Keeping God at a comfortable distance
James 4:8-10
8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Isaiah 29:13-16
13 The Lord says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. 14 Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish." 15 Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the LORD, who do their work in darkness and think, "Who sees us? Who will know?" 16 You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?
We try to keep God at a comfortable distance in our lives. We honour Him, we worship Him, we’re happy to work for Him, we’re happy to perform religious duties and exercises like go to church, even help out with jobs around the church, we’re even happy to give to Him and His causes at times.
But we really don’t want Him to get too close to us though – We’re happy to keep Him at a comfortable distance.
The reason being we know when the presence of God gets too close something is going to happen to us. We fear the supernatural – we are afraid of total surrender, we’re afraid God is going to ask us to do something we don’t want to do – we’re afraid something we don’t like will rise in our hearts – we’re afraid we’ll be naked, vulnerable before God – we afraid that when it is revealed we’ll be ashamed or humiliated.
We know what happens when we get close to God, we’ll get affected by Him, His love, His power – this scares us! We know that if we draw close to God His Holy fire’ll burn us.
We’ll do anything we can to keep Him at a comfortable distance because we some how know that when we open up our lives to Him then we’ll get entangled with His purposes in our lives. We know that intimacy with God will entangle us with His destiny for our lives! We know that closeness to God will result in us losing our lives!
When He gets close to us we’ll need to be honest about our lives, we will be forced to deal with the issues of our life. We’ll need to deal with sin, we’ll need to deal with the way we do stuff in our lives, and getting close to God challenges our priorities.
Having God at an uncomfortable closeness in our lives means we have to look at our lives as God see it, we’ll need to dealing with challenges in our life. When God gets uncomfortably close we know we have to allow His word to filter our lives – we’ll have to finally deal with delusion -
This is not fun – it is serious, it requires humility, it requires a firm grip on reality, it requires emotional and psychological honesty in the depths of our souls – it requires an inner honesty were not comfortable with.
But more than anything it requires faith – heroic faith – Our lack of intimacy has cost the church so much – more than we will ever know – we have robbed the church we have robbed whole generations of the chance to see the incredible power of risk-taking, miracle-working, heroic Christian faith. But God hasn't finished with us yet. Christ is passionate about His church!
We were created for intimacy with God! We actually want to be uncomfortable – we desire the closeness of God – we were created for relationship with God – there is something in us that needs the closeness of God!
When God comes in we’re suddenly willing to humbly deal with any issue no matter how messy as long as we can have God close to us and us close to God – no matter what the cost we want God’s presence with us – Take not thy Holy Spirit from me!!
Psalms 51:9-12
9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. 10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me
Psalms 34:18
18 The LORD is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
When we get close to God He actually gets close to us and we sense the healthy presence of God in our emotional and psychological life.
It amazes me that God desires to be the closes to me when I am broken – when I should desire to hid myself from Him – He lovingly comes and says let me touch you – let me draw near to you.
When I am crushed by sin, circumstances or I have become the recipient of my own folly – when I am ashamed at my only stupidity and iniquity – when I am humiliated by own delusions and haunted by own infidelity before God – it is at this moment God says I want to draw near to you – when my sins are as scarlet – when I am ashamed, embarrassed, mortified with guilt the Lord says draw near to me – when I am overcome with my own weakness, silliness, rebellion, pride and self centred self sufficiency – it is this moment when the Lord say draw near to me!
Isaiah 42:3
3 A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
Lord Invade my life!
We become sensitive to His Spirit and begin to pray, “Lord invade my life!” – We cry out to God, “Become my motivation, my purpose, my reason for living. Oh Lord design my life, describe my life, be the fire of my life”
What does it mean to live a life keeping God at a comfortable distance?
· Replacing intimacy with those things that actually are the counterfeit to God’s intimacy.
· Being of the world but not in the world – this translates into religion, judgemental, critical, sceptical
· Listening to the word of God being preached but not hearing it not allowing it to affect your life – being hard hearted,
· Living a safe distance from God, His word and principles do not affect you – you are not moved by what you hear, you are no longer moved by the things that move the heart of God, you’ve grown lukewarm in your love of God
· Love no longer defines you. God and His word no longer define you.
· You become a fringe dweller – not too close
· You have selective hearing
· By engaging with the world