Doesn’t matter who we are or where we’re at, it’s so easy to come to the conclusion that we could never possibly be close to God.  Other – yes.  Us – no.  We might yearn for that sort of closeness, but we could never experience it.  

INTIMACY IN THIS DAY AND AGE

Intimacy in relationships is something that we all long for but we live in a world today where very few people really discover the intimacy that they are looking for. Why is that?” Well, let me just give you one example – pornography and the internet – they seem to be made for one another. Every year the internet pornography industry is measured in the hundreds of billions of US dollars. At any second well over fifty thousand people are viewing pornography on the internet and somewhere between 5 and 10 % of all websites are pornography related. Now those estimates are probably way under the reality.

And the research says that this is having a real impact on marriages – there is increased marital distress and there is a risk of separation and divorce through pornography. There is decreased marital intimacy and sexual satisfaction – there’s infidelity – there’s increased appetite for more graphic types of pornography and sexual activity associated with abusive legal or unsafe practices. Monogamy – that’s one husband, one wife – is being devalued. Marriage and child rearing are falling apart; there is an increasing number of people struggling with compulsive and addictive sexual behaviour.

See, pornography is something that the world says ‘Well, it’s just a lifestyle choice – instant gratification is fine’ but actually it’s a silent killer. When it comes to true intimacy, people are forsaking the one wondrous blessing of intimacy that God planned for them in marriage – the real thing – for a fake.

Do you see the irony of this? And it’s not just in pornography; you see it in business, you see people being overworked; you see tiredness – life is a whole bunch more transactional today than it ever was. It’s a ‘supermarket check-out’ kind of world instead of a ‘corner-store’ kind of world. So we’ve come to have pretty low expectations when it comes to relationships of real depth. We just expect the world to be more transactional and less relational; less intimate – we do!

And yet deep inside the heart of every man and woman and child is a deep yearning for intimacy. A huge part of that is a yearning to be close to God. Not everybody calls it that; not everyone sees it that way – you look across every culture and civilization though – advanced or so called ‘primitive’ – and you see a yearning for God. Whether we have never really encountered God or whether we have been walking with Him for a lifetime, there remain many people who want to be close to Him and yet they struggle to discover that sort of intimacy. It’s frustrating.

That’s why we are starting a new series today called “How to Get Close to God”. There are two parts to that: understanding the simple truths about what God has done to bring us close – God’s truth is always as simple as it is beautiful; and understanding how we can respond to that. So we are going to look at some simple, practical guidance as to how; that’s why I’ve called this series “How to Get Close to God” not some esoteric theory but discovering His truth with our lives.

I want to introduce you right now to something that God says in the New Testament – it’s in the Book of James:

God yearns jealously for the Spirit that He has made to dwell in us. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Humble yourself before the Lord and He will exalt you” (James 4: 5-10)

It’s a beautiful simple statement – God yearns and when we take a step or two; small and faltering though those steps may be – when we take those steps towards Him, the promise is that He will draw near to us, when we humble ourselves by doing that, He will exalt us.

This is something we are going to unpack on the programme this week and in the coming weeks – to bring this truth alive in our hearts; flowing through our veins – a truth that’s for living, not just a truth just for knowing in our heads, you know. This getting close to God is about knowing the truth but experiencing the truth and living God’s truth in our lives. Actually, living a life where we experience a ‘closeness’ to God. So it’s not just head knowledge – it’s a truth for living.

Now that I should be the one to speak with you about drawing close to God is such an incredible testimony to God’s outrageous grace. You see, for me it all began, this ‘Jesus’ thing, in a dark and dangerous hour – a time in my life when I seemed such a long way off from God – at least that’s how it seemed. I’d strayed so far and yet, it was in the middle of the darkest nights, on the stormiest oceans of life that His grace found me. His light shone for me. I will never forget the inky blackness that surrounded me in those days and I shall never forget how my Saviour reached out to me in that place.

And my prayer for you as we journey together for a time is that the things that we talk about from God’s Word today and over the next few weeks will be a signpost; a marker that points you Christ-ward. And as you come to grips with these beautiful and simple and profound truths, that the Spirit of God will write them on your heart so that you will never be alone again.

I look back on my life as a teenager – I had everything – a good home, a good school, great friends and later on in my high school life, I encountered Jesus – I believed in Him and I began a relationship with Him – in fact, I committed my life to Him. You know what that is like as teenagers, we have the luxury of, I don’t know, innocent idealism and we are not afraid to be dreamers.

And for me, as a teenager, somehow it was so much easier to believe in Jesus back then than it was when I grew up into adulthood – and grow up I did! I had the responsibility and the money and the mortgage and the career and the car – all the things that come with being an adult. And the plain reality of it all was that God was pushed into the back seat, I simply didn’t need Him.

Jesus just didn’t fit into the realities of my career and the money and the opportunity that presented themselves. Well, I guess I still kind of believed in Him, for a while, but little by little I headed off in my own direction. After all I had grown up; I had matured and when that happened it was natural for me to conclude that, ‘Well, I didn’t need that ‘Jesus’ stuff anymore.’

A FADING REALITY

I just want to continue on with a little bit of my own story; a story of a life that just drifted away from God because my hunch is that in the mistakes that I made, well, some of them might just resonate a little bit with you. Because the reality is about where we are living at the moment; we see the world from where we sit. Our perception is our reality.

If we are walking every day with Jesus, praying and enjoying our relationship with Him then that relationship is real; it’s alive, but if we are focussing on all the things in the here and now – which is what I spent most of my life doing – if we allow all our senses to be filled and to be crowded with the sights and the sounds and the smells of creation alone, then all too quickly, the Creator fades from our view.

Now that’s not just a God thing, it happens in every relationship. A man and a woman come together in marriage – they love each other; they enjoy each other, but as time ticks on, they so often begin to focus on a whole bunch of other things that crowd out that relationship part of their marriage – work, careers, kids, money, buying, having, possessing and eventually, sadly, the two that were meant to be one, drift apart again to become two. Eventually that marriage will fall apart. You and I know that this is happening in epidemic proportions. ‘We’ve just grown apart’ they’ll say. For any relationship to succeed it has to be a big part of our present reality. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s the same with God. We can be focussed on a whole bunch of other things and still kind of believe in Jesus; still have that faith somewhere in our heads but the longer we leave it to gather dust in some shelf in our heads, instead of living it with our lives – the longer we focus on other things and not on that relationship with God, the less real it becomes. The faith fades – that’s exactly what happened in my life. That’s how I drifted, day-by-day, month by month, year by year – miles away from the God I knew in my teenage years.

And on top of that because Jesus wasn’t a physical reality; well, He’s not here in the flesh and the blood the way a husband or a wife is, then we can come to a point, which is the point that I came to in my life, of thinking ‘Well, does He still really exist at all? Is He real?’

Right about then, it’s not unusual for the crowd to fade from view or for circumstances to take a turn for the worse. Maybe we lose our job, or there is a broken marriage or relationship or we have money problems or we just don’t have a good sense of our own wellbeing and at that point we wonder ‘Where is God in all of this? Is He real? How can He let this happen, does He really care about me?’

My hunch is that this is something that we all go through in our lives – there’s a point at which God feels like He’s a million, trillion, zillion miles away, no matter what course our spiritual journey had taken up to that point. ‘What happened? Where did He go? Why is it like this?’

That’s the point at which I found myself in 1995, in the month of February – my life was falling apart. All the things that had been so important to me up until then – the shiny baubles, the hopes, the dreams, they lay shattered at my feet. The best I could pray in those dark days and weeks and months; the most that I could muster in faith terms was, ‘God, well, if You are real; if You are out there, I need You. Now would be a really good time, if You exist.’ That’s all I had – I just didn’t know any more because for so long I had been walking in a different direction. I’d been living a different reality. I’d been focussing on other things for so long that He wasn’t real to me anymore.

Frankly, Jesus was a ‘maybe’ where once He had been my Lord. That’s it, that’s how it was and right smack bang in the middle of that, the question was simply ‘What do I have to do to get close to God?’

Let me share with you an utterly outrageous statement from a man named Paul, one of the Apostles of Jesus Christ. He wrote this two thousand years ago. And the reason it is so outrageous is that Paul was a Pharisee; he was a religious nut; a separatist. He was so much into religion by ‘good works’, I can’t find the words and yet after he met Jesus, this is what he wrote:

But now in Jesus Christ, you who were once far off have been brought near through the blood of Christ. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near for through Him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” (You can read that in Ephesians chapter 2, beginning at verse 13)

You who were once far off; you who once thought that God was a trillion miles away; you who once thought that you had to shout half way across the universe for Him to hear you; you who thought that you had to build a bridge back to Him through your good works; you are the one that’s been brought near to Him by the blood of Christ – that bridge of grace that reaches clear across that eternal and unbridgeable divide between God and each one of us.

In other words the only thing that you and I have to do to be brought near to God is to believe that Jesus died for us and that He rose again. That’s what Paul means: “You who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” While all our failures, all our wrongs, all that junk that God calls sin has a price, the price was paid for by Jesus on the cross.

That’s the ‘blood’ thing that he is talking about. Blood was a symbol in Hebrew culture for life – He paid with His life; He spilt His blood, His life for you and me to pay for our sin. Now Christians have heard this message so many times, it becomes almost ‘passe’. The more familiar we are with something, the less attention we pay to it, even if it’s a deep, life transforming truth.

The Gospel, the Good News, well, it can wash past us sometimes and we end up just believing it in our heads. But what about believing it with our hearts and with our very lives – believing in the fact that Jesus died and rose again to pay for our sins, our wrongs, our junk – whatever label you care to use – and then, taking that deep truth and letting it sink in. Drinking it in, soaking it in, so that it becomes part of who we are. What about living it with our lives? What about believing it with our lives?

Because when we do, there is peace; peace with God – hostilities cease because the separation; the barrier, the obstacle is gone – the unbridgeable divide is bridged in an instant. There is no more distance between Him and you, Him and me as there once was, between enemies – peace has broken out. That’s the promise: “We who were once far off are brought near by the blood of Christ.” And you know something? It’s time to start living our lives in that outrageous promise.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

If you won millions in the lottery would that change the way you lived your life? Well, this thing that we are talking about today; this intimacy, this closeness with God, it’s so much better than winning the lottery – it’s more than that. It’s believing that we are set free for eternal life that begins here and now – the war is over – peace has been declared between God and us. It may not feel like that, but that’s the promise that we can believe in – there’s no more gap – far away becomes near.

And faith in that promise is the starting point of getting close to God; in fact, it’s the only starting point. We are now blood relatives with Jesus, adopted into His family, accepted by His grace. We no longer have to be afraid, as we were when we were a long way off.

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship, of adoption and by Him we cry, “Abba, Father”. The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children and if we are children then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ,” (that was written by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 8, verses 15 to 17)

We are blood relatives; heirs, co-heirs with Christ because God made it so through His Son. The cross; the bridge that spans eternity; the bridge that spans the universe; a bridge that is called ‘grace’ – that’s where it all begins, with God’s grace and everything … everything needed to open the door to that relationship has already been done for us by Jesus on the cross.

However uncertain we may feel; however feeble our faith may at first appear; however dark the hour might be, we are brought near to God by the blood of Christ. We discover that whilst we had wandered far away, that in Christ, God is closer than we could ever have imagined. See, that’s the startling paradox of grace. All we need to do, you and I, is believe. The simple truth is that all the good news that you and I will ever need is that when we put our complete trust in what Jesus did for each one of us on the cross; the price He paid for our sin with His life, we are brought near to God. Grace is as simple as it is beautiful.

Father God, we just want to join together right now in prayer. Sometimes it is the simple-ist; the most beautiful, the most wonderful of Your truths that we struggle with the most. Maybe it’s because they are too simple; maybe because they just seem too good to be true and yet Lord, we don’t want to live another minute of our lives without the truth of Your closeness in Jesus Christ, becoming real in us, real in our hearts, real in our lives, real in our experience and only You can do that Lord. Only You, by Your Holy Spirit can write this truth on our hearts.

Father we want to ask You to do that right now in Jesus Christ name. We want to ask You to make Your closeness real in our lives. Lord as we learn more in this series over the coming weeks, show us Your truth; show us how we can simply respond to You; show us how we can live in the certain knowledge, how we can actually experience Your closeness day by day. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

I want to come back to where we started today – James chapter 4, verses 5 to 10: “God yearns jealously for the Spirit that He has made to dwell in us. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Humble yourself before the Lord and He will exalt you.” It’s a beautiful, simple statement: “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”

And you might say, ‘Berni, how do I do that?’ We are going to look at that over the next few weeks on the programme. But God is like any other person in a sense – we are made in His image – we know what we have to do to draw close to another person. We know what a husband has to do to draw close to his wife and a wife to her husband and parents to their children and friends to one another. To spend time with one another; to communicate openly with one another, to trust one another … we know all that stuff so why do we think that it would be any different with our God?

God yearns … He yearns jealously for the Spirit that He has made to dwell in us and when we take a step or two – small, faltering though those might be – towards Him, He will draw near to us. When we humble ourselves He will exalt us.

Next week on the programme we are going to see exactly what steps God has taken towards us, practical, real truth that we can experience in our lives. But can I encourage you, between now and then to spend some time in prayer, just reading this passage in James chapter 4, beginning at verse 5 – reading and praying and saying:

Lord, write this on my heart so that I can never forget it. So that when I’m walking through those dark days, when I think that You are a million miles away, I know I can take just whatever step I can towards You and You will draw near to me.

Father, we just thank You for Your Word, in Jesus name.

God has an amazing plan.  It’s a plan for intimacy with you and me.  I’m talking the sort of closeness that comes when a man and woman marry and make a home and life together.  In fact – God wants to set up His home in you and me. 

WEDDINGS ARE WONDERFUL, BUT …

I just want to set the scene … we are in the second programme of a four programme series that I’ve called “How to Get Close to God”. And so many people have this desire to be close to God – they want it, but it’s been elusive. It’s hard to get close to God – we can’t see Him, we can’t touch Him, we can’t hear His voice – we want it, but how?

Interesting … a husband and a wife, they love each other, they want to be close and yet so often marriages fail because they just don’t know how to be close and how to love one another. And it can be the same thing with God. So often we drift away; we hear the promises of God but we just don’t know ‘How can I live them out? What do I do? How can I be close to God?’ And so we can’t believe the promises because we can’t experience them.

We began this important series last week on the programme when we looked at God’s promise that if we believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins, then we have already been brought close to Him. That promise is kind of like the marriage promise that a husband and a wife make at their wedding – it’s completely unconditional – it’s a promise for life. And from God’s perspective, there’s no divorce.

Let’s have another listen to that promise – it comes in two parts – the first part is about God’s desire; the desire of His heart. Have a listen – if you’ve got a Bible, grab it, open it at James chapter 4, beginning at verse 5. This is what it says:

God yearns jealously for the Spirit that He has made to dwell in us. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Humble yourself before the Lord and He will exalt you. (James 4:5)

And the second part is what God did to fulfil that desire; what He did comes in Ephesians chapter 2, beginning at verse 13:

Now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away, have been brought near through the blood of Christ. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near, for through Him we both have access to the Father by the one Spirit. (Ephesians 2:13-18)

A desire and an action. Together He’s promised the intimacy for us … a promise He will never break; a promise that we can live our lives in with absolute certainty.

So the first step that brings us close to God is the step that He takes through the cross, towards each one of us. It’s a step that He took – the cross is for you and for me – the cross opens the way to God for each one of us. In fact, the cross is the way. That’s why Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one shall come to the Father except through Me.” And the only response that He requires of us is simply to believe in Him, with all that we are – with our very lives – to put our faith in Jesus.

I don’t know about you but every time I rest in that wondrous truth my heart is fit to burst with a joy that words can’t describe. So often I have sat quietly on my own, just gazing with the eyes of my soul, at that wondrous cross and wept with joy at God’s incomprehensible plan to draw me close to Him. Those times without doubt, are the high points of my life. Even if all around there are dark storm clouds; even if all around people seem to be raging and arguing and there is conflict in the middle of that, I can sit quietly and experience the knowledge of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Today I want to take a look at the next step to getting close to God. He took that first mighty step – we looked at that last week on the programme and we respond with a small stumble of faith and … there it is – the marriage promise; the marriage covenant; the eternal relationship between God and you, between God and me, has begun – an eternal marriage.

But what comes next? How do we experience the closeness, the intimacy of that relationship in the reality of our lives? Well, this week we are going to take this one step further, well, not just us, but God. And to understand what He’s about, we are going to use the language of marriage because it makes an awful lot of sense.

Weddings are wonderful but they don’t go on forever. They’re celebrations, when everybody gets dressed up and family and friends come along – this beautiful ceremony where a man and a woman decide in front of everybody, to make that promise; that declaration that they are going to spend the rest of their lives together. Then they have a ceremony, they sign the register, there are flower and photos and a feast and it’s fabulous.

And it’s exactly the same at the moment that we go to God and ask for His forgiveness and accept Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord. It’s an awesome, awesome thing! If it’s something you have never done I just want to encourage you that there is no time like right now, to pray just a simple prayer.

Now back to my wedding – I remember that time – when Jacqui and I were married; a few years ago now but it was just unreal. Being a typical male I said, ‘Well, why don’t we just go to church on Sunday morning and have the wedding as part of the Sunday service and we can have some coffee and some fairy bread afterwards.’ Well, not surprisingly, my lovely Jacqui did not quite see things that way. Instead we hired a marquee and put it up on the vacant block next to our church building and our friends and family came along. By the way, I still had the fairy bread served to her at the bridal table and I had the video with a priceless expression on her face when the plate arrived. Anyway, it was just a wonderful celebration of a man and a woman falling in love and deciding to spend the rest of their lives together as husband and wife.

But, you know the best part of that day for me was when, at the end of the celebration, the car came to pick us up and we left everybody else behind. I still remember that feeling when we hopped into the car to take us to the airport so that we could fly off on our honeymoon. I remember waving to the people and driving off thinking, “This is by far the best part of the wedding, leaving the people behind.’ It’s not so much that I didn’t enjoy the celebration, I did, it was great – but heading off together as husband and wife was awesome. And so began that process of becoming one; of making a life together and a home together, “The two shall become one flesh and cleave to one another.”

See, it’s exactly the same when we leave the rest of the world behind for Christ’s sake; when we except Jesus into our hearts; when we accept once and for all, His offer of eternal relationship through His sacrifice on the cross. We head off with Him. And strangely, in the Bible, God uses the same language as the language of marriage to describe what happens next. And we are going to have a look at what happens next, after that beautiful marriage promise, next.

UNDER ONE ROOF

We were taking a look earlier at how two people come to be one; to be intimate and close in marriage. The wedding is great but then they leave all the other people behind at the wedding and head off on their own, to become one – to set up home together – well that’s marriage.

But how does this closeness, this intimacy work in our relationship with God? As it turns out, exactly the same as in a marriage. We set up house together, we move in with one another – God moves into us and we move into Him – we live together with God, as one. That’s Jesus plan – take a look – He says to His disciples:

If you love me, you will obey what I command and I’ll ask the Father and He will give you another counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world can’t accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him but you know Him for He lives with you and will be in you. I won’t leave you as orphans; I’ll come back to you. Before long the world will not see Me anymore but you will see Me. Because I live, you also will live. And on that day, you will realise that I am in My Father and you are in Me and I am in you. Whoever has My commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves Me and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father and I too will love him and show Myself to him. Then Judas – not Judas Iscariot – said “But Lord, why do You intend to show Yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus replied “If anyone loves Me he will obey My teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love Me will not obey My teaching. These words you hear are not Mine; they belong to the Father who sent Me.” (You can read that in John chapter 14, verses 15 to 23)

See, that, my friend is the language of intimacy and closeness and eternally living with God. Listen, He talks about the Holy Spirit – he says, “He lives with you and will be in you.” And again “My Father will love you and we will come to you and make our home with you.” Isn’t that what it means to be close? I couldn’t imagine living apart from my wife Jacqui, in fact, just as I was writing these words and preparing this script, I was sitting in an airport lounge, about to head off overseas and be apart from her for a week or so.

Now, I love being about God’s business, but travelling, well, it’s a sacrifice for me because I hate being away from Jacqui and even before I stepped onto that plane I was sitting thinking ‘When am I going to be back with her?’ That’s what marriage is? Why would we imagine that it’s any different in our relationship with God? Imagine going to a wedding; a great celebration, but afterwards instead of the bride and groom heading off to make their lives together under the one roof, the husband goes back to his old home and the wife goes back to her old home. They make the promises, they have the celebration but they never make a home together. They never live out the promise with their lives.

Now we have some friends who were married recently – he is an Australian, she is from the Philippines. And because of the immigration laws in Australia, she was forced to leave the country after the wedding and for several months until it was all sorted out, they had to live apart, even though they were married. It was a devastating time for them.

It was the most awful time but you know something? That’s how some people approach their relationship with God and that’s the very reason why so many people believe in Jesus and yet never experience the intimacy – the utter oneness with Him that comes from living their lives with Him.

But there is a price to intimacy. I want you to notice when Jesus spoke of His intimacy, He put clear conditions on it. Let’s look at it again, this time just a shortened version. If you have got a Bible, open it at John chapter 14, beginning at verse 15. He said:

If you love me you will obey what I command. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father and I too will love him and show Myself to Him. If anyone loves me he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. (John 14:15-21)

See, there’s clearly a price to pay for this intimacy – just as there is a price to pay for being married – now it’s so easy to dismiss this. For instance, someone might say ‘You see, I knew when it comes right down to it, this ‘religion’ thing is just another bunch of rules.’ The same could be said of the constraints that marriage places on us.

Before I married Jacqui, I was free to come and go as I pleased; I was free to date other women but when I married this wonderful woman that God gave me, I had to give up those so-called freedoms. Since marrying Jacqui I just can’t decide to go out every night with my friend – I have a wife to consider – and I definitely can’t go out with other women – that’s obvious. Yet far from feeling restricted in those natural constraints that come with the exclusivity of marriage, the exact opposite is true. Maybe sometimes there are sacrifices but they are the very things that set me free to experience the wondrous intimacy that only marriage brings.

So many of us, when we accept Christ, we go ‘Yippee’, isn’t it wonderful, but then we go on and we live life as though nothing has changed – as though believing in Jesus, well, it’s not a new life. It’s as crazy as the notion of this man and woman getting married and going back to their old lives and living in separate houses and dating other people.

And then we wonder, ‘Why is it that I’m not experiencing this closeness to Jesus that other people seem to have?’ When you love someone and you have made a lifelong promise of exclusive commitment, setting up home together is wonderful. But, yes, it’s an adjustment, it involves sacrifice and anyone who has been married for any length of time will tell you that it’s not easy some days. But it’s God’s plan, not only for husband and wife, but for each one of us when we believe in Jesus Christ.

And when a man forsakes relationships with other women for his wife and when she forsakes relationships with other men for her husband, that is as you and I can plainly know, is the place of beautiful intimacy. It’s the closest human relationship possible.

Now listen again to what Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word and my Father will love them and we will come to make our home with them.” Isn’t that outrageous? Isn’t that so different from the notion you can believe in God, you can believe in Jesus and still keep Him at a distance? It’s a beautiful picture, saying ‘If you love Me we are going to come and make our home in you – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, indwelling in us because we have taken a step of faith, not with our heads; not with our mouths but with our lives and how we live.

AN INCREDIBLE INVASION

A few years ago I was talking with a young Jewish lawyer about this very question and he said to me, ‘Hang on just a minute. Isn’t that an incredible invasion of privacy – this notion of God moving in with us?’ I was stunned. I had never quite looked at it that way and it still brings a smile to my face today. Yes, I guess living together is a bit of an invasion of privacy but when you love each other, you want to be together and you want to pay the price.

There is not a single part of me that wants to have a relationship with any other woman other than my wife Jacqui. And it’s the same in my relationship with God. Yep, I make mistakes … I make mistakes every day because I’m human but then I look at the obedience that Jesus calls me to. Actually, there are very, very few things that He says to us ‘don’t do’ – and when I look at those, like stealing and slandering and arguing and lying, it’s blindingly, glimpsingly obvious that they are selfish things that ruin our lives.

Listen again to what Jesus says:

Those who love me will keep my word and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home in them. (John 14:23)

The full effect of what Jesus is saying here runs something like this – If you love me I will come and live with you. I will never leave you – everywhere you go, every minute of the day, I will be with you.

That’s the second part of God’s promise – that He will come and make His home in us. God’s address on planet earth is me – God’s address on planet earth, if you believe in Jesus Christ and love Him, is you and He will never, never move out. The marriage vow, the first part, is the grace of the cross and our heartfelt response of ‘I believe’ – that’s the marriage.

But I don’t love my wife just with my head – I love my wife with my heart and my life. In the same way, I don’t love my God with my head – I love my God with my heart and my life. And because it’s a heart relationship, the next logical step is that we should life together in a home, in a close personal relationship that’s real. And that is the promise of God; that’s what it means when Jesus says:

I will send you another comforter just like me, the Holy Spirit, whom the world cannot see but you can see. (John 14:16-17)

The Spirit of God comes and lives in us. It’s a promise of eternal intimacy open to each person who believes and who sets their heart to accept God on His terms through simple, faithful obedience.

I know some days when I make mistakes; when I sin, it disrupts my intimacy with God. It feels as though my prayer is just bouncing off the ceiling, just as intimacy in a marriage is disrupted when a husband and wife argue. That’s why I keep very short accounts with my God. That’s why I go to Him as quickly as I can – I say ‘Lord, I’m sorry, what I did was wrong, I confess that and I ask You to forgive me through Jesus Christ. And my desire, in Your strength, is to turn away from these things.’

To ‘turn away’ means to repent – to turn away from the things I know to be wrong. And my God forgives me every time because that sin is already paid for on the cross by Jesus. In fact, He forgives in an instant and that forgiveness is what restores the fellowship between us and Him; the closeness, the intimacy.

This is where God makes the rubber hit the road. You and I may feel like He is a million miles away but when that happens we can fall back on the promises of God. Those two promises are that He has brought us close to Him through the blood of His Son and that He has made His home in us. Those are God’s unbreakable promises that He will not change – He won’t renege on them; He won’t walk away from them.

Now we have a decision to make – the same decision that a man and a woman have as the foundation of marriage – will we, you and I, serve Him and Him alone? Will we obey Him? Will we accept His ways above our ways, above the world’s seductive comforts and creeds? Will we step into the paradox of the freedom of life in Christ by obedience to Him?

Because (let me say this plainly), until our hearts cry out, ‘Yes!’ that intimacy with God; that closeness that our heart desires, will forever elude us. The decision is yours; it’s mine! It’s such a simple choice and yet so many tarry on the fringes of a relationship with God because they won’t make the decision because of what it costs them.

Let me share with you, in closing, some beautiful words from A.W. Tozer’s “Pursuit of God”, because these words may just help a soul, here or there, finally cry out that all-important, ‘Yes!’ with their lives. He writes:

The man who has God for his treasure has all things in one. Many ordinary treasurers may be denied him or if he is allowed to have them, the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary to his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one by one, he will scarcely feel the sense of loss for having the source of all things he has in one, all satisfaction, all pleasure, all delight. Whatever he may lose, he has actually lost nothing for he now has it all in one and he has it purely, legitimately and forever.

The decision is yours; the decision is mine!

For most people – life’s just plain busy. Hectic. And in the middle of that, we can believe in God, but end up wondering where He is. Exactly how do we draw close to God amidst the cut and thrust of life?

The Bible. I know, I know – for many people, well “the Bible” has all sorts of connotations.  But what if – well, what if it really is a love letter.  What if God wants to use it to draw us close to Him.  Well??

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

We have all seen those movies that start with, you know, a message in a bottle. It comes bobbing across the ocean from some place on the other side of the world and it’s washed up on a beach somewhere and someone comes along and finds the bottle. And we are all sitting there on the edge of our seats wondering ‘Ok, what does the message say?’ And they play the music and the suspense grows ‘Come on, hurry up, open the bottle and tell us what it says.’

Now let me ask you something – if you were that person; the person who found the bottle, what would you do? Here are your choices: (a) you ignore the bottle ‘Ok there’s a message in the bottle – who cares?’, (b) you pick it up, you throw it back in the ocean – ‘Let someone else read the stupid message, (c) you take it home and you forget about it ‘Yea, I’ll get around to it one day’, or (d) you open the bottle and read the message ‘I wonder what it says?’ As Bart Simpson would say ‘Duh!’.

Obviously we would pounce on that bottle and open it. Who knows how long it’s been in the ocean or where it’s come from or who wrote the message or what it says. I mean how awesome – a message in a bottle! And what if you opened the bottle and discovered that it was a love letter; a love letter written in one sense, to anyone but in another sense, a love letter written specifically to you?

Now that would be amazing wouldn’t it? As long as people have had ink and paper, there have been love letters. I mean, love letters or cards or flowers, they are a really special way to say ‘I love you’. They say ‘I love you’ in a way that nothing else does. And anybody who has been through a courtship will probably have the odd love letter tucked away somewhere.

There’s one letter though; one love letter that’s more special than any other. It begins like this:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness He called ‘night’ and there was evening and there was morning on the first day. (That comes from Genesis chapter 1, verses 1 to 5)

It’s a love letter that begins with an account of where you and I came from. And as you read on, page after page, you are struck by the overwhelming intensity of the love of God that just overflows from every page into your heart.

Then a bit further on, somewhere in the middle, it says something like this:

God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life. For God didn’t send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him. (John chapter 3, verse 16 and 17)

And right towards the end, this is the note on which this love letter finishes:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea. I saw a Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men and He will live with them and they will be his people and God himself with be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.” (That comes from Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 to 3)

This is one awesome love letter and of course, you will probably recognise that they are little chunks out of a huge love letter that these days we call ‘The Bible’. ‘Oh no, not the Bible!’ Now I remember not that many years ago when people would say ‘the Bible’ and I would think ‘Oh no, not the Bible! I mean these old fashioned, fundamentalist, irrelevant Bible bashing – how can they ever begin to believe in that stuff? And imagine reading a stuffy old book like that? I mean – really!’

But when I read those little bits and a whole bunch more of the Bible, what I discovered was that it wasn’t a fundamentalist, religious treatise at all. Fundamentalism – some dogmatic expression of religion – was never God’s idea. It’s something that human beings have taken and twisted God’s love and truth into.

Now when you read the Bible, what you discover is the most awesome love letter; the most amazing plan that God has for your life and for my life, here and now and for eternity. It’s a huge story of God’s engagement of humanity and in it He reveals His love and His grace – a love and a grace that unfolds through the stories of ordinary, fallible people; people like you and me. A story of love and grace that we thought we understood and then all of a sudden we meet the person of Jesus Christ and realize that we understood nothing at all.

Now I definitely had negative images of the Bible – absolutely! I just couldn’t understand how anybody could begin to believe that stuff. Now, you might say ‘Berni, that’s heresy, I believe every word.’ Well, good for you, but there are lots of people who say they believe every word who have one of those thick books at home, somewhere on a shelf or in a cupboard, collecting dust.

Let me get right to the point here. Some people will say ‘Well, God seems to be a million miles away.’ But do you know what I find when I talk to people like that? These are the very same people who have their love letter from God sitting somewhere on a shelf or in a cupboard, collecting dust. And my answer is ‘He’s not, you have just put Him on the shelf.’

I want to shake you out of this attitude that ‘The Bible’ is some kind of, I don’t know, optional extra in our walk with God. The Bible is alive; it is God’s living Word. And when we read it, we need to open it up and say ‘Father, you know, I believe that this is You talking to me today. I believe this is Your will for my life. I believe that Your Holy Spirit wants to shine Your love and Your light and Your grace and Your wisdom into my heart today, through the words on this page.’

It’s alive! It is the living word of the living God – it’s that message in a bottle and it’s His chosen way of speaking with us. Not through some dry theological textbook – no not that at all. But through real life stories that engage our hearts and captivate us with His awesome love.

WHAT AN AMAZING BOOK 

The Bible is an amazing book! You know, it was written over a fifteen hundred year period, starting around 1350BC and finishing towards the end of the first century AD. It was written originally in three different languages. Most of the Old Testament in Hebrew, most of the New Testament in Greek and a little bit in Aramaic, which was the language that Jesus spoke, smattered through both the Old and the New.

It has many different authors from many different cultures in different time periods and different backgrounds, with different things going on when these sixty-six different books of the Bible were written. It has been translated into hundreds of languages and it has been copied by hand because before Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-1400s, there was no way of printing or replicating it. The only way to create copies of the Bible back then, was for people called ‘scribes’ to write the whole thing out by hand – over and over and over again. Can you believe that?

And the scholars and the historians and the textural critics will agree that there are very, very few transcription errors in this Book. That’s because a whole bunch of experts have pieced together the historical trails of hand written manuscripts of the original texts – and there are literally thousands of those – compared them, picked up any minor errors that crept in, in the copying process and corrected them.

There are a handful of uncertain words – just a handful – in some non-critical passages, but by and large, this thing we call ‘The Bible’ that we read today contains precisely the words that were written back then. God’s gone to a lot of trouble to preserve this God-inspired Book, His love letter to us. In fact, in historical terms it is the most accurate and well attested to, historical document that we have from antiquity, by a country mile.

It’s the story of God – it’s the story of who God is and what His plan is and who we are in Jesus Christ and how we can respond to His great love. It’s this vast, amazing, profound love letter, personally guided down through the waves and the oceans of time over the past three and a half thousand years. And like a message in a bottle; like a love letter, it’s now placed into our hands – it’s placed into your hands and my hands.

Now I know that there are going to be some people who are listening today who get to this point and think, ‘You know something, the last few programmes on How to Get Close to God, no problem, I love what he is saying there about drawing close to God but this bit – this thing about reading the Bible – naaah, I’m going to give that a miss.’ In other words, ‘I want to be close to God and I want everything, except the Bible. I mean it’s hard to read and it doesn’t make sense and no, no I just can’t come at that bit.’

And just quietly, just between you and me, that’s where I started out. Even when I was at Bible College, studying a degree in this stuff, there was still a little bit of that swilling around inside me. And it took a man of God; a man whom I admire so much, Doctor Barry Chant, the principle of the college, to deal with that in me.

Here’s the story. I was a busy businessman and I attended Bible College part time. One of the subjects which I had to complete was essentially a subject done on how to preach. And we would sit around each week listening to each other preach in the class. ‘Such a waste of time’ I thought. I was a good communicator; I had travelled around the world speaking at large conferences in my business career.

So after a few weeks, I said to Barry, ‘Look, give me a credit for this subject. I want to be excused from this thing, it’s wasting my time, I’m busy.’ And on the surface it was an entirely reasonable request but something in this wise old man of God, who had been walking with the Lord for over half a century, caused him to shake his head. He said ‘No!’ He said ‘No, I still want to hear you preach a couple of times more.’ I was infuriated with him but the next time I preached his critique went something like this: he said, ‘Berni, you are a great communicator – you know something though, when you preach, you stray too far away from God’s Word. You tell us what you think instead of what God is saying. You need to bring people back to the Bible; back to God’s Word because it is God’s Word that transforms people’s lives, not your wisdom.’

That hurt – my pride smarted at the criticism! But you know something? He was spot on! And after that he let me go and since that time millions of people have benefitted from his wisdom because it was a lesson that has stuck with me ever since.

Have a listen to what Peter the Apostle says – he says:

If you have been born again you have been born again not from perishable seed but of imperishable seed through the living and enduring Word of God. For all men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field – the grass withers, the flowers fall but the Word of the Lord stands forever and this is the Word that was preached to you. (You can read that in the New Testament – First Peter chapter 1, verses 23 to 25)

The things that happen to us here on earth, they come and go – they are temporary but God’s Word stands forever. God’s Word is God speaking to us of His love and God and His Word are inseparable. How do we imagine we can ever be close to Him without listening to Him? We men would love to think that we can be close to our wives without listening to them. I once saw a cartoon – it was a drawing of a man’s ear, it had a hearing aid inside and there were two settings on the hearing aid – on and wife. But as any wife will tell you, there can be no intimacy without deep communication and that involves listening.

God’s principle means of speaking to you and speaking to me is through His Word the Bible, which stands forever. Leave that in the cupboard and we can forget about drawing close to God. Everything but is not close enough because God’s Word is not some transient thing like our feelings or our circumstances – it stands forever – it will never fail. It is the truth whether the world receives it or not.

So often you hear people quote this Scripture – they say ‘The truth will set you free’ and that’s written in John chapter 8, verse 32. But you know that’s only a half of what Jesus said and a half-truth is nothing more than a lie. The devil himself is very good at quoting God’s Word out of context and twisting it into a lie.

Now listen to the whole thing:

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. (John chapter 8, verse 32) 

In other words, in order for the truth to set you free, you have to know it.

A TRANSFORMED LIFE

My life has been utterly transformed by God and it goes on being transformed. And as I have often shared with people, the biggest thing that God ever set me free from was ‘me’ and that is something He is still doing today. Now I’d love to tell you that He did that because I took to heart what I shared with you in the programmes over the last few weeks. I know that you would love me to nudge you and wink my eye and whisper ‘Don’t worry about this programme – it doesn’t really matter – just stick to the first three and you’ll be right.’

I know that, but if I did that it would only be half a truth and that’s nothing more than a lie. You and I can’t be over here and leave the truth over there in a cupboard or on a shelf somewhere gathering dust and expect it somehow, mysteriously, to set us free. It just don’t work that way. To be completely honest with you, the time I have spent listening to the voice of God through the Word of God, has utterly transformed my life. It’s brought me near as He has written His Word, through His Spirit, on my heart. And what’s more, just like the time in prayer – in fact, as an integral part of those quiet times alone with Jesus, reading and meditating on His Word, is the great joy of my life – not a chore, but a joy and a delight.

It does not overstate the matter to say that unless I had spent time reading His Word over these last years, I simply would not have the intimate relationship with God that I enjoy today. And I fully expect that as the months and years roll on and I continue in this regular habit of reading and meditating on His Word, the intimacy of that relationship will grow ever richer and deeper until one day … one day I stand before Him and see Him in all His glory.

I’ll say it again – God’s gone to an enormous amount of trouble to preserve His love letter for you and me, here and now, today. That’s why ‘Oh, I’m just too busy to read the Bible’ is such a feeble excuse. You see how inappropriate that is? No wonder it feels like God is a million miles away! All the time He just wants to speak His promises into our hearts, to whisper His love into our ears, His grace into our lives and the one principle way that He has chosen to do that is through His love letter, the Bible. How can we be too busy?

God has brought us near through faith in Jesus Christ. He set up His home in us through His Holy Spirit – God is with us in every moment of every day, right through the cut and the thrust of life. He calls us to an intimate relationship with Him and God … God’s written a love letter to us; that love letter is called ‘The Bible’ and He would speak to us each and every day through His Word if only we would listen.

God is here in this place with you and me, right here, and through the cross of Christ He is crying out to you and me, “Come, come and be close.” You know it is so easy to get to the end of this series of programmes and be both excited and discouraged. Excited at the prospect of forging a new and intimate relationship with God; discouraged because, well, it all seems so daunting. ‘I mean this guy yabbering on the radio makes it sound so simple but all these years, God has seemed so far away.’

And it would be daunting if it was all up to us, but it isn’t because far from being some passive player, deep in His mighty heart, God yearns for you and for me. He yearns so deeply; so mightily that we cannot begin to comprehend how much He wants to be close to us. And all it takes is for us to take the first step – a step of faith to believe; a step of spending quiet time alone with Him; a step of immersing ourselves in His love letter to us.

Change is always daunting and no doubt the devil would sit on our shoulders and whisper words of doubt into our minds. He wants nothing less than to divert us from this pursuit of God – to set us off course so that we miss the mark.

But the prize; this intimate closeness with God is without peer. There is nothing like it on earth or in the heavens for that matter. When the Spirit of God fills us to overflowing; when we experience God for ourselves in His Word through His Spirit – oh, it leaves us utterly changed – longing for more.

Let’s not pretend that this is some chore, a chore of learning and dissecting and putting our understanding of God in neat little piles of theology. Don’t get me wrong, I am passionate about studying theology and I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to take a step down that path.

But right now I’m talking simply about drawing close to this infinite God – the God who is so vast and so deep and so wonderful and rich and loving and merciful and mysterious and knowable all at the same time, that His very nature defies any attempt for us to dissect Him into trite little sets of doctrines. I’m not talking about that – my prayer for you is that by faith, with the desire of the Spirit burning in your heart, that you would immerse yourself in God Himself. That this oneness that Jesus talked about so much; this intimacy that He purchased for you and me on the cross, would be something that you desire with every fibre of your being.

And that as the days and the weeks and the months and the years roll by, you would know the great delight of looking back on those times and seeing how God has honoured your desire and your faltering first steps.

You know the wonderful thing about God? He’s not looking for perfection in us today. We look and judge people on the outside but God … God looks on our hearts and as He looks on our hearts today, yours and mine, may He see a spark of desire that He Himself will fan into a raging fire by His Spirit.

May you know your God more deeply than you ever thought was possible, by the grace of Jesus Christ!