When God Draws Near

James chapter 4 verse 8, "Come near to God and He will come near to you."
And that's what I want to talk about with you this morning.
What does it look like when God draws near?
What can we reasonably expect will be our experience
as we humble ourselves before God, come to Him in repentance and in faith in Christ.
And God comes to meet us.
What will that look like?
And I want to introduce that subject this morning by playing you a little bit of an extended video clip
of Mary Jo's video clip that you saw last week at the All-Church Celebration Event.
And I do that not to puff up Mary Jo, but to hold her up as a model
of what it is to struggle to draw near to God.
I think I can say without exaggeration that I have known few people in my life
who have had to fight harder to draw near to God
and have God draw near to her in the deep places of her heart that has Mary Jo.
She could have walked away from God, she could have walked away from this church
any number of times over more recent years.
The fact that she didn't is a testimony to God's holding on to her and her persistence.
And I want to share the story with you in a very abbreviated form
to be an encouragement for the rest of us as we wonder sometimes God.
Where are you? Take a look at this.
I listen to stories of people stand up here just like I am tonight and say the Lord
has finally shown up for me.
And I would say to myself, I'd make a list, okay, she did this.
She did that, then she did that, and then she did that.
So I'm going to do that.
And in that, what I was doing was trying to manipulate God.
I was trying to manipulate circumstance.
And I was trying basically to be the executive of God and have him be one of my employees.
I wanted him to serve me.
He read me the verse and he read it this way.
I will give you a new heart.
I will remove from you a heart of stone.
Not I will give you the tools to make a new heart.
You're going to have to wait.
And I will change your heart in my time and in my way.
I had a feeling in the middle of the sermon that I needed to kneel at the foot of the cross.
I said to him, "You have got to be joking.
I will not kneel at the cross, especially at the cross in this church,
not in front of these people no way.
I don't care who you are.
You're not telling me to do that."
And what I heard the Lord saying to me there was,
"Come to the cross, kneel and beg for mercy.
Find me there.
I wait for you to come."
So I had a choice there.
First of all, to beg for mercy from a God who you're so angry at
and who you've blamed for years and years of pain.
And then secondly, for him to say, "You have a choice.
You can come up and meet me here or you can stay down there,
but I'm not coming to get you."
Lord, I have tried everything.
I have tried my plan.
I have tried my way.
I have tried to do everything right and still you don't come.
So if you tell me to kneel at this cross in this church
at the feet of your son that I'm so angry at right now,
then I will.
When I got to the cross, everything broke.
I buckled and I broke and I folded onto the floor
and cried a deep, deep cry to a God who I desperately needed.
Would I follow him when it felt like it was exactly him
that was the source of my pain?
So in those moments at the cross, the Lord revealed to me
stuff about myself that I never knew.
And in the following days, he confirmed in the weirdest,
most miraculous, supernatural ways that it wasn't my imagination.
It wasn't something that I conjured up because I was at the foot
of the cross and all of that kind of stuff.
He revealed to me why my journey was the way it was.
Later on, this morning in the course of the message,
I'll fill you in on some of the specifics of what it was
that the Lord showed her when she was at the foot of the cross.
We often ask ourselves the question, "Lord, why does it take so long?"
Well, partly because the Lord wants to bring us to that place
of utter surrender and utter humility before his face
so that he can meet us in his grace.
The promise is that if we ask, we will receive.
If we seek, we will find and if we knock, the door will be opened.
Draw near to me and I will draw near to you
is the promise of Scripture.
So let's go back to the question then.
What does it look like?
What can we reasonably expect will happen
when in repentance and faith I buckle
in Mary Joe's words at the foot of the cross
and God finally comes and he meets me?
Well, first of all, it means that he manifests
his presence.
It was Moses back in Exodus chapter 33
engaged in a vigorous discussion with the Lord
who said to the Lord, "If your presence does not go with us,
do not send us from here. How will anyone know that you were pleased with me
and with your people unless you go with us?
What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people
on the face of the earth, all through Scripture?"
The outstanding characteristic of God's people
and God's promise to His people
is that they will know His presence
in a unique and real way.
Now, the presence of God is a very interesting thing
because on the one hand, God is everywhere present
in all of the universe. The Psalmist talks about that
in the verse with which we again are serviced today.
Where can I go from your spirit Psalm 139?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there.
If I make my bed in the depths or in sheol
or the place of the grave, you are there.
God is everywhere present,
theologically that is known as the Omnipresence of God.
Very scary idea for a lot of people
if you're trying to hide from God.
Very encouraging for God's people
because it means that we cannot go anywhere
but God has His eye upon us.
But in addition to sort of the everywhere generic presence of God,
the Bible also talks about a thing that some people call
the manifest presence of God.
This is the unique way in which God pulls back the veil
between Himself and His children
and shows His presence uniquely to His children.
Scripture talks about that in John chapter 14
when Jesus says, "He who loves me will be loved by my Father."
And I too will love Him.
Now notice the next words,
"And show myself or manifest in other translations,
manifest myself to Him."
And then Judas, not Judas Iscariot said,
"But Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us
and not to the world?"
And then 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."
Author Scripture from the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis
to the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation,
you have God trying to take up His presence
among His people.
And God delights in pulling back the veil
and in manifesting Himself to us.
Now here's what I want to understand about that.
How we experience the manifest presence of God
is going to vary immensely from individual to individual.
For Mary Jo, when she buckled at the foot of the cross
and I so well remember the Sunday morning
when she was lying there in anguish and in pain,
God showed up by speaking deep into her heart
and revealing the underlying causes
of her lifelong condition.
I'll talk more about that in a little while.
For some people experiencing the presence of God
takes the form of a physical experience.
People often talk about a sense of electric power
running through their bodies.
For other people it can be an emotional high.
For some people it's none of the above.
It is simply a deep and abiding sands
of God's presence deep in their spirit.
In my own life when I look back over the years
I don't think I've ever had a physical experience
of God's presence.
The closest I got to what I think was sort of
an electric charge last week
at the Altchurch celebration when those numbers rolled
on the screen and you know the place broke out in Mayhem.
That was kind of a shivering moment for me.
Nor heck can I say that I've had a lot of emotional
experiences with God.
But I've had quite a number of instances
where deep in my spirit I knew that God was there.
Not always but those moments when you know
that God's there, that He loves you
and that you're moving in the tide of His spirit.
Now that will vary for each one of us.
In fact I have a little bit of a theory about it
and I want to bounce that off you and you can see
if maybe that is accurate or not.
It seems to me that in the early phases
of our Christian life and Christian experience,
particularly if we have been deeply lost in sin
or deeply entrenched in the world or under Satan's power
when God is still very much trying to convince us
that He is real and that He is powerful.
That's when we have those big spiritual experiences
where we know that God is who He says that He is
and we can let go of everything that we're holding on
on to follow Him and to serve Him.
And then as we mature in the Christian life,
those kinds of exhilarating experiences,
they may still come occasionally,
but generally speaking they become less and less
and there is more sort of that deep sense of knowing,
God's here and all's well with me and all's well with the world.
It's a little bit like the difference
between a young couple newly in love
and older people who have been married for a long time.
The younger couple, filled with passion,
filled with enthusiasm, always writing love notes
to each other, they can't be apart from each other
for more than 30 seconds before they have to connect
with each other and a love that is exuberant
and filled with passion, older couple, more comfortable,
less passionate and yet who loves the more?
Well you can't compare because they're two different settings.
An old couple, deeply committed to each other,
deeply comfortable with each other,
can be just as much in tune with each other,
just as much in love with each other.
Then a younger couple that is filled with much more life
and much more passion.
Now I tell you that this morning
because when you're part of a church like this,
where we talk a lot about the presence of God
among us and within us.
And when you hear stories like Mary Jo's story
and a lot of other stories,
it's very easy to start comparing.
It's very easy to say, you know,
I'm glad they had that experience.
I'm glad they can tell about it.
But look at my own life and I've never experienced anything
like that and it's only a little hopskipping a jump
from there to, am I really a Christian?
Am I as good as they are?
What does the matter with me?
And it's always healthy to examine our faith.
It's always healthy to say, Lord,
am I in the place where I need to be?
But it's not healthy to stay there
and to dwell upon comparisons.
Because if we have repented of our sins,
if we have earnestly surrendered as much as we know how
to surrender to Jesus, then by faith in Him
where every bit is much the children of God
has anybody and everybody else.
And though experiences may vary in our own lives
and in the lives of other people,
that is not the measure of our spirituality.
The measure of our spirituality is always faith in Jesus
and it is through Him that with courage and with boldness,
we can come into the presence of God.
Am I making sense here?
Your experience will not be somebody else's experience.
You're different.
Your personality is different.
Your history is different.
Your needs are different.
Thank God for what He gives you.
Put it all on the altar and say, Lord, I want to serve you
with everything that is within me.
So what does it look like when God draws near?
He manifests His presence and then, of course,
He heals our broken places.
Psalm 34-18, the Lord is close to the broken hearted
and serves the saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 147-3, He heals the broken hearted
and binds up to their wounds.
One of the consequences of seed and separation from God
and one of the consequences of separation from God
is that we all encounter the pulling down power
of what the Bible calls death.
The day that you eat there of,
God said to Adam and Eve in the garden,
speaking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
the day that you eat there of, you will surely die.
And death takes many dimensions.
Spiritually, it means we are separated from God.
We don't connect with Him.
We don't hear from Him.
We don't experience Him.
We get lost.
We listen to other voices.
We are like a radio tune to the wrong station.
Emotionally, it means that we get confused in our thinking.
We buy the lie.
We reject the truth.
We wander away and become subject to deception.
And then of course, physically,
it means that ultimately we spiral down into disease
and ultimately death.
The day that you eat there of, you will surely die.
And for Mary Jo, it took the form of a life long,
debilitating depression that would often incapacitate her
to the point where she could hardly move,
a depression that she sought to often resolve
through unhealthy relationships
which inevitably led to more pain and more rejection.
And at the core of her soul, there was a hunger
that no human being could fully meet
or bring to life and satisfy.
And for as many people as there are here,
there will be just as many stories of places
where sin has done its damage
and where the enemy has tried to rob us of life.
Now as you know, the good news of the gospel, of course,
is that God is life.
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.
And so all through scripture,
when God draws near to His people,
when God shows up, there is a release of life.
And I would argue biblically that restoration and healing
is one of the signs of the coming of the kingdom.
I say that because when John the Baptist was in jail
and was having serious questions about Jesus
and sent His disciples to ask Him the question,
are you the one that we were expecting or should we be looking
for another?
Do you remember the answer that Jesus gave to the disciples?
He said this, go back and report to John
what you hear and see.
The blind received sight, the lame walk.
Those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf here,
the dead are raised and good news is preached to the poor.
Blessed is the man who does not fall away
on account of me.
All through history, when God draws near,
whether that is in revival,
whether that is on an individual or a collective level,
there is almost inevitably an outburst of life
and healing and restoration.
It's one of the characteristics of God's people
that new life ought to be happening all the time.
Now does that mean Christians never get sick and die?
Does that mean every disease can be healed in the here and now?
While different people of different theories about that,
I don't believe that to be the case.
I believe we still live in the already but not yet era.
We still live in a world that is fallen
and that is a place of sin and eventually we must all die
and nobody is going to escape that unless Jesus comes first.
But I do believe the Scripture teaches
that in the places of our brokenness,
God will do one of two things
so that we can fulfill His mission
and His mandate for our lives.
He will either remove the affliction,
give us healing and restoration
so that we can accomplish His purposes
or number two, He will give the grace that we need
to overcome our liabilities so that we can accomplish
His purposes for His greater glory.
The Apostle Paul talked about a thord in the flesh.
Bible never tells us what it was.
There are many different theories.
I lean towards the fact that He had eye problems.
Three times He prayed for God to remove the thord in His flesh.
Three times God did not answer His prayer until finally
God said my grace is sufficient.
My power is made perfect in weakness
whichever form it takes when God comes and He meets us.
He brings us to life in places where we have been broken
before and for Mary Jo that took the form of revelation
at the foot of the cross, our revelation
and she can tell it better than I can in much more detail,
a revelation that took her back to the very roots
of her lifelong depression.
For many years she thought her depression was rooted
in the fact that she didn't have much of a relationship
with her father and she was agonizing
before the cross and God spoke into her life.
He pointed out to her that the problem
wasn't simply her lack of relationship with her father.
It was a lack of bonding with her mother
because you see her birth had been extremely difficult.
Her mother had to be put out.
And in that hour the Holy Spirit revealed
to her two dominant emotions that were part of her experience
as she was just born number one, this is my fault.
I should not have been born.
Number two, okay so I am alive
and there is no one big enough to take care of me here
as I thought there would be.
So I had better get control.
And those were the beginnings then
of separating herself from the significant caregivers
of her life opened the door for an enemy invasion.
An enemy invasion that was finally sealed solidly
at a very tragic episode in her life when she was 15 years
of age and she accepted once and for all
that through and through she was ugly instead of lovely.
And in that moment of revelation,
God dealt with her on some of those issues.
What does it look like when God shows up?
He manifests His presence, He heals our broken places
and then of course He calls us forth to new life.
Ephesians 2, 10 is a verse we often quote around here.
If you've ever been in any of Valerie's groups,
you'll have it memorized through and through.
We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus
to do good works which God has prepared in advance
for us to do.
What that means is that before the foundation of the world,
before you and I were ever even bored,
we were conceived in the heart and the mind of God.
He knew who our parents would be.
He knew what time and place in history
we would be called forth.
He knew what our gifting would be,
He knew what our calling would be,
He knew what our destiny would be.
And when God shows up and He brings healing
in these deep and these bitter and these dark places,
as you've often heard me say,
it's never merely an end in itself,
not simply so we can feel good and have a happy life.
No, it's so that we can be restored to functionality
in the kingdom of God.
I keep saying that's why so many of the miracles of Jesus
were miracles of restoration, the lame walk,
the blind sea, the death here,
the poor have good news proclaimed.
Satan is, we'll see it in a few moments,
robs us of life.
He is a murderer through and through and God,
when He shows up, He calls us forth into the destiny
that He had for us from before the foundation of the world.
Now I think He does that in two ways.
He does that by giving us clarity and insight.
It was some weeks after that revelation
at the foot of the cross when Mary Jo went
to a retreated singing waters that He rewrote her name
and changed it from what she had come to own has her own
into the name that He had always intended for her,
which was the name of a lovely.
And she tells me that a lot of people
since the time have come up to her
and I've done the same thing myself
but we've all said to her, Mary Jo,
your countenance has actually changed.
She is different in ways that you cannot put your finger on
but all because Jesus was there
and He spoke into de places.
Now, we won't all have that kind of revelation
but typically what will happen in each of our lives
is that as Lord heals us and we come to life
the passions and the desires that God places within us
that are planted there to enable us to fulfill His purposes,
they start coming to life.
You often heard us say Satan attacks us most powerfully
in the places that are closest to the core of our heart.
And lots of us have had lots of dreams.
And lots of us have learned the hard way through life
to put those dreams in a shelf
because every time we've started to live
somebody has come along and pulled a rug out from underneath us.
I'll tell you, I know about that.
But life has a way of wanting to burst forth.
And when God shows up
and creates for us a nurturing environment,
then the urge to do life, the urge to dream,
the urge to live, the urge to plan,
the urge to undertake something significant
for the glory of God, it re-emerges.
One of the ways in which you can tell
that people are alive
and it won't all be the same for everybody.
But God calls us forth.
And when he calls us forth and we step out into it,
then what happens is that we experience his favor
and his presence.
Now Dave's gonna talk about it a lot more tonight
in terms of stepping out, but let me put it this way.
This is the one area where many more people experience
the presence of God than most of us ever realize.
And that is when we operate in our sweet spot.
That is to say when our gifting and our calling
and circumstances come together, we catch the wind
of the Holy Spirit under our wings
and there are those moments when we fly.
Isn't it true?
Haven't you had those in your life?
Oh, I know, there's lots of times when life is a struggle,
there's lots of times you wonder,
God, where are you and why are things so difficult?
But haven't there been those moments in your life?
Honestly now, haven't there been those moments
when you fight like an eagle catching the updraft
and you soar far above and beyond anything
that you've ever been able to do before?
Is that true?
Well, don't pat yourself on the back too fast
as if it's your great flying skill that got you up there.
No, that is the updraft of the Holy Spirit
bringing us into a place of anointing
where we can do life.
And you will find rather consistently
that when you operate in your place of gifting,
when you operate in your place of calling
and you step out into it, God adds a dimension of anointing
that you cannot put your finger on
and that produces results that are out of proportion
to your strength, to your competence and to your energy.
And most of the time, we don't even know that it is happening
nor do we realize that that in fact is the presence of God
in our lives.
You know how I experience the presence
of God most frequently in my life?
It's not always in the context of worship,
not always in the context of prayer,
but it's almost always in the context
of either getting ready for a message.
And the word of God comes to life.
Or I'm working with somebody one to one,
we are engaging each other, God shows up
and death gets pushed back and life begins to emerge.
And I know that we are standing on holy ground
because God is there.
God shows up in the places of our gifting
and in the places of our calling.
The psalmist said, "Good and upright is the Lord."
Therefore, he instructs sinners in his ways.
He guides the humble in what is right
and teaches them his way.
All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful
for those who keep the demands of his covenant.
What does it look like when God shows up?
He manifests His presence.
We experience His healing power in broken places.
He calls us forth to new life.
And then He teaches us the fine art of spiritual warfare.
You'll have noticed in James chapter four
there are two sides to the equation.
One is to draw near to God and God will draw near to us.
The other is what?
Resist the devil and He will flee from you.
Now most of us here are no stranger to the devil.
He's name is Diabolus.
He is a slanderer.
He is the accuser of the brethren.
He is the great deceiver.
He's also the murderer.
Lots of people in the world have no practical first-hand
experience of His presence and of His power.
That's usually because they are in His presence
and in His power and no threat to His kingdom.
But most of us will have experienced
that as we become alive in Christ
and experience their nearness of God,
the level of spiritual warfare gets up.
And we become aware that there is power out there
that is trying to destroy and that is trying to hinder
and that is trying to make us roll over and die and disappear.
And Scripture says rather than doing that,
our job in conjunction to drawing near to God
is learning how to resist the devil.
Peter puts it this way, "Your enemy, the devil,
"and prowls around like a roaring lion
"looking for someone to devour.
"Resist Him standing firm in the faith.
"And God's promise is that as we do that,
"He has to leave, resist the devil,
"and He will flee from you."
Good example of that is the temptations of Jesus,
Jesus had just received the baptism and the Holy Spirit,
was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness
to be tempted and three times Satan came at Him
to try to dissuade Him from the course that God was laying
before Him, of course, that one day would lead
to His death on the cross.
Each time Jesus resisted by quoting Scripture,
the word of God, the shield of faith,
and the Bible says after the temptations were completed,
when the devil had finished all this tempting,
He left Him until an opportune time.
The devil is limited in time and in space.
And just like worldly friends will give up trying to knock
on the door of your heart to bring you back
to where you came from, if you are determined
to follow Jesus, so Satan, when he sees
that we're not granting him any opening to get in,
we'll leave us and go looking for more fertile territory.
But until such a time, he will try to exploit every avenue
and every opportunity to try to dissuade us
from following after God.
And the more alive we become, the more alive we are
in being committed to the purposes of God,
the greater a threat we are to His kingdom,
and the more serious will be the challenge.
And I can speak to that this morning
from personal experience.
I've hesitated long and hard this week,
whether I'm ready to share this with you this morning.
So bear with me as I try to get to it.
It was the Friday before the old church celebration event,
early in the morning when Michael showed up on my doorstep.
Now I've learned over the years
when my growing up sons come to my house
in the middle of the day, that's never good news.
And Michael came to report that he had just come back
from the doctor who had called him in after his last CAT scan
and his last CAT scan indicated two hot spots
and he needed further testing.
He had one of those tests this past week.
We just got the results this past Friday.
And the test indicates or is indicative
in the words of the specialist of active lymphoma,
which in layman's terms means that his cancer is back.
And I cannot begin to tell you what a blow,
that was out of left field.
The last thing he or I or the rest of us would have expected
and I can tell you, it's left us reeling.
It's got huge implications obviously
for his immediate family, his children are older now
than the first time.
It's got implications for our family,
it's got implications for family business,
certainly as implications also to some degree
in the broader church community.
And I'm sharing it with you this morning
because we're gonna need you to stand with us
to get through this one.
It means another round of chemo,
probably a bone marrow transplant, everything is much harder
the second time around, would you know it's coming?
Pray for us.
Pray that we will be sustained
under whatever that journey means for us.
Pray that our faith will not fail
because that's always a possibility.
Pray that God's name will not suffer loss
or his kingdom but that rather his kingdom purposes
will be accomplished because no matter how tough this is,
by faith and sometimes I tell you all you can do
is walk by raw faith, God is still good
and he is still good all the time.
And whether in good times or in bad times,
he has said that he will be with us always
even to the end of the age.
So please help us because this is more than we can handle
and we need you, our family, to hold us up before God
and in many other ways to get through this.
And we will see that somehow in the end of all of this,
we pray that God will be honored
and that his kingdom will be advanced.
♪ Spirit of God dwell ♪
♪ Thou within my heart ♪
♪ Weed it from earth through all its pulses ♪
♪ Move to my weakness ♪
♪ Mighty as our heart ♪
♪ And make me love thee as I ought to love ♪
♪ I ask no dream, no profit, ecstasy ♪
♪ No sudden rending ♪
♪ Of the veil of clay ♪
♪ No angel visited, no peace guides ♪
♪ But take the dimness of my soul ♪
♪ All the way ♪
♪ This will not be dust ♪
♪ Love be God and King ♪
♪ All of my own soul ♪
♪ Hard and strength and mine ♪
♪ I see the cross and teach my heart to sing ♪
♪ Oh, let me seek thee and go let me find ♪
♪ To teach me to feel that ♪
♪ Thou art always night ♪
♪ Teach me the struggles of the souls to bear ♪
♪ To judge the writing ♪
♪ And out the rabble sigh ♪
♪ Teach me the patience of an answer friend ♪
♪ Teach me to love thee as I'd angels love thee ♪
♪ Oh, one holy passion ♪
♪ Failing all my praise ♪
♪ Well, back is my pride ♪
♪ And he said, friend ♪
♪ Oh, my heart and author ♪
♪ And I love thee ♪