God Is Near: Experiencing His Presence in Everyday Life

God Is Near and Invites Relationship

God’s greatest desire is that we would reach out to him and connect with him. The Bible calls God our Father, who loves us with a love greater than our minds can comprehend.

God wants to connect with you. He’s not hiding. He’s not throwing up walls and barriers to keep you from getting too close to him. He wants to be close to you.

The Truth About Getting Close to God

One of the biggest lies that comes from the attempts to put God in a box is the idea that getting close to God is really hard and something only the sincerest believers can attain. I’ve read stories of people crawling up mountains until their hands and knees are bloody, just to try to get close to God. That’s not who God is. It may create a good story and it may show commitment to the cause, but God does not need a mountaintop for you to reach him. He is here with you now. He doesn’t place outrageous demands on us that we have to fulfill to the smallest detail before he’ll pull back the curtain and let us get close to him. James 4:8 promises, “Come close to God, and God will come close to you.”

God Is Near to Ordinary People Like Us

The whole story of the Bible is about people connecting with God in unbelievably personal ways. Here’s what’s so amazing about that truth: the story of God connecting with people didn’t end when the last book of the Bible was written. There’s no difference between you and me and people in the Bible like Abraham and Sarah and David and Peter and Mary Magdalene. The people in the Bible weren’t superheroes. They were regular people. That’s why the Bible includes the stories of how they screwed up. Yet their screwups didn’t cause God to give up on them. Abraham lied about Sarah being his wife to save his own life. Sarah laughed when God told her she was going to have a baby even though she was old. David slept with someone else’s wife, then arranged for her husband to die in battle. Peter denied Jesus three times, and one of Jesus’ ancestors was a woman named Rahab who worked as a prostitute before God changed her life. If they could connect with God, so can we.

You Can Experience God Like They Did

You and I can live lives that could be written about in the Bible because we can have the same connection with God they had. How do I know that? God made us to seek him. They had breath and lived this life just like we are living now. He was a part of their stories, and he is a part of ours. He’s not playing hide-and-seek. He’s close and ready to be found.

God Is Near Even When We Feel Far Away

Despite the fact that we sometimes feel lost and far from God, God is not remote. He is near.

Surrounded by His Presence

“In him we live and move and exist,” Acts 17:28 said in describing the closeness of God. The verse sounds like it’s describing water for fish. He’s not only near, he is so close that wherever we go, he surrounds us there. His presence completely envelops us. Psalm 139:8–12 put it like this:

If I go up to heaven, you are there;

if I go down to the grave, you are there.

If I ride the wings of the morning,

if I dwell by the farthest oceans,

even there your hand will guide me,

and your strength will support me.

I could ask the darkness to hide me

and the light around me to become night—

but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.

To you the night shines as bright as day.

Darkness and light are the same to you.

God Is Near but Speaks in a Whisper

No matter where we go, God is close by. How close? He’s so close that he speaks to us in a whisper (1 Kings 19:11–13). No one speaks with a whisper from a distance. Our culture might shout at us, selling us the lie that we constantly have to post and check our social media feeds and be at a high volume to show the world how great our lives are because that’s where our value comes from. But God’s voice comes as a whisper. It’s quiet.

Why We Struggle to Hear Him

So even though he’s close, his voice is easily drowned out by everything else in our lives, which is often what makes us think he’s not right there with us. To hear him, we have to stop and quiet our spirits and ask him to show up. That’s the only way you can hear him whisper that he’s here and he wants to connect with you.

God Is Near and Greater Than We Imagine

In Acts 17:22-31, when Paul addresses the Athenians on Mars Hill (Areopagus), he talks about idols of stone or gold. Living in America, I don’t have a lot of experience with actual idols. Most pastors and Bible teachers I’ve heard talk about idols always use the word as a metaphor. Our jobs become our idols or our stuff becomes our idol or our desire to have people see us in a certain light becomes our idol. But when Paul made this speech, idols meant physical idols, statues of gods and goddesses people worshiped and offered sacrifices to. The idols were their gods, reduced down to a size and shape that was easier to wrap their minds around.

Stop Trying to Put God in a Box

People still try to do that with God. We keep trying to make him smaller and less mysterious. That’s how we end up trying to cram God in a box. I love how these last few lines of Paul’s speech put it. God is now calling for radical life-change, Paul said. God calls for us to stop trying to reduce him down to our size and instead stand in awe of the majesty of this God who is so much bigger and mightier and mysterious than our minds can comprehend.

God Is Near Through Jesus and the Resurrection

This is the God who wants to connect with you and me. How do we know he is who Paul said he is in this speech? God validated it by sending his Son, Jesus, whom people killed but God raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus—that’s the proof. Those who heard Paul bring up the resurrection thought that idea was absurd, and it is. Divinely absurd. Yet it is there on the cross of Jesus that I most connect with God. A man rising from the dead is absurd, yet it shows me the amazing love of God, which I cannot get enough of and continues to draw me in.