Is a Relationship With God Even Possible?预览

God Wants a Personal Relationship with You

It’s impossible to have an authentic relationship with a theoretical god, so we turn our faith into vitamin faith. We shrink faith to a set of practices we should definitely try to remember to engage in—because they’re good for us. We narrow our faith lives to a set of things we should for sure put on our to-do lists: go to church … attend a men’s group … get some quiet time in the mornings. 

Scripture says, “Listen for GOD’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go” (Prov. 3:6). But we don’t. We don’t look for him in our everyday lives—we see only physical people and physical things. We don’t listen for him—we hear only the roar of culture. We don’t try to sense his Spirit within us, and we have a hard time seeing him in others—we connect instead with our drivenness and self-contempt, our envy and cynicism and judgment. 

N. T. Wright, with insight and punch, wrote this: “It is our blindness, our arrogant refusal to admit of any reality that won’t go into a test-tube, that prevents us from opening ourselves to God’s dimensions of reality.” It’s our refusal to accept and appreciate and revel in sacred mystery that prevents us from building personal relationships with him. 

But the God who said, “Come to me” (Matt. 11:28) and “Seek my face” (Ps. 27:8), is still saying that—but to us now. He’s saying that to you. 

And the God who said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7), meant it as encouragement to you. 

And the God who said, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20)—he’s making that offer to you right now. 

God is the same as he’s always been. He hasn’t changed because we made some great strides in understanding our world. He holds the very “same position in our modern world that He held before we began probing His creation with telescope and cyclotron,” wrote von Braun.

God has always wanted us to explore and appreciate and unravel. “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov. 25:2).

But what God wants most? 

What he wants most is personal relationships with us. With you.