One of the things that stops us from getting close to God – is how we see Him.  What we think of Him.  What we think He’s like.  And that’s a real tragedy – because those blind spots just don’t belong in our thinking anymore.

It’s great to be with you at the start of a new week and this week on the program we’re going to take a look at the barriers between us and God – the things that stop us from having a close relationship with Him. It’s a kind of different take on last week’s series that was called How to Get Close to God. Today and over the next few days we’re just going to take a look together at some of the things that stop us from experiencing a real closeness to God.

It’s a bit like a marriage, when two people have been married for a good many years, often, there are barriers that have grown up between them. They’re still married, they still love each other but there can be behaviours and ways of thinking and hurts from the past that they just don’t talk about anymore and those barriers are barriers to intimacy, they’re barriers to a close relationship.

This week I want to invite you on a journey with me to look at some of the barriers that we put up in our lives that stop us from having an intimate relationship with God. What are they? What do we do about them? How do we tear them down?

Over the last 13 years since I gave my life to Jesus, God has been dealing with me on so many issues, cleaning me out, changing my perspective, softening my heart. I hope to live a long life ’cause He has so much more to do and I have such a long way to go, it’s a progressive thing. The theologians call it sanctification; I call it rehabilitation.

We’re made in God’s image, each one of us, marred by our own sin. And finally, when we come to our senses God restores us back to His original image, to be like Him. Now one of the things that’s really amazed me along that journey is how often I have blind spots. You know things from the past and you just don’t see how blind you can be.

You know when you’re driving a car and you’ve got your rear vision mirror and you might have mirrors off on each side but there is always a little gap somewhere in between and it’s called a blind spot. The whole point of a blind spot is you can’t see there, that’s why it’s called a blind spot and in our thinking we often have blind spots, old ways of thinking that we hang onto. God has a name for those, He calls them strongholds and it turns out that is particular stronghold, an old way of thinking, that we can have that acts as a barrier to intimacy with God.

The term stronghold is a much misunderstood term. The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 4 talks about it, this is what he says. He says:

The weapons of our warfare are not merely human but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.

So Paul’s talking about strongholds here, what exactly is a stronghold the way that Paul talks about it in the Bible? Well it’s a castle, a stronghold, a fortress but in this context, Paul means ‘anything on which we rely, an argument, a way of reasoning, a way in which we dispute who God is, a way in which we fortify our own opinions and defend those opinions against an opponent’ and Paul says here, a stronghold is one of those beliefs or arguments in our heads that stops us from the knowledge of God.

I’ve always thought of a stronghold like this; it’s something that I hang onto real strong and when I hang onto something real strong, I can’t let go of, of that and take hold of the blessing that God wants to pour into my life. That’s what a stronghold is and the thing that Paul says here is that it’s an “Obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God.”

It stops us from knowing God. Now what stronghold could it be that keeps us from the knowledge of God? What is it, in our heads that can act as a barrier to intimacy, a barrier to closeness with God?

Let’s go back to marriage for a moment. See, we understand things in terms of human relationships and when it drops that God is a person, not human but a person we can have a relationship with, it helps to take that human understanding and realise that there are many strong parallels between human relationships and our relationship with God.

My wife Jacqui; what if I had this picture in my head that she doesn’t want to be close to me. What if I believed I couldn’t possibly be good-looking enough or good enough or anything else enough for her to be attracted to me or to be interested in me? What if I had no expectation at all of closeness or intimacy with her? The answer is that, that would act as a barrier to intimacy. I want to give her a cuddle, I want to give her a kiss but I don’t know, she would never want that, so you don’t, there’s a barrier to intimacy, get it?

How many people carry that sort of picture around in their minds about God? See that’s a stronghold, that’s a blind spot. It’s a kind of way, ‘It’s always been, I’ve never really felt close to God so much. Oh maybe once or twice but not everyday therefore, oh well maybe God doesn’t want to be close to me’. Therefore there’s no intimacy between us and God. You see how a blind spot, how a stronghold like this can keep us from intimacy with God.

My prayer is that the Spirit of God might remove that barrier in a few people’s lives today, once and for all. What’s the heart of God? What does He want? What’s the cry of His heart? What’s His take on this, what is it? James, chapter 4, verse 5 says this:

God yearns jealously for the spirit that He has made to dwell in us. He gives grace to the humble.

You see the heart of God. God is a god who yearns jealously for us and throughout the Scriptures you see this phrase repeated over and over again. Here’s the phrase, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”

God created us in order to have a relationship with us and one of the biggest barriers to that, in fact the only real barrier, is our sin, our rejection of Him and He dealt with that through the death of His Son. And if we carry around this stronghold, this picture of God as a god of judgement and anger and wrath (and yes, He is, let’s make no bones about that, that’s His response to our sin as it should be) but if we forget that He’s also a God of grace, we miss the point because that is what Jesus Christ is all about. That’s why He died on that cross so that we could have forgiveness.

‘Oh Berni, I don’t deserve that. That’s why I think God would never want to be close to me’. NO! You don’t deserve it, I don’t either! That’s the point of grace, that’s the point of mercy. Mercy is only mercy when we don’t deserve it. Paul writes about this in Romans chapter 9, verse 15. He says or God says:

I will have mercy on those whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

It does not therefore depend on mans desire or effort but on God’s mercy.

See it’s time to ditch this stronghold of the mind that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. Let God’s word echo in your heart.

“I will be your God and you will be my people. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

Have you ever done something and later on, you discover that your actions had consequences that you never expected?  Well there’s one thing that we do, that builds a wall between God and ourselves – and it’s something that we would likely never expect.

Today we’re going to take a look at one of the key barriers to intimacy with God. In any relationship there can be things that we can do or we say, patterns of behaviour that we fall into that cause barriers to grow up like brick walls between us. One brick at a time and before you know it, to get close to the other person; you have to crash through or climb over this massive brick wall. Well today I’d like you to grab my hand because I’m not sure that I can do this on my own.

Grab my hand and together lets crash through one of the biggest brick walls that we can build between us and God. And you know the really insidious thing about this particular brick wall, we don’t even realise it’s happening because it’s about our relationship, not with God but with other people. And yet as our relationships with other people fail, so we can drift away from the closeness of God that we so long for. Let’s take a look.

I want to share with you a story, a relationship of someone that I worked with in ministry a while ago. Now this man has a great heart, he’s a great leader, he makes quick decisions, makes good decisions and he’s prepared to take the hard decisions when he has to. Someone that I was working alongside with, as I said, the problem is every now and then this man is prone to angry outbursts. He makes quick decisions, that’s the upside but the downside is that he’s quick to fly off the handle.

One day I was on the receiving end of one of those angry outbursts. I have to tell you something, I was shocked, I was hurt, I was angry. I wanted to react and in the heat of the battle. I turned to God and said, “God, what do you want me to do with this guy?” And quick as a flash the Spirit of God whispered, ‘Turn the other cheek’.

As you can imagine that is not necessarily the answer I was looking for just at that moment. It’s not fun, I mean I had some righteous anger; I wanted to deal with this guy. The problem is my righteous anger doesn’t help this other person who my God loves just as much as He loves me.

See, that’s the key, listen to how Jesus puts it. He says this, it’s recorded in Mark chapter 12 beginning at verse 29.

‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ and the second commandment is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these’. (Mark 12:29-31)

This is a double-sided coin. See any economy has a currency; in the UK it’s pound sterling, in the USA it’s American dollars, in India it’s rupees, in the Democratic Republic of Congo it’s Congolese francs and it doesn’t matter which economy you go to, it’s about how much you have, success is having a lot of the currency.

The Kingdom of God has a currency too; the currency in the Kingdom of God however is love. It’s the currency of relationship, it’s the currency of closeness, it’s the currency of intimacy with God and with other people and it’s not about how much you have, it’s about how much you give.

See, this currency of giving rather than having, the essential currency of the Kingdom of God is a double-sided coin – the love of God and the love of neighbour and there’s a reason for that. See God doesn’t just love me, He loves you too and that is mightily inconvenient to me some days I have to tell you. See if I hate you and say that I love God I’m a liar.

Apostle John puts it this way in 1 John chapter 4, verse 20,

If anyone says, ‘I love God’ and yet hates his brother, he’s a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen and He has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:20-21)

Pretty straight forward, a barrier that I erect between me and you is in effect, a barrier that I erect between me and God. Again, have a listen to Jesus’ own words in the Lords Prayer, He says:

Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others. (Luke 11:4)

And then He goes on to explain:

For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you but if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father in heaven will not forgive your sins. (Matthew 6:14-15)

Therefore, if you are offering a gift at the altar and there you remember you brother has something against you, leave the gift there in front of the altar and first, go and be reconciled to your brother. Then come and offer your gift to God. (Matthew 5:22-23)

A barrier between you and me that one of us builds or that the other one builds or that we both build or that we leave there without dealing with, without tearing it down brick by brick no matter what it costs us, that barrier in the intimacy of our relationship is also a barrier between each one of us, as individuals, in our relationship with God.

Peter says to Jesus,

How many times should I forgive these people that wrong me, seven times? (Matthew 18:21)

I mean if you slap me in the face seven times and I forgive you seven times, that’s an awful lot and Jesus says, ‘No actually I expect you to forgive seventy-seven times’.

In other words; just keep forgiving and Jesus goes on after that to tell a parable of the wicked servant, this servant who owed his master a big debt, he couldn’t pay it, the master forgave him his debt but in turn, the servant refuses to forgive a much smaller debt that one of the other servants owes him. When the master finds out he’s not happy, this is what happens, in Matthew chapter 18 beginning at verse 32.

So the master calls the servant in and says, “You wicked servant! I cancelled all of that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” In anger his master turned him over to the jailors to be tortured until he could pay back all that he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. (Matthew 18:32-35)

Pretty direct stuff, isn’t it? I know it’s not what we want to hear, what we want is we want to be able to have arguments and descent over there with other people and yet have this wonderful, fuzzy, intimacy with God. Jesus is saying, ‘You can’t have that’.

Intimacy with God demands that we deal with fractured relationships no matter what the cost and if we’re praying and our prayers are bouncing of the ceiling, we think, ‘Oh why isn’t it that I can’t get close to God?’

Maybe we need to look around at how we’re treating other people. Maybe we need to deal with some broken relationships no matter what the cost because God loves each one of us and when I hate someone He loves, that is an offence to Him. When you hate someone He loves, that is an offence to Him.

The currency of intimacy with God is love and that currency is a double-sided coin, you can’t have one without the other – you just can’t, they’re part of the one coin and when we fail in this area we put up a barrier between us and God. I know this is a tough one, it’s one that if we want to draw close to God however, we have to deal with, no ifs, no buts, no maybes.

Each one of us has something in our makeup, in our lives that we could call our particular “stubborn sin”.  And that one thing so fractures our fellowship with God. But … what if God’s ready to help us deal with that stubborn sin.

I don’t know if you’re married or not but if you’re not just humour me and use your imagination for a moment. Imagine that each time you lean over to kiss your husband or your wife, he or she slaps you in the face. You just want to be close and yet, the one that you want to be close to slaps you in the face each time; offends you, hurts you. Their response to your desire for intimacy is a slap in the face.

Now you and I don’t have to have a counselling degree to figure out that this is not going to be good for our marriage, right? In fact if it happened just once it would be down right insulting and hurtful but imagine, imagine if it went on for a few days or a few weeks or a few months or even for a few years.

How do you feel? Delighted, close to your soul mate, fulfilled in the intimacy of your relationship? Ha! Not likely, in fact I would be pretty confident in saying, that if this went on for more than a few weeks, it would be a pretty certain bet that this marriage would fall apart. So why should it be any different with God?

We can probably think of some times when people have slapped us in the face, perhaps not literally but lets use that picture as a metaphor for what happens in relationships and it maybe that we decide to hang in there, to maintain the relationship but just one slap in the face can ruin the fellowship and consistent slaps in the face, over and over and over again are going to mean that we are miles apart.

Even if we decide to stay in that marriage or that friendship or that work relationship or whatever it is, the slaps in the face are a barrier to intimacy, it ain’t rocket science and you know something, it’s exactly the same when we slap God in the face with our sin.

Sin is a simple little word but it covers a multitude of things but actually there are very few things that God says, ‘Don’t do’. It’s like a marriage, there are very few things I can’t do but there are a few and they’re blindingly glimpsingly obvious. If I do those things I will ruin my marriage. If I avoid them God will give me the most wonderful, delightful intimate marriage, which He has. I love this, it is so simple, sometimes we make this stuff so complicated, it ain’t and it’s the same with God, it’s really simple. There are just a few things we can’t do.

Lets go back to Adam and Eve, they had a perfect relationship and fellowship with God in the garden. In fact there was only one thing He said ‘don’t do. Don’t eat the fruit of this one particular tree’. Now there was nothing special or magical or anything else about this tree, there was no hallucinogenic drug in the fruit, it was just a tree. The thing that was special about it was that God said ‘not this one’.

What God was doing was, He was loving Adam and Eve, He was making sure that they had the ability to choose to love Him back, to live in a perfect relationship, an intimate relationship with Him or to choose to turn their backs on Him by doing the one thing that He said don’t do.

See without that choice their love would not be an act of free will and without free will love isn’t love. Well we all kind of know the story, God said don’t eat the fruit from this tree but they were tempted and they did eat the fruit from that tree and look at what happens next, the very next thing, Genesis chapter 3 beginning at verse 7.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realised they were naked so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves and then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden but God called to the man and said, “Where are you?”

Adam answered, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked so I hid.” And God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to eat from?” And the man said, “The woman, the woman that you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and then I ate it.” (Genesis 3:7-12)

A perfect relationship between God and Adam and Eve and the very next thing that happens after they disobey God is the relationship is broken, they run and hide from God as if that’s possible. The intimacy is broken, the perfect relationship they had with Him, the fellowship in the cool of the morning is broken. And not just between God and Adam but Adam turns around and blames Eve so he fractures their relationship too. That’s what sin does, that’s what happens when we ignore the blindingly, glimpsingly obvious things that God says don’t do.

You know the thing with sin, it’s a B.G.O. It’s blindingly glimpsingly obvious. It’s not rocket science, it’s not complicated and each one of us has one or two things that persist and persist and persist.

Persistent sin, it’s like slapping God in the face. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the 7 deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth which is laziness, wrath which is anger, envy and pride and they’re vices and somehow the way it turns out is we each seem to be prone to one or maybe two of those more than we are to the others. Let me read them again; lust, gluttony, greed, sloth or laziness, wrath or anger, envy and pride.

With me it was gluttony, I’m your original foodoholic, truly, I love food and anger was pretty much up there as well for me. Both issues that God has had to deal with me in otherwise I wouldn’t be much use to you if I was an angry so and so. It’s been hard and God’s still dealing with me. But I’ve discovered if I don’t let Him deal with those, I can’t on my own, they’re beyond my abilities, they just are. And whatever your particular vice or persistent sin is, it’s beyond yours too.

It’s the way we’re made, it’s so obvious and yet like Adam and Eve, we just blunder in there anyway, time after time after time and as we continually slap God in the face with those sins in our lives, over and over and over again, He never gives up on us but it does fracture the fellowship, it ruins the intimacy.

So what’s the answer? If I can’t deal with this, if you can’t, how are we going to get close to God? How are we going to remove the barrier to intimacy with Him in our lives? The apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 18.

The message of the cross maybe foolishness to those who are perishing but to us, who are saved, it is the power of God but we preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than mans wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than mans strength. My message and my preaching were not wise and persuasive words but in a demonstration of the Spirits power so that your faith may not rest on men’s wisdom but on God’s power. (1 Corinthians 1:18-26)

See, God doesn’t expect us to do this on our own, God gives us power through His spirit. His heart is for intimacy with us and He gives us the power to bring about change.

Sometimes you’ll hear jokers like me talking about having a fantastic, intimate relationship with God – and it’s easy to think to yourself, Well, Berni, my life’s just not like that.  Hmm. I understand.  But sometimes, sometimes what’s required, is a leap of faith.

One of my favourite movies of all time is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It’s the story of Indy, played by Harrison Ford and his father, played by Sean Connery, going on an adventure to find the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank out of on the night of the Last Supper. When they finally decipher the cryptic ancient maps and arrive at the amazing old temple kind of place where the Holy Grail is, Indiana Jones has to go through 3 dangerous tests; the breathe of God, the word of God and the path of God.

The last one, the path of God, involves Indiana leaping from a place called The Lions Head, into what looks like, this massive bottomless chasm. He stands there and wonders, ‘What do I do next?’ and struggling with this he realises it’s a leap of faith. “Oh God …” he cries and you can hear his father in the background, who’s been shot and he’s dying, “You must believe boy, you must believe” and finally he does it. Indiana Jones takes that great leap of faith into the chasm, a leap that almost certainly will cost him his life.

Now I don’t want to spoil the rest of the movie for you if you haven’t seen it but what Indiana Jones discovers is that what he saw from the edge of that precipice at the lions head as being this massive bottomless cavern that he couldn’t possibly jump across, well it wasn’t what it seemed. So often that’s the case in life.

So often in life we stand on the edge looking down, realising we can’t cross it and the only thing to do is to stay there, where we are but for Indiana Jones, that wasn’t an option. His father was dying and the one thing that could save Dad was the Holy Grail on the other side of this uncrossable chasm and when the status quo is no longer an option, the only other alternative is to take a leap of faith into the unknown and discover whether the uncrossable is crossable.

There are people in this world who, right now, are standing on the edge of that precipice and the status quo is no longer an option. They hunger; they thirst for an intimacy with God. They long in their hearts, they ache to be close to God but the chasm is uncrossable. They know, they’ve tried, they’ve failed over and over and over again; ‘I want to be close to God but how do I get close, how?’

It’s the Indiana Jones dilemma; at the end of the day there is only one option and that is taking a leap of faith but just like Indiana, we look down at the precipice and think, ‘Oh God, surely this is not possible, surely I’m going to fail’ but then, when we’re standing on the edge of the precipice, things are not always what they seem.

What God calls us to is a leap of faith, it doesn’t matter how long we sit on that ledge wondering, we’re not going to know until we take that leap of faith, a leap in His direction. The decision to stay on the edge of the precipice is like a barrier to being close to God. I mean the precipice is a barrier too but imagine, just for a moment, the precipice isn’t what it seems. Imagine for a moment that there’s a bridge across, a bridge that we can’t see by staying there on the edge, a bridge that we can only know by taking the leap of faith.

Have you ever asked yourself exactly what is faith? God tells us, it’s in the Bible, Hebrews chapter 11:

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen and without faith it’s impossible to please God for whoever would approach Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1-3)

Sitting on the edge of the precipice faith is the thing that makes you leap because in your heart you believe there’s a way across. Faith breaks the inertia, faith knocks down the barrier. Now faith is almost always accompanied by fear of failure because we’re trusting in something we can’t see. People make this mistake, they think that because they’re afraid they don’t have faith but you know, for me, whenever God’s asked me to step out in faith, into that chasm, into that thing that I just can’t possibly see how I’m going to get across, to do something that I can’t do, there’s almost always fear. And for many people, stepping out and believing that they can be close to God, well there’s a huge fear of failure, ‘Well it’s never worked before’. But without faith it’s impossible to please God.

For whoever would approach Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” (Hebrews 11:6)

It’s God’s decision to do it this way, it’s God’s decision to hide the path across, oh we can see the path with our minds, we can read the Bible, we can see that Jesus is that path, we can see that He is that bridge, we can see that He is the way because He paid for our sin on the cross. His sacrifice, the shedding of His blood is what brings us close to God, we can read that, we can process it, we can understand it with our minds but so often it doesn’t make sense in our hearts.

See, in our hearts we have to take that leap of faith. In our hearts we need to decide, you know something? I’m just going to believe that this bridge is there, that I can be close to God. I know I have failed in the past, I know that it seems impossible, I know that I couldn’t possibly be good enough to be close to God but I am going to believe that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. He is the only way to the Father.

I know that I can’t see it with my heart and I know I don’t understand how this is going to happen but in my heart I’m going to hunger, I’m going to thirst, I’m going to seek God and I’m just going to believe that He exists and He rewards those who diligently seek Him. In fact, I would rather spend the rest of my days hungering and thirsting and seeking than just sitting here on this stupid ledge’.

You get what I’m saying? Maybe, maybe in your life you wanted to be close to God for so long that it just, it just hasn’t happened. I believe that, through His word, God is calling some people today just to believe, just to believe simply, like a child that God wants to be close to us. Don’t you realise that God yearns jealously for the spirit that He has made to dwell in us and I truly believe there are some people today, maybe it’s you, you have to make that decision of faith, that leap of faith in their hearts.

That leap that says, ‘No matter what the cost, no matter how risky it is, no matter how much I fear failure, I am going to take this leap of faith in God.’ And when we do, all of a sudden we discover that the chasm is not what it seemed. That there is a bridge that we couldn’t see by sitting on that ledge, that we could only feel under the souls of our feet when we leapt out and walked on it.

It’s amazing these days how many things we have to crowd our senses, and even though many of them are fun and pleasurable, they make demands on our time.  And so, with life as complex, and as full as it’s become, we simply don’t have time for… God.