-Transcript-
00:36 All right, welcome to the cafe today. Good to be here. You know, we’re in the holiday season.
00:43 What do people look forward to most about the holidays? Is it the pie? Maybe. Is it the gift-giving or receiving? Maybe. Time off from work or school? Yeah, that could be it.
00:54 But I’ll bet you the thing people look forward to the most is time with family. Time with loved ones. Oh, that’s the best part of the holiday, isn’t it? Just spending time with those that we care about.
01:05 We don’t have to really be doing anything special at all. Just sitting around talking or going for a walk or just spending time together, catching up. In that nearness, there’s something cherished about it.
01:20 I believe that’s why so many love this holiday season. And I want to talk about nearness here a little bit today and talk about the idea of God being near to us. There’s a wonderful verse in the Bible.
01:33 Matter of fact, we were using this verse to encourage some young folks recently in our church. Psalm 34:18, the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a brokenheart and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Well, that verse is just wonderful and it’s so simple yet so deep.
01:56 So there’s two parts to it. The first part here is the Lord is nigh or near unto them that are of a broken heart. What does it mean for God to be near? What would it mean for God to be far? I want you to think about that here today.
02:11 You know, there’s a real blessing in having God near. The worst thing I think a Christian can experience, one that has been saved, one with the Holy Spirit living within them, is a distance from God, a far-off nature of God.
02:21 We don’t serve God by feeling and at the same time we desire his company and his fellowship and that does involve feeling and emotion, soul-stirring.
02:35 All of this happens when God is near, I believe. You want a biblical example? Look at David after he had sinned with Bathsheba and he had committed adultery and all these awful things and basically had her husband Uriah killed in battle.
02:47 All of it was horrible and he spent, as I understand it, about a year unrepentant, in a way, living a lie and being a far-off from God.
03:06 And if you read in the Psalms about David’s heartbreak, about his bones just shattering, about just the feeling of desperation, all of that comes from God being a far-off.
03:22 And if you have tasted and seen that God is good and if you have had the Holy Spirit living within you and dwelling you and you just love the Lord and you just get a blessing,
03:29 you get joy and peace out of serving God and studying his word and going to church and singing for him and so forth, if you have all of that and then you have a distance from God,
03:40 a far-off feeling that God is not near, amen, that’s the worst feeling in the world. So when we understand the context of that,
03:49 then we read Psalm 34:18, the Lord is nigh or near unto them that are of a broken heart.
04:04 You say, man, I want a broken heart because I want God near me, amen, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. So we want God to be near and what that means is that he is living within us, that we have not grieved the Holy Spirit, that we are living by his commands, that we are not engaging in sinful behavior.
04:21 Yes, we are all sinners and we all fall short and every day we sin and fall short, but we are not purposely or willfully engaging in sin or being ignorant to what he has called us to do or how he’s called us to live.
04:31 That’s how we stay close to God and there’s a word here, contrite, the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.
04:42 That’s again kind of an SAT word, kind of a big one, isn’t it? And we’re going to look at what the word contrite means. It means, according to the dictionary, feeling or expressing remorse or penitence, affected by guilt, a broken and contrite heart, remorseful, repentant, regretful, penitent, sorry, apologetic, ashamed, chastened, right?
05:12 I think that remorseful, regretful, the idea of repentant, the idea is that we have to recognize within ourselves our sinfulness, our selfishness, our fleshly behaviors.
05:31 We need to recognize them before God and if we are unwilling to do that, then pride will get in the way and the Lord hates pride. The Bible talks about the proud look being an abomination to God. God hates pride.
05:45 Pride goes before the fall, as they say. I know the King James describes it a little bit different, but pride goes before the fall. The devil, why was he cast out of heaven? Because he was proud.
05:54 He wanted to be like God. You know, it’s very important to God that we be humble. In fact, the Bible also speaks of the proud will fall.
06:02 I think this is in Proverbs, but the humble the Lord will exalt. Amen. And we see that time and time again.
06:07 Maybe in our own walk with God, when we’re humble, we’re living for God, that he will bring us up. Oh, and how he can bring us up and encourage us through his Word and through the Holy Spirit
06:17 and through the brothers and sisters in Christ and all of these great things, how he can encourage us. But when we are proud, when we have pride in our life, that is a problem.
06:27 And when we think of that idea of being contrite, the idea is breaking that pride apart. The idea is taking the pride like a, say, like a vase, like a covering on you and are covering on your heart, like a, like a clay mold on your heart, taking it and throwing it to the floor and smashing it. And so it’s all broken.
06:47 And the pride is no longer there. And we’re being honest for the first time in a long time, or maybe the first time ever with a holy God about who we really are and why we need him. Because he cannot use us if we are prideful.
07:01 Amen. He can’t use us. And so we see that this idea of contrite, of being remorseful, repentant, full of regret, sorry, apologetic, is step one in having God close to us.
07:12 That is step one. We see this mirrored in James chapter 4 verse 8. Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded.
07:24 So we see here a lot of instructions on how to get close to God. Number one, we have to draw close to him. You know, we are called to search him out.
07:30 Amen. We are called, I think, in the ministry to challenge people to search him out. I’ve spoken to lost people, lost family members, and I knew that I wasn’t gonna argue my way into them being saved or anything like that.
07:46 And so what I did instead was just challenge them. I said, get into the Scriptures. Just make a point to study the entire Bible,
07:53 or maybe even just the, you know, the Pentateuch, you know, the first books of the Old Testament, and the Gospels, and a couple of Paul’s epistles.
08:03 I mean, you just take your pick. You go ahead. You go in there, and you just see what happens.
08:09 And I believe that if that person would accept my challenge, and unfortunately, sadly, I don’t know that they did, that they would, that God would reveal himself to them because they were drawing nigh to him. They were trying. They were seeking him out.
08:20 There was a great testimony I heard on the radio years ago of a feminist professor that hated God and hated the Bible.
08:29 And she, as her vocation, as her job, was a researcher, and a writer, and someone that took that very seriously. I went to graduate school.
08:37 I can’t believe I’ve actually got a master’s degree in English speech communications. I know that’s hard to believe, but praise God. He is good.
08:44 And again, I have no pride about that. If anything, I’m like Paul. I try to unlearn a lot of stuff there.
08:51 But the professors there, they took their job very serious. They took researching very serious. They took academia very serious.
08:58 And I understand that this lady was like that, and she took her research very serious. And she said, I am going to disprove the Bible. I’m going to take that Bible, and I’m going to tear it apart.
09:07 I’m going to read every page. I’m going to study it, and I’m going to then disprove it. Well, guess what happened? Imagine this.
09:15 She got in the Bible, and oh, my goodness, God got a hold of her because she drew near to him, and she said, I’m going to study it. You go ahead, God. You show yourself to me or prove me wrong.
09:24 She studied it, and he saved her soul. Amen. She ended up marrying a preacher.
09:31 She ended up leaving that wicked school and went off to, I think, a Christian school and so forth, and she’s an evangelist now. And she literally was feminist. I believe she was lesbian.
09:40 Maybe y’all could do a Google search, look this one up. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her testimony, and I believe I verified it by hearing it on the radio and looking it up online for myself.
09:48 And it was an incredible testimony to what God will do when you draw near to him.
09:54 Amen. When you draw near to him, you draw nigh to him, and that is the first step. You draw nigh to him, he’ll draw nigh to you.
09:59 You cleanse your hands, ye sinners. Purify your hearts, ye double-minded. And so the idea is we need to draw nigh to him, but we can’t do that with a perverse outlook.
10:10 We can’t do that going in with these preconceived notions. See, like an academic, when they want to go in, they have to use the facts to then prove their research. They want to go into a topic and research something.
10:19 They know that they have to be objective as best that they can. Amen. And we must approach God in that way where we can’t go in with pride and saying, well, we’ve been done wrong our whole life, and maybe, God, you’ll understand what’s really going on.
10:40 No, we need to go in humble as we would to see the King, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords. We need to picture God in that light as a creator of the universe, as all-knowing and wise beyond belief. I’ll tell you what, Job is a great book.
10:48 You read Job the first time, you have empathy for Job, you have sympathy for Job, and you’re just amazed at his character and God’s blessings. You read that book four or five times, and you start looking at how God deals with Job, how God rebukes Job.
10:59 Remember that the Lord Himself, God Himself, told Satan, hey, this is an upstanding man, this is a righteous man, this is someone that God calls righteous.
11:08 And God flat-out rebukes Job as Job kind of petitions to God about why things are the way they are, and his lot in life, and so forth. God rebukes him. We need to understand that if that man, Job,
11:20 who certainly is probably most definitely more righteous than me, or you, or whoever is listening here today, if God rebuked him, how much more so should we be humble in front of God, and fear him, and understand that there are so many things that we don’t know.
11:35 Again, if you get into Job, look at how God points out what he does, and how no man could even understand how God fills the ocean, for example, or sets the tides, or sets the stars, and these incredible things.
11:46 It’s only God can do. We need to have that humility about us, and that means that once we understand who He is, and we fear Him, and we’re drawing near to Him, then that sin should convict us, that sinful life should convict us, and we should wash our hands, we should purify our hearts.
12:01 What does that mean? That means to go to God in repentance. Now, how do we repent before God?
12:09 We go to Him and identify with Him what that sin is, and He’ll list it off to us. It could be covetousness.
12:14 Look, if you don’t know what coveting means, if you don’t truly know what it means, how can you identify that sin with God? It could be lust. It could be greed. It could be anger.
12:22 It could be all kinds of things, and you got to understand, God’s dealing on a different plane. You could say, well, I never had an affair with anybody, and God would then point out, you looked at that video online, or you looked at that cheerleader, or you looked at that person down the street.
12:39 God knows what’s in our hearts, and He tells us that even to look upon someone with lust is like committing adultery.
12:46 His standard, His ways are higher than our ways, and so first we need to do is identify what we’re sinning, ask the Holy Spirit to reveal it to us if we’ve been saved, and identify it with God, agree that it’s awful, and depart from it, because until we understand that, and yes,
13:04 I will give this, God help me to say it correctly, I will give this in the light of this world, that what does Satan want to do in the spiritual battle that we’re in? He wants to deceive.
13:14 He wants to have you tempted beyond measure, and confused, so we must identify that in the context of which we’re living, which is a spiritual battle.
13:23 That’s why it’s so important to get into His Word, draw near to Him, and when we do that, we have this great peace and unity with God.
13:32 All of a sudden, ministries will start popping up, because God can use us, because we are humble. We’ve drawn close to Him, and He’s near us, and He’s helping us, and it’s such a wonderful place to be. It’s not the easiest place to be.
13:43 It doesn’t happen naturally, because naturally in the flesh, we are sinful, but those that are willing to set pride on the side, and say, God, I will go to you humbly, and I will live for you, watch what He does.
13:56 I believe He will work a great miracle in your life. If He does, tell me about it, and continue to seek Him, continue to tell others about Him, continue to live for Him, until He calls us home.
14:06 What a great God we serve. He’s given us instructions. Let’s take Him up on it.
14:11 Thank you so much for listening today. Take care. God bless. Amen.