Intimacy with God

Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts you double-minded. --James 4:8


Drawing near to God is something that we dare not take lightly. We are sinful beings afterall, and God is absolute in his holiness. How then can we begin to close the gap that yawns between us? Our first step is to come clean. I'm not suggesting that we are unworthy of coming to God unless we are living perfect lives. If that were the case, no one would ever be able to come to God. By coming clean, I mean we need to realize that we cannot hide anything from God.

God already knows our comings and our goings both for now and forever. He knows our innermost thoughts and secrets--things we sometimes barely even acknowledge to ourselves. To come clean before him means that we come before him with the full realization that we are unworthy. We openly admit we are sinners, and lay before him our faults and failures. Emptying ourselves of false pride and confessing our sins frees our hearts. A freed heart is able to accept God's forgiveness. It is within that forgiveness that God speaks his love to us.

In all the earth there exists no accurate description for how high and deep and wide God's love is for his children. We are unable grasp even the tiniest fraction of understanding of that unconditional love. God's love is felt only by knowing Jesus, and it is through a relationship with him that we begin to know true love and intimacy with God.

All of us were created with a yearning for intimacy and love. This world offers many substitutues for it, but nothing will ever be as fulfilling or meaninful as a realtionship with God. Even the happiest and most successful marriages will, at best, only offer a glimpse of the love God has for us. We can search for ways to feel complete in many things--boyfriends or girlfriends, careers, or even hobbies. The truth is, the love we long for will elude us so long as we are not drawing near to God.

Let us purify our hearts to make room for the love God has to give. Let us stop pursuing our ambitions thinking that there are material things or even personal relationships that will fulfill us. God has so much to offer if only we would ask, but first we need to clean out the "junk" in our hearts to make room for a relationship with him.