Draw near

Sunday 4^th January 2015
Bible Reading:  Hebrews 10:10-22
Wherever we are, God is there. There is no place; there can be no place, where he is not.
 “Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”  Psalm 139:7-8
 “No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as near to God from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any further or any nearer to God than any other person. These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us”   AW Tozer
However the presence of God and the manifest presence of God are not the same.
 “When the Bible speaks of the coming of divine persons it does not refer to a moving from absence into presence since divine persons are always present but a moving from one mode of presence into another mode of presence.”  Thomas Aquinas
The reality of God’s nearness can be revealed to us, either as individuals or as a company of people. In the Old Testament a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night reassured the Israelites that God’s presence was with them in the desert.
Yet this didn’t give them a way of communicating with that presence.  God was real but he was so utterly different to them and so pure and holy their humanity and their sinfulness created such a barrier. They needed a way of getting closer to him.  The answer came through the tabernacle which was designed by God and built according to his instruction to Moses.
It consisted of three main areas.

-          The outer court

This contained an altar and a basin.  On this altar, they sacrificed animals to show their devotion of God.
-          The inner sanctuary (or Holy Place),
This contained bread, a lamp stand and the altar of incense, which all represented their dependence upon God and their desire to know him.  
-          The Holy of Holies
This was behind a thick veil, and contained the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat. It was here that God’s presence dwelt and here where the High Priest would enter once each year to sprinkle sacrificial blood on the mercy seat in atonement of sin for himself and for the people. The priest got in and out quickly because he was so in awe of being in the presence of God.
But now God has given us the through the provision of his son Jesus Christ to enter in to this inner sanctuary ourselves, without guilt, embarrassment or fear.
 

1. Invited to draw near

The great aim of the writer of Hebrews is that each of us get near God, that we have fellowship with him that we not settle for a life at a distance from him so that God is distant thought, but is a near and present.
The words “draw near” mean to approach or to visit.  When we worship him in spirit and in truth, when we go to him in prayer and when we give our lives in his service we are drawing near to him. When we should do so with:
a) Hunger
The French have a proverb that provides insight for worship.
"A good meal ought to begin with hunger."
When we come to God filled up with our own self-sufficiency or full of preoccupied thoughts, we definitely won’t experience meaningful worship.
"My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?"  Psalm 42:2
b) Prepared hearts
We must submit ourselves in humble worship and obedience before the Father. And we must resist the distractions and discouragements that the devil tries to bring to keep us from God. We must do both in order to draw near to God and for Him to then draw near to us.
c) Reverence 
God has done astonishing and costly things to draw us near and you are entering a holy place when you draw near to God. We cannot come carelessly or flippantly. 

2. Why do we neglect the presence of God?
Yet despite the enormous privilege we have of experiencing the presence of God and drawing near to him we so often neglect it?
Many of us live very imbalanced lives. Many work too little or too much. Many have friendships that make them too dependent on others and some have become self-reliant and unaccountable.  Many of us are too intense and others of us are lazy. Some of us are too impulsive and others too measured. And in the midst of it all time for drawing near to God is squeezed out. Many believers pledge they’ll give attention to the relationship with God if and when they can find the time.
The truth is that we will never find time to draw near to God unless we make it our first priority.

3. What happens in His presence?

There was something special and spiritually significant about the Most Holy Place. Behind the veil was the glorious presence of God. When Moses encountered the glory of God something grand occurred.  Moses face shone so much the people were afraid to look upon him. There is a lesson for us in this. We cannot enter the glorious of presence of God and not be changed!
We need to go behind the veil. That’s where change takes place. Within the sanctuary is where preparation and restoration occur. When we encounter the eternal presence of God we become reflectors of His glory.
"And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." 2 Corinthians 3:18 
The biblical idea of transformation is not simply change, nor is it just improvement.  God is at work, re-creating who you are, re-programming how I think, re-defining what we value, why we do what we do. He is doing this so that we will be conformed to the image of His Son, the model and pattern.

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among us.”    Rom 8:29

“We take air into our lungs and transform the blood from impure to pure and send it on its life sustaining way We take food and transform it into blood and tissue and cell we transform mere sense impressions on the retina into sight we take wild sounds and tame then to time an tune and make them into music we take two people and tie them together with love and make them into a family. We take the self-centred soul get him to surrender to Christ and he is transformed.”  Selwyn Hughes

As we stand before the Person of Christ and focus our lives on him we are gradually changed into His likeness because whatever gets our attention gets you.
It is said; “People who are taken up with nothing become to look like the object of their focus - Blank faces, blank expression, blank lives but if Christ is the object of our attention then the glorious truth is we are gradually changed to be like Him.
If you want to go on the internet just having a computer, i.e. hardware is not enough, you need software. 
Every human being has the hardware to experience the presence of God, but not every human has the software. The Holy Spirit is the software that logs us into the presence of God. The Holy Spirit is the person that gives us eyes to see - remember what Jesus said when He was talking about human beings? He said you have to have eyes to see but you don’t see. In other words you have the hardware but not the software. You have to have ears to hear but you haven’t downloaded the software to hear.
You cannot earn the Holy Spirit. Microsoft does not have a program you can buy that will download the Holy Spirit into your hard drive, your life. Some people think they have to work hard praying to bring the presence of God in their lives, but you don’t achieve the presence of God, we need to surrender to it by surrendering to the Holy Spirit.

God bless
Alan