RUNNING AWAY FROM GOD, ONLY TO FIND OUT HE NEVER LEFT YOU

How close are you to God? I don’t mean how close do you feel toward God. Rather, how close does God consider Himself to you?
A sudden surge of emotion—a reply to what someone says, a response to something someone does, a reaction toward what you see or hear—cools down as quickly as it heats up. Reactionary emotions explode like fireworks in your life’s nighttime sky, an intense burst of sound and color, followed by nothing. After all the fanfare dies down, rather quickly, life returns to normal.
Long term feelings behave very differently. Nagging and lingering, they roll into your life like a dense fog. You see, but can’t see through them. They never reveal an accurate sense of what’s going on. They do more lying than truth-telling.
Often times, your spiritual life takes its cues from how you feel about yourself. When life runs well organized, or relationships flow smoothly and uncomplicated, or others follow your lead in fulfilling the task at hand, typically, you like what you see reflecting back at you in the mirror—regardless of the image’s truthfulness.
All is well, so, you think, all must be well with God.
But seldom do you live a life without any wrinkles. The tasks that define your identity never fully get completed, relationships take unexpected right turns, veering off into the unknown, and those people you count on to help fulfill your dreams, they fail you. Emotionally, you live a volatile life of ups-and-downs.
Perhaps, that’s how you would describe your relationship with God: up-and-down. Your desire for God takes you up toward Him, but your feelings about yourself in relation to how you’re living for God bring you back down.
In my failure to know Him, God makes Himself known.I’ve been on that rollercoaster. And like you, I know how frustrating life lives, wanting to draw close to God, but not too close, fearing He might see what I see, the contradictions in my own life. Spiritually queasy, I never quite know exactly where I stand with God.
I hate living this way. As much as I try to draw near to Him, my emotions never allow me to get close enough.
Self-effort always ends in defeat.
So what does God do about me?
In my failure to know Him, God makes Himself known.
Rather than shouting, God quietly speaks to the heart of the defeated. His whispers of exchanging a life lived in lying emotions, for one living by faith, revive hope in the midst of hopelessness. Not a faith required to do something, but rather to believe in someone, a simple faith in the faithfulness of God.
You may run from God, but you’ll never get away from Him. His faithfulness acts like gravity, pulling you close.
All those emotions that result from your up-and-down living, accusing you of moving too far away from God to ever return, exist as lying fools. And to believe them would be foolish. You can’t move away from the One who has moved into your life. Jesus lives within your heart, so how could God possibly be anything but close?
Some people prefer to continue living their Christian lives out of their own self-efforts and not out of the efforts of Christ. When they read something like the impossibility of ever moving away from God, immediately they bring up the verse about how God draws near to the person who draws near to Him, implying some sort of distance separates the Christian from God. They quote this verse, not because they intend to live it, but rather as a way to maintain a measure of control over your life.
The attraction of legalism is in its ability to be used as a spiritual weapon against others. As well, legalism never tells the entire truth. It sets God up as a passive judge, doing nothing to help, ready to pounce on you at a single misstep.
But the real story of Christianity, the one God tells, focuses on what He does for you, and not on what you do for Him. Nowhere in the bible does it say that your nearness to God depends on your movement toward Him. Drawing near to God, and in turn having Him draw near to you, doesn’t imply that you have to make the first move. Out of the millions of miles of travel necessary to close the gap between you and God, He traveled all but a fraction of an inch.
But you’ll never experience the reality of the closeness you have with God, until you fully embrace the faithfulness of God. Living by faith is important. But faith only echoes God’s faithfulness. Faith responds to what God initiates. No amount of right-way-living on your part can keep you in hot pursuit of God. You’re going to face some times when the fire has all but gone out.
Yet God’s faithfulness toward you, to guide you step-by-step out of the dense, gray fog of lying emotions, and into a colorful world of grace and truth, never burns out. His very essence serves as the source of His unending loyalty.
Today, the enemy is sending lying emotions your way. Or worse, baking in a one percent falsehood with ninety-nine percent truth, just enough so when you take a bite of what he’s offering, you won’t notice anything peculiar about the taste. All that’s wrong with your life, he gladly points out, and then lays the blame for the apparent distance between you and God at your feet.
The enemy’s continually swirl of lying emotions, a hurricane dumping wind and rain in your life, cannot be withstood. If you try, you’ll just get washed out to sea. You cannot fight against, and sustain yourself, in such an overwhelming, internal storm.
But you can hide in the faithfulness of God. He can save you.
The truth of the matter is you’re already hiding in God, because your very existence is in God, through Christ.
You can’t get any closer to Him than you already are.
Truth-be-told, His faithfulness never let you go.

BELIEFCHANGERS BY DAVID STEPHENS