Life Hacks (Part 9): Connecting With God

Good morning, welcome.

I want to just take a moment to highlight the November 11th event.

You've heard a little bit about that.

This is one of the few things during the year that we really say to anybody who says, This is my church home, make this a priority to come to, to be a part of.

And if you're newer to Orchard Hill or saying, I'm not really sure where I am, this would be a great way to learn about the church.

And you may be saying, well, wait a second, it's year-end giving event.

I don't want to give anything, so I don't want to come.

It's okay to come with that as your initial mindset or permanent mindset to the event because this is much more than just a year-end giving event.

Our history is that we every year have an event toward the end of the year where we basically celebrate what God has done in the last year and then talk about what's ahead.

And several people use that as an opportunity to say between then and the end of the year what they could maybe do to help fund future ministry.

But even if you say, you know what, I don't really want to be part of that, to come and be a part of what is happening for the church would be just a great thing.

We have three locations, seven different services every weekend, and this is the one time where we all come together, and the night at the science center will be fun.

We've made it so that it's cheaper than to go on your own to the science center.

Uh there's some cost, but it's way cheaper than if you go.

There will be a 45-minute presentation, and then just some great things.

Now, you may be asking the question well, what is the project didn't we give last year to a project, this old house, and what happened with all of that?

And that's a great question.

If you're in the strip district, that money uh went partly to budget support, but then mostly to the renovation of St.

Elizabeth's Church or the old altar bar that will become Orchard Hill Strip District.

That's pretty clear, straightforward project.

Uh any money this year goes to that um and still will need lots of money if things go well.

Uh we're hoping that that'll open in January, February, March, April, May, June.

So somewhere next year, that will open.

We're excited for that.

If you're in Butler County, uh money that was given last year for this old house uh went into an account.

Some of it was used on the transition from Penn Christian Academy into the the new location.

Uh most of that's still sitting in an account for a future location.

If you're here in Wexford, uh you gave money uh for an auditorium kind of refresh and redo, and you may say, nothing's happened.

And you are right, that money is all still sitting in an account, has not been been utilized because as our team went to work on what would be involved in this, they decided that rather than doing this in some pieces, in other words, do a piece, then do a piece, then do a piece, that they wanted to try to do it all in one shot.

And what that'll mean is there'll be a time if uh if the money is available where next year we'll be shutting down this space and working to renovate and update and and bring up to kind of current time some of that.

So so all of the money that was given last year is still there, and this will be part of the project in the end of the year, is what we're looking at uh kind of to do in this space.

And so uh so I hope that you will make November 11th a priority if uh if this is your church home.

Let's take a moment and pray together.

Father, uh, as we come together this morning, I pray that you would let your word speak to each of us, that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, how do you connect with God?

Like personally, what is it that that helps you make a deep connection with God?

In our culture, the way that question is answered is continually evolving.

And what I mean by that is people now will say things like, well, I maybe connect with God by going for a walk in nature.

I feel closest to God when I'm on my boat, or I feel closest to God when I'm just thinking thoughts or talking with friends or serving somebody.

And those are all ways that you may feel close to God.

But what's happened in our culture on a whole is that people have have unhitched the notion of connecting with God from any kind of formal religion or church.

And that's certainly understandable in many ways.

In fact, it's become so common for people to unhitch these two that the predominant notion is I don't need any kind of religion in order to be spiritual.

I can be spiritual without being religious.

And again, I understand that impulse.

In fact, I think this has become so strong in our culture today that often when I'm in a social setting and somebody says, What do you do for a living?

I'll I'll give a different answer.

Instead of saying I'm a pastor, because when you say you're a pastor, people are like, Where's the snack bar?

And they just kind of like like leave quickly, I'll say I'm a spiritual guide.

And people will be like, Really?

Tell me about that.

Because they're intrigued.

And and and they're always interested in like, how do you make a living as a spiritual guide?

And I'll tell them, you know, we have several thousand clients and things, and nobody has to pay anything, and they're like, What?

How does that work?

And and and and everything.

And and I find that people are interested in spiritual things as long as it's not tied to religion.

So the question is, how do we actually connect to God?

In fact, some would go so far as to say, I don't even need any religious connection.

I don't need anything.

Well, the book of James is a book that deals with wisdom for life, especially spiritual wisdom.

And James is written, because of the way it starts, to people who are of faith.

And what that means is when you begin James, he says, to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations, and then he says, consider it pure joy, my brothers.

Brothers was a technical term for people who believed.

In other words, James is written to people who had already come to faith.

And then when we come to James 4, verses 7 through 10, that you heard read just a moment ago, that these verses I think show us how to connect with God for those who are already of faith.

James 4:7–10

And here's what this means is if you try to detach your connection to God from Jesus Christ from faith, at least in part what you're doing is you're saying, I'll just decide on my own version of God.

In fact, how a lot of people process this is they'll say something along the lines of, well, my God isn't like that, or the kind of God that I believe in is like this.

And then they will create their own version of God.

Now, the reason this is significant is John chapter 14, verse 6 says that uh where Jesus is talking, he says, No one can come to the Father except by me.

John 14:6

What he's doing in part is he's saying, if you want to know the real God, it is part and parcel of knowing Jesus Christ.

That those two can't be completely detached.

Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't a number of ways that you can experience Jesus Christ, but but it means that that part of coming to the real God is coming to understand who Jesus is, what he's done, and embracing that God.

But once that's true in your life, it's still possible that you go through seasons where you say, I don't feel God, I don't sense God, God seems far away, God seems remote.

In fact, I would guess that many of us would say, you know, there used to be a time when I felt close to God.

When I would go to worship and the songs all seemed to have meaning, when every message felt like it was targeted to me, when I had joy in being part of a group, and now I hear the same people telling the same stories over and over again, and it just doesn't move me the way it once did.

Or I used to be excited to serve.

I I used to long to read my Bible, and now it's just kind of like, eh, there it is.

Well, I think James has something to say, and what I'd like to do today is address that feeling for somebody who says, I do believe in Jesus, but God feels remote, feels distant from me.

But by the way, I'm not going to try to unpack this idea of Jesus being the only way to God that I just mentioned.

We did a series in the summer called Off the Cuff.

And there was a message, I think it was June this last year, that our staff did, uh, Joel did here and did in different places to talk about what that means.

And you can go back and listen to that.

But here's what I'd like to like to say.

I I think this passage has three keys to feeling or to connecting with God.

And I want to express these as kind of a Venn diagram.

If you've ever seen one of these, you know that this is the kind of classic idea that these three things intersect, and where they intersect is where you actually find the truest sense of how these things work together.

And here's the first part of this, the first key.

I'm just going to say it's surrender, and this is in verse 7 of James chapter 4.

James 4 · chapter mention

And the reason I say this is because here's how James 4 states it.

It says, Submit yourselves then to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Now, I I just talked about how our culture wants to unhitch in many ways God, the concept of God, from any kind of revealed text or any kind of standard definition and say, I like to think of God like this, or the God that I believe in is like this.

But what is required if we actually want to connect with the real God is that we submit to or surrender to the God who is.

And what that means is that we're willing to grant God to be God on God's terms, rather than saying, the only God that I'll believe in is a God that I define the way that I want to define.

In fact, I would go so far as to say, if the only God that you'll believe in is the God that you will define the way that you like, then that isn't actually God you're relating to, but some kind of a version of God that has become more palpable to you or more acceptable to you than the God that is.

And I would also say that one of the ways that we answer kind of that objection is to say to somebody, tell me about the God you don't believe in.

Because a lot of times the God that people say they don't believe in is not the God of the Bible.

Let me give you an example.

Just recently, Katy Perry uh made another statement about her religious upbringing.

If you're not familiar with Katy Perry, good for you.

Um but um Katy Perry is a pop singer, and uh I think you'd call her music pop.

I'm not sure what you'd classify it as, but but she, when she first started to sing, made a Christian album, an album that was full of songs about God, and then has since uh kind of gone to a place where she would say she doesn't believe in the same kind of God that she once believed in.

Here's what she said just not too long ago.

She said, You may or may not have heard that I come from a Bible-thumping background that wasn't particularly accepting of curiosity.

I wasn't allowed to eat lucky charms.

Luck was considered too closely associated with Lucifer, which is obvious.

Or to watch the Smurfs because they were magical blue demons.

Now, the reason that I read this is listen to what she's rejecting.

What she's rejecting is a version of Christianity that says, what, lucky charms are bad?

Now, lucky charms are a horrible cereal, right?

But but but there's nothing spiritually wrong with eating lucky charms.

For me, I don't eat lucky charms because if I'm gonna eat that much like sugar, I'm gonna make it good, not that.

But for Katie Perry, she's saying, This is the God that I'm running from, a God who would tell me not to eat lucky charms or watch the Smurfs, and listen to this.

I may not have known it then, but doing uh good, but doing uh and asking these questions to redefine right and wrong when everybody else around me spoke in absolute truth was my first attempt at a courageous life.

Do you hear what she's saying?

She's saying, here's how I became courageous.

I challenged what was wrong.

Or I redefined right and wrong.

I made my own version of God.

Now, she was rejecting probably a God that I would also reject, a God who says, don't eat lucky charms or watch the smurfs and has all of this.

But then what she did is she took another step and said, the only right and wrong is the right and wrong that I see.

There is no other right and wrong.

And here's what it means to surrender to God.

And why I say this is part of connecting to the real God is it means that on some level, you and I are willing to say, God, whatever you send, I'll accept.

And God, whatever you ask, I will do.

See, anything short of that is not surrendering to God, it's not submitting to God.

What we're doing instead at that point is we're saying, God, I'll surrender to you, I'll accept what you give as long as I like it, I'll do what you want as long as I approve of it, rather than saying, God, you are free to cross my will.

Lee Strobel interviewed Hugh Hefner a few years ago before Hugh Hefner died.

Lee Strobel was an investigative journalist with the Chicago Tribune for years, and he set out to disprove Christianity because his wife had become a Christian.

And in the process of doing his investigation, he came to say, I now believe that Jesus really is God, that the resurrection is credible.

And since then, he's made kind of a career of writing things that you'd call apologetic or about the faith.

And so he was curious about Hugh Hefner.

So he went to the Playboy mansion to interview Hugh Hefner before his death.

And here's what he said afterward: he said, I came away with the understanding that Hugh Hefner had a minimal belief in a minimal God who would offer a minimal barrier to the life that he really wanted to live.

In other words, Hugh Hefner said, I'm gonna define God the way I want, I'm not gonna surrender to the real God because that doesn't fit my life.

See, there's no real relationship with a real God that doesn't include obedience to his divinity.

Being willing to say, God, I'll accept what you send, God, I'll obey what you command.

I'll do whatever you ask.

And if your version of God never crosses your will, it's probably not actually God.

And it probably isn't rooted in the historic text of the Bible, because there are things in the Bible that will cross any of our wills at one time or another.

So that's the first element.

Here's a second key.

I'm just going to call this nearness.

And oh, by the way, just before I do, it says there, resist the devil and he will flee from you.

I'm not going to go into this because it would take us in a whole nother direction about Satan or the devil.

But the implication is that there's a choice here: surrendering to God or giving in to the devil.

In other words, either saying I'm going to live life my own way, or I'm going to surrender to God.

So surrender is a key.

Then there's nearness.

And the reason I say nearness is because verse 8 begins with this little phrase, come near to God or draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Some versions say draw, some say come near.

But the idea here is that as you come and acknowledge and get close to God, that then you experience closeness with God.

Now some people will hear that and they'll say, doesn't God draw people to himself?

And doesn't this preclude this notion of saying you do something?

But notice what James does here.

He does not apologize.

In fact, this is in the imperative voice in the Greek language, meaning it's a command.

He says, draw near to God.

I want you to go about making yourself somebody who has proximity to the things of God.

And so what some of us might do is we might say, well, since God draws, then there's nothing incumbent on me.

But that's about salvation here.

This is talking about our personal experience and that the way that you come to experience God is to put yourself in a place where you're near to Him.

And He says this without any apology and with a clear invitation to say, if you want to know God, if you want to encounter Him, then draw close.

Now again, this is where we come back to how do we draw close?

Because some of us will say, well, I do feel closer to God on the boat than I do at church.

Like I get that.

And so you might say, well, well, then do I go on my boat every weekend instead of coming to church?

Is that part of how this works?

Well, here's what I would say.

Well, one, the Bible actually commands people to not forsake the assembly.

Hebrews 10, 25.

Somebody asked me this question after last night's message, and it was a great question.

Isn't church part of this and being part of a church?

See, I don't think you can surrender to God entirely when it says, I'll do whatever he asks, and say church is just optional.

Because to not forsake the assembly doesn't mean I just get together with two or three of my friends.

The assembly was a word that had the connotation of a gathered group in a community that had been structured.

So, so I don't think that saying, hey, you might feel closer to God in other places is a reason not to, but here's what's what's really clear about drawing near to God, and I see this in John 15, and that is the way that we we draw near to God has to on some level be tied to his word.

John chapter 15, verse 7 says it this way: if you remain in me and my words remain in you, then you can ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.

John 15:7

What he's talking about here is intimacy of relationship.

He's saying, if you're so saturated with my words, with my truth, then even the things that you ask will be things that are so in accord with my direction that it will be done.

You see, sometimes what we want to do is we want to say, Well, I draw near to God in all kinds of ways, and there are certainly a myriad of ways, worship and solitude and disciplines, but but what's true is that all of those need a content that's driven by the revealed word of God, and so there's an effort required, an intentionality that's required.

Now you may say, Well, I don't want to work at it that hard.

God should just be part of kind of my experience.

But you know this from your life that that you actually put effort into things that are worthwhile.

Just think about dating and marriage.

If you're married or have been married, when you start to date somebody, and maybe if you're single, the the analogy would just be a friendship.

When you first make a friend or you first start to date somebody, it is really easy to spend time together and to be excited and to feel intimacy because you're spending time together.

What happens is you you start spending time together and you can't get enough, so you just keep on finding ways to spend time together.

And then what happens?

You get married, right?

And or or or or your friendship evolves.

That that was a joke, by the way.

Um, thank you.

Thank you for the courtesy laugh.

Um and what happens when you get married is the intimacy changes.

It's still there, especially if the relationship is good.

But what you find is over time, if you don't work at it, you don't have the same emotion that you had when you started dating.

And when we come to re our faith and our relationship with God, what some of us do is we say, I want the emotion that I once had, but I'm not willing to put in the work on the backside because it should just happen.

Therefore, God must be distant, God must be far.

But but what is happening here in James is he's saying, if you really want to encounter God, it requires that you surrender to God.

Whatever you send, I'll accept, whatever you ask, I'll do, and that you intentionally pursue nearness to God.

And then we see a third kind of key, which I think is probably the most challenging.

And I'm going to call this innocence.

And I see this in verses 8, the end of verse 8 through verse 10.

And the reason I use the word innocence is because these verses give some very clear instruction, but if you're aware of any Old Testament imagery, this is speaking about repentance.

Now, this is not talking about sinlessness, but repentance, innocence.

Here's what we see.

Wash your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded.

This was language of ritual purity from the Old Testament.

So he says, Purify your hands, symbolizing the idea of your outer life, and he says, and then purify your hearts, symbolizing the idea of your inner life, is what he's saying.

Grieve and mourn, wail, change your laughter to mourning, your joy to gloom.

These were images used in the Old Testament of people coming in repentance before a holy God and saying, God, I am coming, understanding that I do not live up to your standards.

Verse 10.

Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will lift you up.

Now, again, sometimes this is challenging, especially when people develop some theological categories, because what they'll say is, Aren't I forgiven for all of my past sin, present sin, and future sin if I come to Jesus Christ?

And isn't that the good news of what is true in the Bible?

And the answer is absolutely.

If you come to Jesus Christ, he becomes the substitute.

He pays the price for your sin, meaning all future sin is already forgiven.

And so you could hear that and say, well, therefore I don't need to actually repent of any future sin because it's already been forgiven.

But that's referring to a legal standing.

Because when the Bible talks about what Jesus did, it's referring to a legal standing, often referred to as justification.

It's dealing with the idea of the atonement, what Jesus Christ did, and justified means to be declared right.

The atonement means Christ paying for something.

But our actual experience is still tied to actual repentance, to innocence, to coming before God and acknowledging that we do not live lives that are completely right.

Now, clearly it is good to live in such a way that you don't have to constantly repent of everything.

But here's what happens: if you begin to actually encounter God and you surrender fully to him and you draw near to him, you'll actually start seeing more and more ways that you need to repent.

This is true of the Apostle Paul.

What does he say in Romans?

He says, I'm the chief of sinners.

I do the things that I don't want to do, not past tense, present tense.

This was after his conversion, after his growth, after his ministry, after years of walking with God.

He says, I still don't do what I want to do.

And here's why.

Because as you start to mature in your faith, what you will do is your definition of sin will actually become more robust, not less robust.

And what that means is you won't just simply say, God, I have to repent for the things that I didn't do that were wrong or I did that were wrong, didn't do that were right, but but I realize that even my motives, even the way that I approach things, the thoughts that I think are often not right.

In other words, sometimes you even have to repent of the right things that we do because we do them with selfish or ulterior motives.

There's a prayer that somebody prayed years ago.

It goes like this.

So far today, God, I've done all right.

I haven't gossiped, I haven't lost my temper, I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent.

I'm really glad about that.

But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed.

And from then on, I'm going to need a lot more help.

You see, the more we understand what God calls us to, the more we'll actually put ourselves in a place where we say, God, I need to come to you and acknowledge that there's something here that hasn't been right.

And so we're talking here about innocence, not sinlessness, innocence by coming to God and saying, God, I come to you with where I have come short.

And here's what happens for many of us, and that is, we'll try to avoid this.

And I speak from experience.

Repentance is not easy because it takes us from laughter to mourning, from joy to sadness, and we don't want that.

We want God to always be giving us a your awesome kind of moment.

And sometimes we need to come if we want to encounter the real God to repentance, and so we we try to avoid it.

In Psalm 32, there's some ways that we try to avoid it.

Here's what we read in Psalm 32 Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven.

In other words, if you want to experience real blessedness, happiness in life, it means that you'll come to a point where you say, My transgressions are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them, and in whose spirit is no deceit.

But then here are some of the ways we try to avoid repentance.

Verse 3, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away, though, or through my groaning all day long.

You see, what some of us will do is we'll deny our need for repentance.

We'll assume that God has no standard and therefore we'll keep silent, meaning we just say, I have nothing to repent of.

I have no need to come before God in order to have a restored innocence.

Some of us, what we'll do is in verse 5, and that is we'll try to conceal our sin.

Verse 5, then I acknowledge my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity.

I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

See, what some of us will do is we'll assume that if we don't deal with our sin, God won't see it and it won't be an issue.

And so sometimes we deny it.

We say, I didn't do anything wrong.

God doesn't have a standard, or I don't like God's standard, therefore I try to avoid it, or we'll try to conceal it and act like it didn't happen.

Or we'll delay.

Verse 6 says this, therefore, let all the faithful pray to you while you may be found.

And what this is indicating is that there is coming a day when God, instead of saying, come whenever, however, will actually say, I'm no longer able to be found.

And here's what happens when we deny or conceal or delay dealing with our sin.

What happens is our heart becomes just a little harder, and as our heart becomes a little bit harder, we become more emboldened in wickedness, things that are counter to the things of God, and we become less willing to be a recipient of grace.

Because we start to say, I want to do life my own way, and then we say, I don't know where God is.

And this all actually goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden with the lie that Satan first tried to perpetuate, and that is the way that you will be most happy is by choosing life on your own terms, your own way.

That was the whole issue of the fruit in the garden.

Choose for yourself rather than surrendering to God, drawing near to God, and having your innocence restored through what Christ has done in a legal, long-term sense, but also in a temporal, experiential sense, where you say, God, I come to you in this.

Well, let me just give you an example.

In James, there are a lot of different sins or things you could look at.

One of them is in James 3, he talks about the sins of the tongue.

And if we could just agree for a moment that gossip is a sin of the tongue.

So, in other words, to run somebody down who isn't present, to say things that are unkind, untrue maybe, maybe true, maybe untrue, but but just to run somebody down.

So here's what can happen when it comes to denying and delaying and concealing is you can say, oh, that wasn't really that bad.

I was just sharing a concern.

Do you see the denial?

I'm not going to let God name that as gossip because I don't want to deal with that.

Or we conceal it.

We say, well, it wasn't that big a deal.

Or we say, you know what, maybe that wasn't so great, but I'll deal with it down the road.

God will forgive me in the future.

And in each instance, what we're doing is we're letting our heart get just a little harder.

We're becoming more emboldened to say, I'm going to continue to practice this.

And it ends up taking us into what you see here in Psalm 32, which is a person whose bones are wasting away.

And this is a metaphor here, I believe.

Maybe it was literal in this instance, but it's referring to the consequences, the price that we pay when we run from God.

And then we end up saying, I don't know where God is, and my life is unraveling.

There's one other way that we try to avoid this.

This is Psalm 51, which was another confession psalm, like Psalm 32, verse 16 and 17.

It says, You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it.

You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.

You, God, will not despise.

And one of the ways I think we try to avoid repentance is by penance.

I think that's what's in view here in verse 16 when he says, I would bring a sacrifice, a burnt offering.

And what penance is, is it's when we try to say, I will take my bad self and make it a good self, and as soon as it's good enough, then God will be pleased.

Now, you may hear that and say, well, isn't it good, and isn't repentance mean not just weeping and wailing, but correcting and changing and turning and going the other direction?

Yes.

But what penance does is penance basically says, the way that I am going to make myself right with God is by correcting my behavior on my own.

Then I'll present myself to God.

And it's the opposite of repentance in this sense.

Repentance means I come and say, I don't have anything to offer.

I blew it again.

I'm in the same place in God.

If it weren't for what Jesus Christ has done, I would be completely without hope.

And you see, what we do sometimes is we choose penance because we don't actually have to go to God in repentance.

We don't actually have to deal with Jesus.

We can just simply say, I go and pledge to do better, and in pledging to do better, I actually miss experiencing God.

Because what I'm doing is I'm asserting that I'll try better and I'm not actually encountering real innocence.

Now, here's why this is so important is without innocence, without not sinlessness, innocence declared given by Jesus, what will happen is we will consistently encounter kind of a lesser version of God.

Now God is gracious.

Sometimes He'll reveal Himself in pieces, even when we haven't surrendered, we're not near, we we aren't innocent.

I'm not saying God will never, but what I'm saying is your encounter with God will always be frustrating.

That's what Psalm 32 is saying.

If you don't bring these elements together, these keys.

Now, some of you are probably sitting here right now, and what you're saying is, you know what, I've done all these things.

And yet God still feels remote, still seems distant, still seems far removed from my day-to-day life.

And I understand that, and that may well be true.

But let me just ask you a couple questions.

If that's you.

Have you really surrendered and said to God, whatever you ask, I'll do?

There's nothing that once I'm convinced that you have revealed it in your word, that I will withhold.

And there's nothing that you send that I will not accept?

Have you really practiced pursuing God in nearness?

Do you come to worship with a sense of anticipation rather than a, I hope they sing these songs, or I can't believe they sung those songs?

Do you come with an anticipation of what will happen from the text each week, not saying, boy, I hope that somebody tells a funny tear-moving story so that I can engage fully?

Do you go to a group or a study with a mindset that says, I want to see and celebrate God and the people that He's placed around me, or do you go just saying, I crossed it off my list as another activity along the way?

And then when's the last time that you really repented?

That you really took stock of the places in your life that are not in line with what God has revealed and brought them to God and said, I'm gonna purify my hands, I'm gonna purify my heart before you.

You see, it might be that the reason God seems distant is because you have not been in a place to relate to him.

Now it's also possible that you have been in a place where you say, you know, to the best of my understanding, the best of my ability, I've done these things, and God still seems distant.

And certainly there are psalms that that indicate that there are times that we may go through seasons like that in our lives, where God seems remote, seems distant.

And if you find yourself in one of those seasons, the the challenge is to say, I'm going to continue to surrender, I'm going to continue to draw near, I'm going to continue to confess and repent, so that I find myself in a place where I can actually encounter the God of the Bible.

You know, sometimes what will happen is you will seek God and feel like God is not close, not nearby.

But sometimes I think that's God's way of actually deepening our sense of real trust and faith.

If you have a young child or an aunt or an uncle to a young child or something, and you say to the young child, hey, I'm going to go away for a while, and then I'm going to come back, and when I come back, I'm going to do this with you.

It's much harder for that child to have faith in your character when you're gone and you're absent and they don't see you than if you're sitting in the next room and they can come and check in with you every few minutes and say, Hey, when are we going to do the fun thing that you promised?

And you keep assuring them.

But their faith actually grows as they mature in your character to say, I can trust them even when I can't see them.

And so sometimes God's seeming absence to us is his way of helping us actually draw closer to who he is and what he may have for us.

Now, here's just the the last thing, and that is you may be here and you may be saying, okay, it sounds really hard to connect with God.

Like, I just want to get on my boat and connect with God.

I just want to go for a walk and connect with God.

I want to deal with all of this.

And my God is the kind that I can just connect with on a boat.

Do you hear how that goes?

Let me just encourage you to say that this passage and its context goes back to verse 4 of James 4, where he says, You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

And if you were here last week, we talked about this image.

And my take is that it wasn't God saying, you adulterous people, it's God saying, you adulterous people, you're seeking so many things to satisfy your soul.

But I'm here and I'm the jilted lover because if you would come back to me, you would find what it is you're really looking for.

You see, if you're a person who says, I'm of faith, I'm not of faith, but but I'm trying to get my satisfaction from all the things of the world, and God seems like an impediment to it.

What you're missing is that God is actually the place where you will find your deepest fulfillment.

You see, all the things in the world, and this is why friendship with the world is enmity with God, it was never designed to carry the weight of your soul.

All the stuff of this world was never designed for that.

And to the degree that you and I say, that's my hope, that's where I try to get it, we will not find our satisfaction in God.

And we'll live with a sense of disappointment about the way that God relates to us or we feel connected to Him.

But He invites us.

He says, Come, submit to me, surrender, draw near to me, I'll draw near to you.

Find and plead the innocence, and you will encounter me.

Humble yourself and I will give you favor.

I will lift you up.

That's what he says.

And it's your invitation and it's mine.

Father, help me, help each of us here today to not just simply wish for a deeper connection with you, but to encounter it because of the beautiful invitation that you give us.

Father, for some, maybe this is a moment of just saying, I've always thought I could just kind of connect to God that I imagine, but maybe even in these moments there's just a realization that the real God is a God who might cross their will.

And in that, God, I just ask that that even in this moment there would be a willingness to acknowledge and bend a knee to who Jesus is and receive the gift of salvation and life.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We're going to sing a song in response.

So would you stand and join?