Connecting with God
By: Stephen George
Tags: Connection, God, Religion, Theology, Christianity

Connecting with God

I recently gave a sermon, so far no-one’s rebuked me or left the church, so here’s a transcript of what I said:

Albert Einstein was teaching at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and every year he would set his students an exam. One year, he passed the exam paper to his assistant, his assistant looked over the paper and turned to Einstein, confused. “Professor” he said, “this is exactly the same exam that you set last year.” Einstein, without flinching, replied “yes, yes it is” to which his assistant asked, “well why would you do this? Why would you give them all the same questions again?”

“Because,” Einstein replied, “the answers have changed.”

I wonder how you would have felt as one of those students, thinking you knew all the answers and that there were some easy marks to be had, only to discover that things don’t work the same this year as they did last year, that the answers have changed?

Maybe it’s like this with God sometimes? Does it ever feel like a moving target? Like sometimes we pray & fast and God moves powerfully and answers our prayers but other times like He isn’t listening, even though we’re doing all the same things & calling out to Him just as passionately. Do you ever feel like you’re asking the same questions, but the answers have changed?

We’ve been looking at our church values over the last few weeks, and tonight we’re thinking about “Connecting with God”. This tension is part of the human condition, wrestling with the divine, learning to understand how we can connect with a uniquely Holy God, who humbly became like us but, at the same time, in so many ways transcends us. The Psalmists felt this tension; you can read throughout the Psalms these pleas to God, “How long will you ignore our prayers?”, “Why have you forsaken me?”, “How long will you let our enemies triumph over us?”. One particular example comes in Psalm 44, written after Israel had suffered some military defeats, we read:

“All this has come upon us though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way; yet you have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign god, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart. Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

They felt like they were doing all the right things, like they were following all the instructions but they weren’t getting the answers they were used to. You could forgive the Israelites for feeling like the rules had changed.

I wonder if you can remember a time in your life when you felt particularly close to God, as though you were especially connected to Him? Maybe it was a moment, maybe a season; call it to mind and imagine how you felt, where you were, what was happening.

Now I wonder if you can remember a time in your life when you felt particularly disconnected, or separated, from God? How was that different? How did it feel, how did it happen?

If you can think of those two experiences at either end of line, from connection on the one hand to disconnection/separation on the other, where on that line would you place yourself this evening? Where would you have placed yourself yesterday? This time last year? Where, honestly, do you expect to be able to place yourself this time tomorrow? I think if I tried to plot my life along this line it would vary quite wildly, bouncing from one end to the other. But the problem here is not that along the scale, but rather that we think of it as a scale at all. What if our connection with God wasn’t on a sliding scale? What if it wasn’t a series of highs & lows, of ebbs & flows? What if our connection with God was consistent & constant and endured our variety of circumstances and moods?

We were not made for moments of connection, but for a persistent abiding.

Connection is important. We are social animals designed to connect with each other. Isolation can be damaging. I speak as someone who is generally quite happy in his own company, but even I reach a point of longing for some interaction, for some real eye contact, a shared laugh, or simply some attention. I’m getting married soon and it’s quite amazing to think that my fiancée and I actually speak not just everyday, but normally many times throughout the day. Again, I speak as someone who does well to remember to call his parents more than once a month, but I become very aware if more than a morning goes by and I haven’t heard anything from Joya. That signifies our connection, that our lives are becoming more and more intertwined and that we are becoming more and more connected to each other. My connection with her encourages me, it inspires me and motivates me, it reassures me and gives me a sense of purpose.

How much more so, then, should my connection with the author of life be pressing on my heart and mind? Am I longing for some attention, for a conversation, for an audience with the Almighty? Is it an itch that I need to scratch if I go a morning without hearing from Him? Cory Asbury, who gained a lot of notoriety recently for writing a song about the ‘Reckless love of God’, had this to say:

“I want to reach for God the way I reach for my phone: when I’m bored, when I’m uncomfortable, when I need answers or entertainment, when I’m lonely and need someone to talk to”.

We’ll come to our reading from Luke in more detail shortly, but in that story we see a great example of someone who was desperate for a connection with God, to the point of overcoming some serious obstacles. We were not made for moments, but for a persistent abiding.

In the Gospel of John, chapter 14, Jesus promises His disciples that, after He has gone, the Holy Spirit will come and lead them, teach them and empower them; and He says an incredible thing:

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

The idea, the design, is that we’re not occasionally crossing paths with God when we remember to check in, but that our lives become intertwined with His. God has always been desperate to connect with us, to live with us:

In the beginning: a garden, then a Promised land, Tabernacles, Arks, Temples, Prophets, Sacrifices; time after time God providing a way that we could connect with Him despite our best efforts to push Him away or keep Him at bay, time after time providing places and means for Heaven and Earth to come together; and, ultimately, Jesus: the perfect, permanent act of grace that, simply by putting our trust in Jesus & believing He is who He says He is, we can be forever connected with God, a connection that cannot be broken; this is why Paul wrote in Romans that nothing can separate us (read Romans 8: 35–39). We, the church, become the place where Heaven & Earth come together.

It was always the plan that we would be close to God: Adam walked with God in the garden of Eden, Abraham ate with God by the oaks of Mamre, Jacob physically wrestled with God through the night, Moses spoke face to face with God as one would speak to a friend. The Biblical ideal is us & God, walking together, breaking bread together, speaking together as friends and in the person of Jesus we see God bridging the gap to make all of that happen again, to make all of that a practical reality for all of us. Love God, and He will come and make His home with you. And as we worship Him our songs become just one way that we can express that love.

It’s this indwelling of ‘God in us’ that tells us how we can connect. I think connecting with God becomes so much easier and more natural if we can remember that we are connected to God: that He is not far off, that we are not meant to be grasping or striving for something distant, but that we are living together, we are sharing a house.

Living with someone isn’t always as easy as being on your own, it takes communication and understanding, compromise and even sacrifice. I used to live with my brother, he’s a brewer by trade and we had a small, 50L brewery setup in our kitchen; so I would regularly come home to an overpowering stench of hops. He was also far from the tidiest of housemates, I’d often have to hunt for kitchen counter space amidst mounds of empty food containers and dirty plates, but this was the sacrifice, the compromise, that meant I got to grow in my relationship and love for my brother, that was the cost that meant I could live in such close proximity with him. I know there will be challenges when Joya and I start living together, but there will be so much more joy and fruit in our relationship as a result. And when we’re living with God, He, thankfully, can bear our messiness, bad habits and dirty plates. I think it’s so beautiful that this is how God has decided to relate to us. Sometimes it may be frustrating, it may feel like the answers keep changing, it may be hard to face up to some of the things that need to change about the way we live, but it also means that we get a relationship rather than an equation or formula & that God is personable, not mechanical.

He doesn’t want our sacrifices, our songs, our prayers; He wants our hearts. Our true worship, our prayers that are really “in His name” are the overflow of a heart that completely belongs to Him. Are we desperate, are we aching for a deeper connection that doesn’t come and go, that isn’t a highlights reel, but that is an entire way of life? There is undoubtedly great mystery in the way that God works sometimes, but what if we could treat each and every prayerful conversation that we have with Him, not with the frustration of not understanding, but as an opportunity to learn something new about Him, to practice recognising His voice, even if He’s saying something new?

To finish, I want to draw out a couple of questions and reflections from our reading earlier from Luke 5. So, my questions:

Who’s carrying you? Who are you carrying?

What are you expecting?

1. Who’s carrying you? Who are you carrying? The paralysed man couldn’t do it on his own. He couldn’t get there by himself. He needed his friends to bring him, he needed their support, he needed their determination. And then, in verse 20, we’re told that when Jesus “saw their faith, he said, ‘Man, your sins are forgiven you.’” Jesus was not simply responding to the individual but acted on the faith of the group. He saw their faith. Who can you identify as the people in your life that would tear the roof tiles off for you? That would carry you for miles? Let’s be a church that’s known for that, that is known as disciples of Jesus because of how we love each other. Who are the people that are going to build you up in your faith and bring you before Jesus? And don’t put any limitations on who God might use for that role. One of my best friends from college is called Fred. Fred won’t mind me telling you that he is an atheist, he’s now a clinical psychologist and an all-round clever guy. He would readily and happily self-identify as an atheist and a humanist and he and I spent a lot of our teenage years talking about God and the Bible and Fred is responsible for disciplining me more than almost anyone else in my life that I can think of. He forced me to work out what I believed, to come up with answers to some really hard questions that I probably never would have thought of if he wasn’t asking them and doesn’t it sound just like God that he would use a humanist atheist to inspire my faith and to force me to make it my own and draw closer to Him? Let’s be on the look out for each other’s connection with God and let’s be ready to find Him working through some unlikely places and people.

2. What are you expecting? The reading doesn’t explicitly tell us, but I imagine that these men thought they were taking their friend to a healer so that he would be able to walk again. The passage even sets up our expectations by telling us at the end of verse 17 that the power of God was with Jesus to heal. And this is still true today; if I ever hear anyone talk about “prayer for healing” I just assume they mean physical healing: pain being alleviated, illness being made well. But what happens? The man is lowered through the roof into the midst before Jesus and Jesus doesn’t say “get up and walk”, that comes later and for a different reason, but rather, “your sins are forgiven you”. Jesus might have something to say to you that goes far deeper that what you came to Him to hear. Be ready for Him to cut to heart of the matter, to the core of you and don’t be surprised if He does something you’re not expecting.

As we gather on a Sunday, let’s worship together, carrying each other when we need to, and let’s take this time that we’ve set aside, to recommit our hearts to God, to dedicate our whole lives to Him, ready for Him to do the unexpected and knowing that, as we do, He will come and make His home with us and that, as we leave this place, we have in us the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead.