Closer Than You Think

When’s the last time God felt close, not as an idea you agree with, but as a presence you could almost sense in the room? That question opens a candid conversation about why so many of us settle for religious activity while our hearts stay distant, and why the ache for closeness might be the truest signal that God is still drawing you in.  <br><br>We walk through Scripture like a single thread of pursuit: God calling “Where are you?” in the garden, God speaking to Moses face to face like a friend, and Jesus looking at His disciples and saying He no longer calls them servants but friends. Along the way, we unpack James 4:8 as a direct promise with a condition: draw near to God and He draws near to you. That is not hype, it is an invitation to real intimacy with God, real relationship with Jesus Christ, and real spiritual renewal when life feels dry.  <br><br>Then we get practical and a little uncomfortable, especially for those of us who love the language of power. Signs, gifts, and ministry matter, but power without intimacy becomes performance and performance burns you out. We share a personal story of grief that made heaven feel far away, and the quiet moment God broke through with a simple reminder: “I’m still here.” We close with one doable step for the week: sit with God for fifteen minutes before you do anything else, not to get something, but to be with Him.  <br><br>If this speaks to you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find the show. Where do you feel the distance most right now?

Transcript

When Did God Feel Close

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Let me ask you something before we do anything else. When's the last time? Not in church, not in a service, not even in a devotional, but when's the last time you genuinely felt close to God? Think about it. Not just that He was present, not just that He was real, but close. Like someone was actually in the room with you. If you had to stop and think about that, that might be the most important thing you hear today. Because here's what I've discovered after 25 years of preaching, after standing behind pulpits and sitting in prayer rooms and walking through some seasons where heaven felt like brass. God has never been far, not even once. What changes is how close we let him get. That's what changes. And I think a lot of us have settled. We settle for information about God when he's been offering us intimacy with him. We settle for church attendance when he's been inviting us into a conversation with him. We've gotten good at doing religious things, and somewhere along the way, we've missed the real thing. He's been after ever since the beginning of time. Just us. Just you. Welcome to the Christian Cafe Cafe. I'm your host, and today we're going somewhere real. So pull up your seat, get your coffee, because we need to talk about the relationship between God and man, and specifically what God actually wants out of it. Not because it's a history lesson, but back to the beginning of Genesis, because the beginning tells us everything God's intentions were. In Genesis chapter 3, the fall of man had already happened. Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit, and the whole thing has unraveled. But here's what gets me every time I read this text. It says in verse 9, God comes walking through the garden in the cool of a day, and he calls out, Adam, where are you? Now, let me be clear about something. God is an omnipotent God. He already knew exactly where Adam was. He knew what had happened. He knew the servant had already been there. He didn't ask because he didn't know. He asked because that's what you do when you love someone. You call out for them, you go looking for them. See that question, where are you? It's not the voice of a judge opening court on Monday morning. No, it's not. That's the voice of a father who's just looking and trying to find his child. And I want you to hear something. That voice has never stopped calling. God has never stopped walking through the garden looking for you. Never. And guess what? He never will. He'll continue looking for you, continue to call out to you. Fast forward to Exodus chapter 33, and we find Moses here. He's in an incredible moment. He's interceding for Israel after the golden calf disaster. We all remember that, how they he went up the mountain and they got all their gold together and they made the calf to worship and things. So after that fiasco, Moses intercedes for them and he makes a bold request. He says, God, show me your glory. And in verse 11, before that even happens, let's look at what the writer tells us in Exodus 33 and 11. He says, The Lord will speak. Let me reread that. The Lord would speak to Moses'. I'm having a hard time talking. The Lord would speak to Moses face to face as one speaks to a friend. Hmm. Face to face. I like talking to my friends face to face. I don't like using a cell phone. I don't like texting or none of that. I like to talk to them face to face because I'm going to see the reaction. But that's not where I'm trying to go with this. But he talked to Moses face to face as a friend. This is Moses we're talking about, guys. A man who started out as a murderer on the run, hiding in the wilderness, tending to somebody else's sheep. And yet, God pulled him into a friendship so close that the scripture had to use that very word friend to describe it. Ain't that miraculous? Doesn't that give us hope that no matter what we've done in our lifetime, that God can still call us friend? I'm thankful for that. See, that's not religion, that's a relationship. And it tells me that the level of intimacy God was after was never about titles and it wasn't about positions, nor spiritual performances. He wanted a friend. But here's what it gets even more remarkable to me. Let's jump all the way to the New Testament, to John chapter 15. You see, Jesus is in an upper room with his disciples. It's the night before his crucifixion. And he says something so profound that I think we've read past it so many times and didn't realize it. But in John chapter 15, verse 15, he says, I am no longer, again, I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends. See that word again? Friends. For everything that I learned from my father, I have made known to you. He upgraded them right there. No longer were their disciples, even though they still were, but he upgraded right there to friends. In that moment, Jesus took 12 men who became to him his disciples, his followers, and he called them friends. He let them into the inner circle. He said, I'm not keeping secrets from you. He says, Everything the Father has shown me, I've shown you. And then James 4 and 8 gives us the clearest invitation in all the scripture. Come near to God, and he will come near to you. That's not poetic language. That's a promise with a condition. You move toward him, he moves towards you. It's a two-way pursuit, guys. Not one-sided, it's two ways. It means the closeness you've been longing for. Right? You've been searching for some closeness. There it is. All you got to do is come near to him. It's available right now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but it is available right now. And it's available right now, not after you get things together, not after you stop struggling, but right now. So we're going to struggle. But guess what? That closest is available right now. So let me say this plainly so you can understand. God never designed religion, He designed relationship. The whole sacrificial system, the priesthood, the tabernacle, all of it was pointing toward the day when he could do what he always wanted, which was to remove the barrier between himself and the people that he made. And Jesus accomplished exactly that. Aren't you so glad? Ain't you so glad that he went to the cross and accomplished? The veil was torn, the way was open for us, and ever since then we have had a direct, unhindered, full access to God of the universe. Not through a priest, not through any programs, through a person. And that person's name is Jesus Christ. Aren't you so glad of that? Aren't you glad that that veil was torn, that that he went to the cross just so he could be intimate with us? Think about that. He suffered everything he suffered on that cross, the pain, the agony, the torture, everything he suffered just to be intimate with the ones that he created. Can you say you would do that for your friends to be intimate with them? Shoot, can we say that? We would do that to be intimate with our spouses. Something to think about, guys. Something to think about that. Now, I I want to shift gears just a little bit because I need to talk to my charismatic family for just a minute. See, there's a prophetic layer here, and it what intimacy actually produces when we get intimate with with the Father. We talk about a lot of power, right? We talk about signs and wonders. We talk about the gifts of the Spirit. And I'm not walking any of that back. No, I believe in all of that. But here's something I've had to learn the hard way. And I want you to listen closely. Power without intimacy is just performance. I'm gonna say that again because I think we need to hear it. Power without intimacy is just performance. And guys, performance is exhausting. But when you get in the presence of God, man, it's just unreal. It's not exhausting. It feels great, it's exhilarating. And I don't want to go there because I can go off someplace else right there, but I'll I'll stop because I'm gonna stay right here where I'm at. And just I want you to understand that if we're doing anything for performance, we're not intimate with God. You understand that? If we're trying to perform our religion, we're trying to perform any way of being a Christian, then we're not doing it with the power of intimacy with the Father. See, when you look at the men and women in the scripture who walked in genuine supernatural power, there's a common thread. See, they knew God. Not just about God, they knew him on a personal level, on an intimate level, I should say. Elijah on Mount Carmel wasn't a showman. He was a man who spent enough time along with God to know exactly how he moved. Daniel's gift of interpretation wasn't a trick. See, it flowed out of a prayer life so consistent that even his enemies had to admit that the spirit of the living God was with him. Oh man, can can you imagine if you and I today had that kind of intimacy with God? What people would say about us? Can you imagine? Can you imagine that type of intimacy? See, the gifts don't flow from talent. They never have. They flow from the throne. The power of God and and and the gifts of God flow from the throne. And the closer you are to the throne, the more naturally they operate. If they're coming from the throne, if the gifts are coming from the throne and you're close to God, then you got you don't have to worry about performing. It's gonna be natural. It's gonna come natural. See, intimacy with God produces sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. It produces discernment, it produces an inner knowing. When he says go, you go. And when he says wait, you wait. You stop being reactive to circumstances because you're oriented toward heaven. You stop making decisions out of fear because you know the one who holds the outcome. See, isn't this great? Having an intimacy with God, see what it brings us. Man, this is rich. This is rich. I hope you're getting I hope you're grasping hold of this because this is powerful. This is a powerful word. I want to also say this because somebody needs to hear it today. Intimacy with God will ruin you for religion. Exactly will. In the best possible way, though. Once you've actually sat in his presence, once you felt the weight of his glory and heard that still small voice that cuts through everything, you can't go back to going, just going through the motions. You can't just sit in a pew and just punch a spiritual clock anymore. You've been ruined for anything less than for the real stuff. You remember we talked about this in our God Chasers book, how that Pastor Tom Tenney got so in the presence of God so much that he didn't want anything fake. He got tired of the fake stuff. He was hungry for something else, so he went looking for it and he found it. And once he found it, he didn't want anything else but that. See, that's what the in what intimacy with God would create in us. It would create something in us that we want to be something real. We want to see God's power. We want to see all these things manifested in our lives and in the body of the saints. But we first have to have intimacy. We've got to stop performing. Can I get an amen from that? We've got to stop performing, but get into an intimate relationship with God. See, and I believe that that's what God is after right now in this season. He's not just looking for workers, he's looking for friends. He's not just looking for people who will do things for him. He's looking for people who will be with him. People who will sit with him long enough to exactly hear what's on his heart. See, the church doesn't need more programming, it needs more presence. And presence starts with us. It starts with you, starts individually, choosing to draw near, choosing to be intimate with him. I want to get personal with you for just a minute, because I could give you all the theology in the world, and it wouldn't mean half as much as just telling you what this has looked like in my own life. I remember when my mother passed away, this is back in 2005, I was pastoring a church at the time, and my church was not a large church, had very few members, but nevertheless we were being obedient to God, and and my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and they told us that she had a year to live, and she actually only ended up living living like a month. She died a few days after Christmas. And I and it's like when she passed away, I was devastated. My dad was a minister, still is, and he was pastoring also, and and we were all devastated. And I don't know about you, but when you lose someone that you're close to or that's close to you, you just feel like everything is so far away. And at that time I felt like God was so far away. I was angry. I think my whole family was angry at God. We didn't understand because my mother was a God-fearing woman. She served God with everything she had. She prayed. I remember her telling me one time that she had prayed for me and prayed that God would save me and take me so that I'd make it to heaven. That's how rebellious I was growing up and in my teenage years and even into my adult years. It was not until sometime later that I really come back to God. But that's the woman she was. And when when God saw fit to take her, you know, I was devastated. And at that time, I I was just wondering, God, where are you at? Are you not seeing this? Are you not seeing what you're doing to our family? Do you not see how that, you know, we're grieving because you took our mother from us? And I just felt like God was so far away from us and and He was not listening to us, but I reminded that, you know, He said He would be with us to the end. He'd never leave us nor forsake us, and and that we'd He'd always be there. And I I guess it took me several years to really, well, not several years, but at least a year to really get over it and really start thinking, well, God, you know, you're true to your word. You never left us. We walked away from you. And I'm I'm not saying I I backslid or anything like that. I just said I I I didn't pray as what I was praying. I I wasn't in my word. I I just, you know, took a backseat. I quit pastoring, I quit preaching. My dad did the same thing, and my brother. And it was like God just seemed so far away. He just it just like we could pray, and it's like they just prayers hit the roof, you know, just not coming down. And I just remember one day that I forget where I was at or what I was doing, but I could hear God tell me, I'm still there. All you need to do is lean on me because I was in pain, I was hurting. I was I was so tort. My mother passed away, my mother left me, and I could just hear his still fall small voice say, I'm still here, son. I'm still here. And so a few months went by and I began to feel God's presence again. I began to feel that his closest was by me. And and I remember feeling, you know, just knowing that God was there, I could feel, you know, everybody knows the touch of their mother, their warmth of the mother when they hug you. I felt that very same thing one day from my from from God. It was like, your mother's here, and I'm here. You're wrapped in my arms. I've got you. I've got you. And just a sweet spirit just overshadowed me, and and I just once again I felt that he was close. And and I think back to that time, and I say, God, how did I ever let you down like that? How did I ever think that you would not be with me? How why did I get so mad? But in those our weakest moments and our weakest times in life, God's still there. It doesn't matter. We're the ones that walk away from him. We're the ones that don't let him in. We shut him off. The one that helps us the most and that's always there for us. See, our relationship with our friends and our family and our husbands and wife is something totally different than the intimacy that God wants. He just wants you to trust him. He wants you to just lean on him, give him everything. Surrender your whole world to him. And when we do that, then we know that without a shadow of a doubt that he's got our back. Nothing we go, we have to go through, we go through alone because he's always there. See, I'm telling you this not because my story is remarkable, because it to there's other people's stories a lot more remarkable than mine. But to me, this is a big thing. But see, I'm telling you this because 25 years in ministry teaches me one thing about. Everything else. The only thing that keeps you going, the only thing that keeps you from burning out, from drying up or falling away, is actually knowing the person you're serving. You see? Actually knowing the person you're serving. Not the role, not the calling, not the role we play in church, or not the calling God's place in our life. It's not about none of that. It's all about the person that we know that we are serving. And that's Jesus Christ. Amen. So where does this leave us? I'm not going to give you a seven-step plan to end intimacy with God because intimacy is a it's not a formula, it's a posture. And the posture is simply this turn toward Him. That's it. But I do want to give you something practical. One thing. This week, before you do anything else in your spiritual life, before you do Bible study, before you do your ministry work, even before your the prayer list, just sit with God. Not to get something, not to say something, just to be with Him. Even if it's only 15 minutes. Even if it's uncomfortable at first. Even if your mind wanders 17, 18, 19, 20 times. Because mind wanders all the time. Because here's what happens when you do that consistently. The distant closes. The noise quiets. And you start to recognize his voice the same way you'd recognize the voice of someone you love. It becomes familiar. And it becomes unmistakable. And that changes everything. It changes how you read scripture because you now you're reading it with him. Not just about him, but with him. It changes how we pray. Because now you're actually talking to someone, not just reciting words at a ceiling. It changes how you move through your day. Because now you're carrying an awareness that he is with you, not just watching you, but he's with you. He's closer than you think. That's the reality of who God is to you right now. The question is whether you'll close the distance on your side. You've been going through the emotions. You've been going through emotions and emotions. You've been doing the right things for the wrong reasons, or maybe the right reasons, but in your own strength. And the invitation today is simple. Draw near. Please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Leave a review, drop a comment, let us know how God is moving your life because of what you heard today. We want to celebrate with you. You can find us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Just look up the Christian Cafe. And if you want more, head over to our pod page at the Christian Cafe for all of our episodes and resources. You can also email me at the Christian Cafe 2022 at gmail.com. Okay, guys, until next time, stay close. He's closer than you think.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Join us next time right here on the Christian Cafe and see what God is serving up fresh for you.