Sunday, March 7: Where are You, God?

Do you ever feel alone? Are you sometimes desperate to feel God’s presence again in your life? Do you ever equate the feeling of aloneness with the love of God? Do you think that because you cannot see Him, hear Him or feel Him that He must not be there, must not love you like He used to, or He must not care what you are enduring?


Rubbish!


God loves you so much that He cannot take His eyes away from you. Though you sometimes may not feel His presence, that usually has more to do with the sin in your life that separates you from Him. “Usually” is a key word in the previous sentence, for sin isn’t always the reason for God’s seemingly deaf ear or distance from you. Job endured God’s distance not because of sin, but because God wanted to draw him even closer! King David, a man after God’s own heart, wrote a number of psalms with that feeling of being removed from the presence of God. In fact, Jesus felt that same distance! Though Jesus never sinned, the distance that He felt was a response to sin, just as it is so often in our own lives. David wrote these prophetic words from what he was feeling, though Jesus lived the words on the cross:


1 My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
Psalm 22:1


When the sins of the world were heaped upon the mighty shoulders of our Savior, He felt the separation from His Father that sin causes. A righteous God cannot look upon sin. At that moment on the cross, Jesus felt a loss of relationship with His Father for the only time in all of eternity. Notice the words in the verse above. Jesus does not refer to “My Father,” but to “My God.” Who is Jesus talking to in that verse? He speaks of God twice, and we know that God is in three persons. Jesus is speaking to the Father and the Holy Spirit! So in that verse, Jesus not only felt the separation from the Father, but also from the Holy Spirit.


We as Christians have the Father, Son and Holy Spirit living inside of us. Does it shame you to think of the places we have carried God and involved Him in our sinful lives?


23 “Am I a God near at hand,” says the LORD,
“And not a God afar off?
24 Can anyone hide himself in secret places,
So I shall not see him?” says the LORD;
“Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the LORD.
Jeremiah 23:23-24


God is everywhere. He cannot be far off, though He may seem that way at times in our lives. If you don’t sense His presence, confess you sins to Him!