Let us draw near to God!
Those of you who carry your mobile phone with you enjoy receiving text messages from people whom you love very much. In fact, there are times that you almost risk your life by reading text messages from your friends and typing a reply to them while you are driving on a busy road.
Why do you think you go to the point of even endangering your life by reading text messages while driving? It is because you love the person from whom you receive the text message and you want to have a conversation with that person even at inconvenient times. You want to have communication with the person whom you love so much. In a sense, you want to be close to your friend even under difficult circumstances. We do that with our human friends all the time. But I wonder how much of the time of our days or weeks we give to our God in order to draw near to him for worship and fellowship? Let alone risking our lives to draw near to him as we do with texting, how much of our time do we dedicate to have communion with our God in private and public worship?
Remember, worship is the highest desire of the heart of our Creator from his people. We have been created for the purpose of worship. And it was for that very purpose that the writer of the Book of Hebrews, in Chapter 10:22, exhorts us to draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
You see, the reason why God wants you to draw near to him at all times is to fulfil his purpose of creating you and to consecrate yourself for His glory by separating yourself from the wicked way of the world around you. The temptation that the Jewish and Gentile Christians at the time of the writing of the Book of Hebrews faced was that the world and people around them were trying to draw near to God through animal sacrifices. These were never intended to be a direct access to the presence of the Holy God for worship. What most people around them were doing and the fiery trials that they were facing from the only approved religion of Judaism at the time was the result of their failing God in the area of worship. Because of that, the author of the Hebrews tells them not to follow the wrong crowd in the principle of worship, but instead to worship the Lord through the new way that Christ has opened for them by his perfect blood. It was to that effect that he exhorted them with these words:
“Therefore brothers , since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain , that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God” Hebrews 10: 19-22.
As you can observe it in the Scripture very easily, the reason why God the Father sent his son to the world was not only to remove our sins by his perfect death (sacrifice) once for all but also to bring us near to God the Father for a sweet and uninterrupted time of worship and communion with our heavenly Father. But the question is, how does a person draw near to God with full confidence?
How do we worship God continually with a pure heart and cleansed conscience? If you are really serious about true and biblical worship and you want to know how the blood of Christ makes you qualified for the kind of worship that pleases God, I encourage you to listen to the whole sermon on Drawing Near to God that was preached last Sunday morning here at Redeemer.
In the love of Christ!
Pastor Zecharias