his word, and the result of action founded upon that word, correspond and agree, opening a heaven within and beyond me, in which I see myself delivered from all that now in myself is to myself despicable and unlovely; if I can reasonably-reasonably to myself, not to another-cherish hopes of a glory of conscious being, divinely better than all my imagination when most daring could invent-a glory springing from absolute unity with my creator, and therefore with my neighbor; if the Lord of the ancient tale, I say, has thus held word with me, am I likely to doubt much or long whether there be such a lord or no?”

Put God to the test. Seek him out, do what he tells you to do. You will quickly find whether “there be such a lord or no”.