A Personal God

Is God a distant being up in the sky to you? Is He standing back just waiting for you to make a mistake so He can punish you? Do you believe He is unapproachable, distant, to far away to really know?

If these are your perceptions of God then you have a wrong view of who He really is.

Many times when we grow up, we hold the same view of God as we do our earthly father. If your father was distant and unemotional, then you will probably view God as stoic and distant. If your father abandoned you, you may fear that God is not truly trust worthy. If your father was mean or a strict disciplinarian then your view will most likely be the same of God. We most often associate the traits we experienced in our father with what our heavenly father must be like.

Scripture show us a very different God. It shows us a very personal God not a distant and cruel God. He desires us to seek Him and spend time in His presence. We were created in His image and put in the Garden of Eden to have fellowship with Him. It is only by the fall of man that we were no longer able to be in His presence. Sin forced a separation between God and man to occur but was rectified by the sacrifice Christ paid.

Act 17: 24-29 says - "God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from on blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,"

In this scripture, Paul is addressing the men of Athens. So religious they were that they had all the Gods setup to worship. Not to miss any, they even had an alter made, inscribed "to the unknown God". Paul proclaims the God they do not know and begins to describe Him to them.

He told the men of Athens then and tells us today that God made everything, the world and everything in it. Since He is in charge of everything here on earth and in heaven, He doesn't need the things we could make for Him. There is nothing we can make here on earth to house God.

Also, He doesn't need our praise or worship; after all He made us and breathed life into us. He created man from one bloodline and spread them all over the earth. Nothing has happened that He did not appoint to happen.

So what does He want then?

The answer is in verses 27-29 "so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.' Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising."

He wants a relationship with us. He wants us to seek Him, in the hope that when we begin to grope for Him we will find Him. He is right there waiting for us to find Him. It is in the constant companionship that we are to live and move and have our being. We are to be in constant communion, walking with Him, talking with Him, just like Adam did in the garden before the fall.
We are His offspring. We are to think of ourselves as loved and cared for, wanted and adored. God is not distant, He is right there waiting for us to find Him. Waiting for us to need Him and just be with Him.

Our God is a merciful God, a loving, compassionate, gentle, kind, longsuffering, holy, completely righteous God. He is not pushy or overbearing; he waits patiently for us to come to Him.

We can not compare Him to what we see here on earth, it could never do Him justice. We must go to Him in prayer and search the scriptures to know Him truly as He is. The personal God who cares for each of us individually.