Walking With God in Truth

It's been said that people long to make a connection with a higher power. There may be some truth to that, but I don't believe it is true that unbelieving people want to connect with God Himself. Paul quoted the Psalms in Romans 3:11 when he stated; "There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God." What I believe, is that through pride and conceit, that mankind has usually sought after a god of his own understanding, or in other words, a god that mankind has made up to suit himself. From city to city throughout Greece, god after god was created. Through secret rituals, mystery religions offered a way to meet a deity. What the appeal of such false gods was, given their reported temperament, is beyond me.

Unbelieving mankind today may give an appearance of sophistication, but the bottom line is that he still wants a god that won't cramp his prideful, sinful lifestyle.Even within what is generally referred to as Christian evangelicalism these days, there are denominations that serve to foster this problem. Within the seeker sensitive movement there are those who say, "What needs do you have? Oh! Jesus will fulfill that need!" Within the emergent movement there are those who say, "What do you need Jesus to be? That's who Jesus is, then."

This isn't anything new. It started happening back in the garden of Eden. There are god stories that put forth a very amiable version of a god. There are god stories and claims by new age concept promoters that tout that we are gods ourselves. Variations on a theme. What is that theme? It's been said that the best lies are cleverly mixed with the truth of a matter.

Only becoming a believer, a follower of Jesus Christ promises fellowship with a perfect, unchanging all-powerful Creator God. The Bible makes it clear that there is one sovereign in this universe He created for us. He is someone that we cannot shoehorn into an image to suit ourselves. We can know Him, but not comprehend Him. How can sinful man have a close, personal relationship with such a holy God? What, if anything do we have in common with Him?

This is a bit of a dilemma. Sometimes for that reason, people will either try to diminish in their minds the nature or degree of their sinfulness, or diminish the holiness of God, or both. If we do recognize our sinfulness, and if we do recognize the infinite holiness and goodness of God, the question remains, how can we, as sinful men and women, ever have anything in common with God?

There is only one answer. It is through the blood-drenched cross of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. That sort of imagery in a statement horrifies some people and annoys others, but the truth is, because He died in our place, taking the punishment for our sins, the Bible tells us that we have the right, as bold as that sounds, to call the Creator of all that is, our Father.

Fellowship with God is one of the most amazing things about being a Christian. Even in the Old Testament, we can read about the way that David or Daniel and others interacted in very personal ways, even though they were in total awe of God. True believers did not try to lower God's standard to be near Him, but instead, they were looking forward to the cross of Christ, to be "lifted up" through His work to be in heaven with Him. Jesus gave us the way to have access to the Father, through a new, spiritual birth to become His children. Even so, as Christians, we still sin. One of the complaints I hear often from unbelievers is that Christians have no market on being able to control their sinfulness. True. We don't often walk with God in just the way that we should. It is only a process of honest self-examination and studying God's word in prayer that we move away from trying either consciously or unconsciously to suppress either our sin in our minds or His holiness in our hearts.There are those of us who have been believers for many years, yet still struggling with sin. What must we do with that sin?

In his first epistle, John talks about that very thing. He tells us how we can have ongoing fellowship with God, beginning in verse 5. We must come face to face with our condition. That is hard to deny when John writes about Him, "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all."

I think sometimes that people read too much into what that sentence means for us. Is John talking about moral light here? Is he saying that God has a physically bright light that emanates from who He is? Is he talking about His essence, or the way He reveals Himself to us. I think there are elements of both in that simple statement. There were Theophanies which occurred in the Old Testament that involved brilliant light. On the road to Damascus, Paul was surrounded by a light when the Lord manifested Himself to him, brighter than the light of the sun. Paul says in 1st Timothy 6 that "God dwells in unapproachable light." These verses speak of God's holiness, but we cannot know of the majesty of His appearance with even the descriptions contained in the Bible. We can imagine, but we cannot know until after we pass on.

Either way, God's holiness has not changed between the Testaments. That means that His view of sin hasn't changed either. There is no gray area with sin in God's sight. He is infinitely holy. If we want to fellowship with God, we need to have that in our hearts.

If we are going to "walk with God" we are going to be walking in His all-illuminating light, we are going to be forced to be honest about ourselves, and our weaknesses. There is no comparison between us, and holy God. Our level of ungodliness will be glaringly exposed. The main theme of 1 John to me is fellowship, and an honest appraisal of ourselves and our state, and an acknowledgement of His holiness is very necessary and very healthy.

When we're walking with God, it is like we are wearing a really white shirt, and it has an ugly spaghetti sauce stain on it. His pure light makes that stain plainly apparent, but He is in no way stained by it Himself. The stain is plainly visible. God sees it, but still we must confess it truthfully to God, and ask for His forgiveness and cleansing power over it. Because we have His Holy Spirit within us, we are not the stained thing, but instead He sees us as forgiven through His righteousness. John's words point us to how we relate to God because of who He is. There isn't any honest way to rationalize our sin. God's word shows us His purity, and exposes the stain that is all over us, the stain that only He can remove from us.