Job 22:12-14 NIV

“God is so great—higher than the heavens,
higher than the farthest stars.
13 But you reply, ‘That’s why God can’t see what I am doing!
How can he judge through the thick darkness?
14 For thick clouds swirl about him, and he cannot see us.
He is way up there, walking on the vault of heaven.’

My God sees everything. He misses nothing. According to the Scripture He is intimately acquainted with every man, woman and child on the planet. He clocks the moment we awake and He is aware when we fall asleep. He sees our public triumphs and is present at our private failures. The Bible goes so far as to say he keeps track of the numbers of hairs on our heads ( when you consider half the population is bald that’s not as huge a miracle as say healing cancer…but still).

  In spite of all He sees, though, God does not interfere where He is not invited. God is sovereign and He has sovereignly given us free will. For some of us that means God is intimately involved in our everyday decisions through prayer. He is our safety rope as we scale the peaks of life. For others of us that means God is totally cut out of our lives and any rope we have from Him is only enough for us to hang ourselves with. Those who pursue God intentionally and regularly understand that God is the unseen visitor at every gathering and the silent participant in every conversation. Those who ignore God take His invisibility and silence as absence or abandonment.  For them if God exists He exists somewhere far off and only observes our lives From a distance.

Pastor Howard Renker said to our congregation just the other night, “What you perceive is what you will believe. What you believe is what you will receive.”

Applying that logic, where we perceive God to be in our lives determines what we will believe about Him. That belief will affect what we can receive from Him. So if we think of God as far away in Heaven we may believe He is not present to help us with our everyday problems. If we believe that, then we will receive little help from Him on an everyday basis. If however we believe that Jesus lives with us in our homes,  in our hearts and is ever-present with us, then we will believe He is present to help us with the broken down car or the wayward child. In that case we will receive help everyday.

So let me ask, is God working with you from a distance or is He close at hand? 

What needs to change in order for you to see God as “closer” to you?