Tag: nearness to God

Seeking God Successfully (Part Two)

Psalm 27:8

You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek” (ESV).

We have heard God’s call to seek him. Next, let’s think about our response to God’s invitation.

Above all, let us realize that this is a personal invitation to a personal relationship. Seek my face. The living, Holy One wants to meet us up close. He doesn’t hold us at arm’s length. I have an injured shoulder that hinders me occasionally in giving or receiving hugs. Once, someone told me that my hug seemed awkward or reluctant, but that wasn’t the case at all. It simply felt physically uncomfortable at that moment. God has no such limitations. He, through his grace and love in Christ, is always able to invite us to draw very near. Seek my face.

God invites us to seek him, not the rituals of religion. This is where so many go astray from personal contact with God himself. Here is one way this happens. In the law or old covenant, God commanded Israel the way in which they could live in the presence of God and worship him at the tabernacle/temple. God set up laws of ritual cleanliness, prescribed sacrifices, which were administered through priests, as necessary to approach him. The religions of the ungodly in their worship of false gods also had religious rituals. But the true God ended all such things in Christ at his cross. Now true worship is to approach God the Father through the Son on the basis of his once for all finished sacrifice by the Spirit. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit (Ephesians 2:18 NIV). Jesus made it clear that the new covenant era was different from the age of the law covenant. Jesus told her, “Believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:21-24 CSB).

It is important to draw near to God through Christ and his finished work alone. We do not have prescribed rituals, because the Lord Jesus himself is our access to the Father. We do need the works of the law, because we live in the power of the Spirit. When we read the word, we hear the written voice of God in our personal nearness with him. Reading the Scriptures is not the means to gain God’s acceptance for a personal relationship. Instead, when we read, we simply listen to him in a state of nearness. The same is true of prayer, which is the believer’s communication with God. We speak with the living God as his dearly loved children, because he has brought us near in Christ (1 Peter 3:18). We meditate on God’s written word, because we have heard his voice and delight to ponder his word to us, as a husband or wife reflects on the words of their beloved. We eat and drink at the Lord’s Supper, not to receive grace, but because we remember the Lord in whom we already have grace. We sing in services, not as a means to gain God’s ear, but because he delights in the united voices of his children, as we declare his greatness to each other.

Therefore, live joyfully in your nearness to the God of glory. When you meet with your brothers and sisters in the Father’s family, delight in the blessing of shared grace. “We are here together with God the Father—set free, adopted, accepted, and eternally loved!”

Grace and peace, David

Seeking God Successfully (Part One)

Psalm 27:8

You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek” (ESV).

In this verse we see God’s command and David’s obedience. God provides David with a warrant to seek God and David responds by accepting the offer. The first three words are not in the original text, but are added by the translators to make clear that God was inviting David to seek his face. The lack of the words should not surprise us. Close personal relationships are emotional, even when they flow deep beneath the surface, and so they can be abrupt. The sudden call from God to seek his face is thus very natural.

Let’s focus on God’s call to us.

In these words God is revealing to us that he wants to disclose himself to humans. In God’s word, we see written the certainty of his desire. David as God’s prophet tells us of this. God is reaching out from the glorious splendor of his majesty to draw near to his weak creatures. Here is a source of happiness, that God would have a close (face-to-face) relationship with people that he created. From this we ought to gain a better understanding of what true religion is. It is much more than the performance of ritual—any ritual and especially empty ritual. True Christianity is intensely personal. God calls to people he made to dare and approach the Holy One as one would approach a friend or lover. Yes, we must approach him as he directs in his word, but that is not the present point. Instead, it is God graciously calling, and a human simply trusting that call to dare to communicate with God.

Why would God want to call us to him? Mere creatures, particularly sinful creatures, can never add anything to all-sufficient Glory. No, it is because in his holiness (set-apartness) he is loving and good, and he wants to share his glory and goodness and love with us. So we hear these words, “Seek my face.” Notice also that God takes the initiative in relating to us. By nature we do not seek God (Romans 3:11). In fact, we wander from him and suppress his revelation. We fail to invest time to draw near to him. We get caught up in lesser things to our own loss. But God still graciously calls us to draw near to him (cf. James 4:8).

What we must understand is that God wants us to know him and to approach him personally. Some people who are great in the eyes of the world hold themselves back from common people. But God, the greatest of all, want us to be with him—forever. This is one of the goals of the plan of God (Revelation 21:3). Everything that God wants us to do by means of evangelism and worship and discipleship and service and prayer and fellowship tends toward this greater purpose; namely, to have a people close to his face. In the same way, every sin opposes that goal and seeks to ruin it.

Therefore, we must realize that if at any time we are not enjoying the sweetness of being near to God, the problem lies with us, and not with the God who loves us and calls us to participate in a close personal relationship with him. This can be hard for us to accept, since we tend to act like Adam in the Garden, when he blamed God for giving Eve to him. In our sin we want to blame God and to excuse ourselves. But our minds must be controlled by the Scriptures.

God has chosen to communicate his desire for a personal relationship with people. This is not some hidden fact, disclosed only to some discerning theologians. It is plainly stated in this text and many texts. Think of all the calls that come from God or Christ in the Bible. Consider God’s desire to fellowship with his people through Christ (1 Corinthians 1:9). Before the creation Father, Son and Holy Spirit were fully satisfied in their united glory as God. But because God is good, he willed to make his goodness known (Romans 9:23-24), not because he had to but because he wanted to. As light naturally enlightens a room, so the goodness of God naturally reaches out to those who need his goodness. What of those who do not want God’s goodness? Their wickedness does not discredit God’s goodness (Romans 3:1-8), and they fulfill another purpose (Romans 9:22).

Since we are God’s people and have experienced his goodness in a close way, we should sense our responsibility to let others know of his goodness (Psalm 34:8). God has called us to a place and time to be a co-communicator of his desire for personal fellowship. As we experience God’s goodness, we become better communicators of God’s desire to share his goodness with people that he has made. We thus have a happy message. In addition we show forth God’s desire when we freely want to tell others of God’s goodness and when we seek to spread this knowledge far. When a fire is great it burns far; when love is great it extends and communicates itself far and wide.

Grace and peace, David

Draw Near to God

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Hebrews 10:22

We live in a day that emphasizes methodology and technique above character. People in our time suppose that it doesn’t matter what you are as long as you do what you’re supposed to, whatever that means. This can be seen in the attitudes of people towards star athletes on their favorite teams. Character doesn’t matter until the athlete does something so horrendous and out of control that people have to notice. However, people of true greatness avoid that trap. For example, consider John Adams at the time of the Boston Massacre. He was then a prominent lawyer with a growing practice and enlarging political prospects. Then came the tragic events of the evening of March 5, 1770. The British officer and soldiers who fired on the crowd were charged with murder. No one would defend them in court—except John Adams. Though he feared for his reputation and even the welfare and lives of his family and himself, he did not hesitate to take the case. Why? He did so because he believed in the rule of law and the right of every man to a fair trial and a proper defense. So he risked everything to do what was right.

Every church must have a sense of Christ’s character and want to demonstrate his character and way of life before a watching world, and more importantly, to God. To say this another way, our individual spiritual lives must be in right order before the collective “body life” of our church can be right. A crucial aspect of this way of life is drawing near to God. When Christians draw near to God, then they realize that they are near to each other. Consider Romans 15:7.

The Holy Spirit in this text gives as tremendous exhortation: “let us draw near”. But think of the One whom the writer encourages us to approach. He is the true and living God. He is the God who is glorious and majestic (1:3), the Creator of all things (3:4; 11:3). He is angry with sinners (3:10; 10:27) and is all-knowing (4:13). He is also the Judge of mankind (10:30-31; 12:23; 13:4) and is a consuming fire (12:29; cf. Deuteronomy 4:23-24). Anyone that takes these words seriously might want to draw back. We might well fear him rather than want to be near him. You see, in order to draw near to God, we must have a correct concept of the God who is there and who wants us to draw near! This involves an ever-deepening knowledge of God’s revelation of himself in the Scriptures.

“As long as we do not look beyond the earth, being quite content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods. Suppose we but once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and to ponder his nature, and how completely perfect are his righteousness, wisdom, and power —the straightedge to which we must be shaped. Then, what masquerading earlier as righteousness was pleasing in us will soon grow filthy in its consummate wickedness. What wonderfully impressed us under the name of wisdom will stink in its very foolishness. What wore the face of power will prove itself the most miserable weakness. That is, what in us seems perfection itself corresponds ill to the purity of God” (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.1.2)

However, (and this is the good news!), because of God’s free grace to us in Jesus Christ, we can approach God with joyful confidence. This joyful confidence rests on what we have in Christ. “Since we have… let us…” (10:21-22). In the words of Margaret Clarkson in the hymn “We Come, O Christ, to You”: “You are the Way to God, your blood our ransom paid; in you we face our Judge and Maker unafraid.” Here we see the logic of the believer. Or to say this another way, God wants us to love and worship him with our minds. Think about what you have in Christ, and then think about what you should do because you have been so richly blessed. Our nickname for this is “Therefore Christianity”. Know what you have in Christ, and therefore, live this way. How then should we think? Don’t merely moan about your failings. Proper mourning over sin is fine; in fact, it is commendable (Matthew 5:4), as long as it doesn’t leave you in the swamp of depression. True spiritual sorrow over sin in a believer will lead the saint back to Christ and real repentance (2 Corinthians 7:8-11). However, don’t look for a supplemental experience, as if Christ were insufficient. Instead, by faith lay hold of Christ and then live like someone in Christ should live.

By these words God the Holy Spirit is revealing to us God’s desire for close fellowship with his people (1 John 1:3-4; 1 Corinthians 1:9). God wants you! Therefore, a Christian who is living by faith in Christ should have a good self-image. On the other hand, if anyone is struggling with self-image problems it shows some sort of failure in the life. It might be sin and a guilty conscience or more specific sins or weaknesses, such as not laying hold of spiritual blessings by faith, or having little faith, or becoming disconnected from Christ by legalism, or not meditating on the Bible, or not keeping in step with the Spirit’s leadership or grieving the Holy Spirit. To draw near to God is the way to have a little of heaven on earth. In heaven you will be with God; on earth he would be with you. Is there any difference in kind? So then, we see a spiritual attitude of which we should be giving evidence and promoting. What is it? We should be exhorting one another to draw near to God. “Let us draw near to God.”

Grace and peace, David