By Neil Earle
A young woman recently came to me who had drifted from church and passed through many rough spots in her life, which had included serious addictions. But now she was making a determined and successful effort to repair her relationship with God. “How can I blot out the tendency to want to use swear words when I pray to God?” she asked. “This is really bothering me and I don’t want to do that?”
Believe it or not but these are the kind of questions pastor don’t mind dealing with. Imagine, brethren, a person asking a minister for spiritual counsel in this day and age!! How strange! (I speak only partly in jest.)
Frankly it is so moving to see someone striving to rebuild their relationship with God that it inspired this sermon. We all pass through dry spots and periods of doubt in the Christian life. Saint Paul confessed that there were many occasions when he despaired even of life itself, thinking he had received the sentence of death (2 Corinthians 1:8-10). Perhaps you felt that way if you received a frightening test result from the doctor. These sentences of death do happen. The saints in the Middle Ages called these times “the dark night of the soul” and even Jesus on the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
It is only God’s word and experienced Christian counsel that can help at such times. Here are four points I have gleaned after 39 years in active ministry. Perhaps they can help you.
Abide in Christ (John 15:4). This seems simple but it will require of us our greatest treasure – our time. All serious Christians know they must spend time with their Lord and Savior to drink in of the rich benefits a relationship with Jesus brings. “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” Jesus promised. “You will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28).
You’ve heard me say that God doesn’t miss a single thing when we are not praying. When we drift from prayer for a week or a month or a year we have cut ourselves off from the Source of what we all need. Oh, our salvation is assured by grace but God may withhold his blessings on our life’s endeavors. We find ourselves floundering and wondering, Where is God? It is so sad that we become so blinded. Paul described God as “him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine according to the power that is at work in us” (Ephesians 3:20). Hmmm. Go back and reread that. We cut ourselves off or drift from the Source of all power and begin to be like the patient that has lost too much blood. We don’t know what is happening but we feel like our life is draining away.
God can help us here. We have to rededicate ourselves to seeking his face. That is an expression Old Testament prophets used over and over again.
What I told the young woman at the beginning was to read Romans 7:14-20 and she would feel a lot better. You see, I knew from experience that she was on the right track. I knew that she would eventually break through to God and get the mastery over these temptations to curse and take God’s name in vain. Many of us have been there before. “When I would do good evil is present with me,” Paul wrote. What she was going through is the normal experience of someone trying to get back on the path with God. But it takes time and determination and it means a period of what the great saints called “persevering prayer,” as outlined in Jesus’ parable of the Unjust Judge.
It will work for you, my friends. It will work. It just takes time. God often delays an answer in order to help us rebuild that lost time we spend with him, to move us even closer to him. Then when he moves near us once again with healing in his wings we know we have recovered the gift of his peace. As the great Puritan writer John Owen says, “there comes along with it so much sweetness and such a discovery of his love, that there is a strong inclination and desire (in us) to deal perversely no more.”
Get a Study Bible. Your greatest physical and tangible ally in rebuilding your relationship with God is the Word of God. When we have drifted from God we have unconsciously become hardened through the callousness and deceitfulness of sin. We don’t see how far we’ve fallen back because our human mind uses justification at the speed of light. “But I was busy.” “I just had three children in four years.” “I’ve had 23 job applications rejected.” All of that can be true but what is needed is the living word of God to cut through these human reasons and get us back to our Source. In the Message Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “His powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting through everything.” The antidote to justifying and futile human reason is humble confession and a reach for pardon. King David admitted: “It s good for me that I have been afflicted that I may learn your commandments.” Paul said, “When I am weak then I am strong.” James said, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given him” (James 1:5). James was called “Old Camel Knees’ because his knee were hardened from a life of constant prayer. He led the Church in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death and was later thrown from the temple top after a good life in God’s service. But his words still speak – “we have not because we ask not.”
Now a good study Bible can tell you all about such lively details. I recommend to people the NIV Study Bible because it has little denominational slant. The books of the Bible are just lines of type on a page unless we know roughly when they were written, why they were written and what the main point of each book was. You can’t get that information in a normal Bible but a good Study Bible can clue you in and make each Book more real. It’s like having a min-Bible Commentary at your side and it can really perk up your Bible study. That is one of the best ways to get back in touch with God for you will meet him again in the pages of his word as the Holy Spirit begins to breathe afresh on you. Try it, you’ll like it.
Use the Means of Grace Expectantly. The “means of grace” is a technical term for all the things the church does for its people – it includes fellowship, singing hymns, serving the Bread and the Wine and, yes, even taking up offerings. When Jesus was facing his darkest perils in the Garden of Gethsemane he wanted his closest friends around. When we are drifting from God sometimes a good word from someone else can perk us up or sometimes a person who is ill will ask us to pray for them. It’s hard to turn down a request like that and this can galvanize our spiritual juices once again.
Singing hymns is another wonderful way to refresh ourselves in the Spirit of the Lord. Colossians 3:16 has this advice for us: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts God.”
We need to come to church expectantly because just the routine of attendance hasn’t been getting us anywhere in a period of drift. God the Holy Spirit has a message for every attendee at a Christian service but the worshiper has to be ready. “Be still and know that I am God” and “open your mouth and I will fill it” are two verses that speak to us at times like this. We sing hymns because we can say in music what is not easy to say in person or around the church coffee pot. And sometimes these things in the lyrics are very deep things indeed. Consider this line from Charles Wesley’s “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” one of the great hymns of the faith:
“He breaks the power of cancelled sin. He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.”
There is a rich reservoir of Christian thanks and adoration packed into these two lines but…they are just the very things we find hard to express on our own. So…we borrow the words of other saints who have gone before us and we find God’s refreshing Spirit blowing into our hardened minds and consciences through music. Because…it brings the spiritual uplift written by men and women who were motivated by that same Spirit. That way, we piggyback on their faith (Hebrews 13:7).
And that again is a way God reaches out to us in our hardness and deadness. You see, Paul was right: He is not far from every one of us (Acts 17).
Serve the Local Church (Again!). There is no doubt about it, these are hard times for the visible institutional church. But yet the church is till the primary locus of the Kingdom of God on earth. As one pastor says, “God loves the church; it is Christ’s idea, not ours.” The Roman church teaches that the local church represents the whole church, that a small congregation has in it all that is needed to be the representatives of Christ’s body on earth. Some people would rather do the glamorous work of a Paul and Silas or serve as missionaries overseas (they think!) than clean up the coffee pot after services or bring a pizza to the children’s church. But they are only kidding themselves. Jesus said he who is faithful in little is faithful in much and the New Testament is studded with people like Dorcas in Acts 9:36 who because of her service in needlework and sewing was so valuable to the Church in Joppa that Peter was moved to bring her back from the dead! Wow! What a reward for Christian service.
You can see more in such passages as 1 Timothy 5 that service to the local church is service to God himself. “As you have done it to the least of these my brethren” is Jesus’ standard for evaluating our fruitfulness as Christians (Matthew 25: 40). Some churches also work their serving crew to death and there is always that danger but…one way to recapture your spiritual zeal and fervor is to find a way to serve God’s people. This will start the juices flowing in those hardened spiritual arteries.
In conclusion we can see that many Christians through the ages have seen the need to rebuild their relationship with God. How wonderful that God’s offer still stands: “Draw near to me and I will draw near to you” (James 4:8).