What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?
Part 4
Nevertheless, what use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?
Well, I think I’ve already answered this: the whole of the inner life of personal relationship is as vibrant as ever. This has not been downgraded to self-reflection, meditation, or adopting inspiring principles and values as your philosophy of life. God is still experienced as a person with whom you have a supremely deep relationship. God acts as an independent agent to guide and strengthen you. All the spiritual gifts that are usually deemed to be gifts from God are still available to you. This relationship with God is what powers a supremely fulfilling spiritual life of freshness, purity, vitality, love, peace, joy; it imparts ultimate meaning to life and connects your individual, finite and temporal life with the universal, infinite and eternal.
However, let’s approach the question from the angle of: what have we lost?
In reality, if this new analysis is correct, we have lost nothing, because God has never been changing things in the external world; we just, mistakenly, thought he was. Of course, if we now explicitly accept this, we are losing the hope that he might – and this hope is very important indeed. On the other side, we lose all that hurt and confusion that religious people feel when a good prayer isn’t answered. So, let’s try and list our losses, and asses how serious they are.
Spiritual Devotion 