Enemies of Intimacy

NewLife Fellowship, Oct. 17, 2004

Our theme this month is intimacy with God – being close to God, being on good terms with God, being a friend of God.

          I would like to talk today about some enemies of intimacy. What prevents us from having the close relationship with God that he wants to have with us?

          The first enemy, I think, is our own desire. Sometimes we just don’t want to be that close to God. Maybe a father figure in our past means that we don’t really trust God; we have no desire to draw close to him because he is associated with disapproval, or punishment, or even abuse.

God is in heaven and we are here on earth, and that’s OK with us. We are happy to have some distance between us and God, and perhaps that way he won’t be continually nagging at us to change our ways, and he won’t send us on some assignment that we really don’t want to go on, and he won’t be scowling down his nose at all our mistakes.

Or maybe we have a mental picture of God that was given to us by some previous church, or even by this one. Maybe we think that God is mostly rules and regulations, mostly stern and serious, kindof busy and not really the sort of person you’d like to get to know. He’s a colorless personality, not the sort of person who likes to tell stories and laugh and have a good time. Why, we’d have nothing in common, so why would we want to be friends with the most boring person in the universe – unless of course he would zap us if we didn’t.

So we might have wrong ideas about God, and not really want to be close to him. Well, I can’t change that. I do know that Jesus describes God as throwing parties for people who repent. He is the sort of person who likes to have a good time.

And I also know that Jesus was God in the flesh, and people seemed to like him. Oh, sure, they were attracted to free food and free medical care, but even beyond that, people seemed to like him. He had a whole troop of people following him around the countryside because he was an interesting character. And besides that, he really liked them. He took an interest in them, he wanted them to grow in confidence, he loved them - despite the mistakes they made.

And God is like that – he is really interested in each of us. He loves us, and he wants to have a friendship with us. And we can be sure that when he is the wisest person in the universe, that he also knows how to make that relationship interesting for us.

Have you ever thought that eternal life with God would be sort of boring? I have. I think it’s a signal that my concept of God is a bit stunted. The truth is that God has in his memory every story of every person on earth. He has a treasure-house of fascinating facts, and he is not too busy to share them with us. Eternal life is going to be one interesting thing after another, one enjoyable thing after another, because God know how to have a good time.

But we have to get to know him, and I have to admit that I don’t find that very easy. Why, I read his book once, and I even read parts of it a second time, and God still seems like someone far, far away. It’s hard to feel intimate with someone whose idea of communication is to give me a letter he wrote to someone else 2000 years ago.

Well, I’ve tried praying, too, but I can never tell God anything that he doesn’t already know, and I don’t want to ask too many times because he heard me the first time, and he just doesn’t say much in return. It’s hard to develop a relationship like that – it moves   kind-of  slow-ly.

Well, I think that slowness is my fault, not God’s. And it turns out that when I read God’s book a second time, I learn a little more than I did the first time, and when I read it a third time, I learn a little more again. And that letter he wrote to the Romans actually says a lot to me, too, and the book he had Matthew write tells me a lot about how God loves me. And so now I have something more to talk to him about, and I’m still not very good at it, but I am getting better.

And I find in the book of  James that he writes, “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.” That’s in James chapter 4, so let’s turn there today to see what James says about how we can have a better relationship with God. It’s a simple point – God wants to have a relationship with us – he has already taken the initiative, but we can’t have a relationship unless we cooperate. So if we draw near to him, then he says that he will draw near to us.

And in this passage in James 4, we will find a few clues about barriers that we sometimes build in our relationship with God – or we can call them enemies.

So I want to look today at some of the enemies of intimacy. Let’s start in verse 4, where James writes, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”

Now, isn’t that a friendly way to begin a sermon? Well, no, it’s not. James is not exactly the best advertising agency that God ever had. He writes a little strongly here, but at least he is pointing out a major problem that people have in their relationship with God – they are distracted by the things of this world – attracted by the things of this world, and James likens that attraction to adultery.

In the Bible, God compares his relationship with his people to a marriage – he is the husband and we are the wife. What it means is that he wants an exclusive relationship – he does not want us dabbling on the side with other gods, other things that we happen to like more at the time. Now obviously, God does not want us bowing down to statues and offering incense to idols in Hindu temples. But it goes further than that – God does not want anything to be competing for our allegiance. He does not want us to have anything more important to us than he is.

Now, what are the gods and goddesses of the modern world? They are media, entertainment, sports, money, sex, and liquor. And for some people this year, it’s politics. They think that better laws, or better politicians, will bring them the prosperity they want. Others look to what the neighbors think, public opinion, fashion, being “cool.”

Some people just never seem to have much time for God. They may give him two or three hours on Sunday morning, but hardly anything during the week – and yet they can make time in their schedule to catch a movie, go to a game, or go shopping. It’s like they’ve got a lover on the side, and it’s no wonder that their relationship with God isn’t very good.

It’s not that watching movies is wrong, or playing sports is wrong, or shopping is wrong – all those things are OK – but it’s a question of priorities. We should each examine our own life, to see how we use our time, to see what is most important to us. Are we getting the most important things done, or are we letting them slide because we are distracted by the attractions of this world?

I said that it’s OK to watch a movie – that depends, of course, on what movie it is. Some people don’t want God meddling in their choice of entertainment. It is simply that entertainment is more important to them than God is.

Another test of our allegiance is our pocketbook. Some people spend more on electronic luxuries than they are willing to give to God. These gadgets didn’t even exist ten years ago, but somehow people make excuses that they are necessary now, and God gets only what is left over. It shouldn’t be like that. Some people spend more on games than on reality, spend more on parties than they give to the gospel. Is that a symptom of a bad relationship, or is it a cause? It’s probably both – just like an extramarital affair is both a symptom and a cause of further problems.

Jesus said, Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The way we use our money shows where our heart is. If we don’t give any money to God, it shows that we don’t have much of a relationship with him. Now, it is quite possible to give a lot of money and not have much of a relationship, either, but it is still a good indicator of where our heart is.

The question is, who gets first priority in our budget? Do we wait until all the luxuries are purchased, and all the brothers and cousins and friends have what they want, and we’ve gone to all the movies we want, and then we see how much is left over for God? Or do we plan from the start to be generous with him, because he has been so generous to us? It’s a question of what’s most important to us.

Jesus said, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. We cannot trust God for all our needs while we are also trusting in Mammon. Jesus said that if we want to follow him, we need to take up our cross, and be willing to lose our life in order to gain it, but it seems that some people are unwilling to give anything up. If I want it, I’m going to make sure that I get it, and God will have to wait a little longer. He’s got all the time and money in the world, anyway – he doesn’t need my money.

Well, that’s true, but God doesn’t tell us to give money because he needs it. He tells us to give because we need to give, and as long as the greenbacks in our pocket are more important to us than God, we will have problems in our relationship. As long as our desires are more important than doing the will of God, we are going to have problems.

Another way that the world distracts us away from God is simple busyness. We are rushing here doing this, and rushing here and doing that. Boy, I can certainly relate to that. There’s work at work, and work at home, and papers I have to write for school, and soon there will be papers I have to grade. So we have to budget our time as well as our wallet, and allocate some time for God in our lives. If we are too busy to pray, then we are too busy. If we are too busy to study the Bible, we are too busy.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus said that one group of seeds was choked out by weeds – and he called them the cares of this life. It’s the busy stuff – we fill our lives with so many good things that we don’t have time for the most important thing of all. We fritter our time with things that don’t really matter, and we neglect things that really do.

A relationship with God requires time. Sometimes God forces us to slow down, but it is better if we simply give him time from our own free will. Draw close to God, James says, and he will draw close to you. We need to see if we are committing spiritual adultery, by valuing the things of this world more than we value the things of God.

The Old Testament says that God is a jealous God. He does not want us to have other gods that take our time and attention away from him.

The New Testament says it, too. In fact, James says it in verse 5: “Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?” Yes, the Holy Spirit envies our time and allegiance. God wants us first, because he loves us, and he knows that our life is going to be a whole lot better when we put God first.

If we’ve messed up – and all of us have – then James has good news in verse 6: “But he gives us more grace.” He is always willing to take us back, after we have put away our other lovers and given him what he deserves. He is the father of the prodigal son, who is always waiting for us to return, and always giving us a wonderful welcome when we do. He doesn’t want us to spend all our life on wild living and feeding pigs, but he welcomes us when we quit. When we give him money, when we give him time, when we give him obedience, he is happy. He throws the spiritual equivalent of a party.   

Now, James 4:6 also says, “That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’” Pride is another enemy of intimacy. Whenever our own way is more important than God, we have pride. When we think we know more about life than God does, we have pride that blocks our relationship. When we think that our own opinions about entertainment are more important than what God says about it, then we have pride, and we have set ourselves up as a god.

But when we think more highly of ourselves than we do of God, we can’t have a good relationship with him. God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. He is always willing to welcome those who acknowledge that he knows a lot more about life than we do.

So what’s the solution? Verse 7: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Ah, that’s where all these problems come from – it’s the devil who tempts us with self-indulgence and self-reliance. It’s the devil who wants to distract us with a thousand good things, as long as we neglect the most important. It’s the devil who tells us to trust ourselves, to make sure that we satisfy our desires. It’s the devil who tells us to pray only when we feel like it, to study only when we feel like it, and to give only when we feel like it.

Resist the devil, James says, and he will flee from you. And at the same time, verse 8, “Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded [trying to have it both ways – one foot in the world and another in the church]. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰

If you try to get your laughter and joy through the world, give it up.

“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

Do you want to be stubborn, dead set on managing your own life, or are you willing to draw near to God? We need to seek him while he may be found.

Basically, God has what we need. Where do we look for purpose and meaning in life – in God, or in the world? Where do we look for fulfillment and satisfaction? Where do we look for love, for a sense of self-worth, for peace of mind? God has what we need, and when we draw closer to him, he will draw closer to us.