God's Not Intimidated: How to Get Close to God

I've got a question for you: How desperate are we to experience Jesus at work in our lives?

I keep going back to this for my own personal life, man, I got a good life. I got to be honest. I got great, beautiful, amazing kids. I've got a fantastic wife. I've got a church that I love coming to, and a group of people that I love being with.

I've got a good life and it would be easy for me just to downshift and take this in neutral and just ride it out, but I got a regular prayer in my heart: God, never let me lose the desperation for your presence. Never let me get to a point where, "No, I don't run in front of people. No, I won't climb a tree in front of people." 

I love when King David is welcoming in the arc of the covenant in the Old Testament, it says, "He stripped down to nothing but a loincloth and he started dancing in front of the arc and he led in the entire way," the King of Israel.

He led in the arc with dancing before the Lord. His wife says, "What are you doing? You just humiliated yourself."

He said, "For the sake of God, I will become even more undignified than that if the presence of God calls me to do that."

My question as a church for us is how desperate are we for experiencing the presence of Jesus at work in our lives?

Are you willing to be humiliated?

True humility in the eyes of God is being desperate enough to be humiliated in order to see God at work in your life.

"I don't care what people think, I've got to get there."

Jesus' work in our lives brings restoration, not humiliation. 

I need you to know; that should be the comfort that you take when you're telling people about Jesus.

The goal is not to make you look stupid in front of your friends and family. The goal is not to call out your past sins and say, "Okay if you're going to come to Jesus, we need to talk some things out. I need you to stand in front of everybody and declare all the sinful things you've done.
Once we've cleared it all out, then you can be one of us." 

No, no, no, no, no. He just wants to restore you and leave the past in the past.

Now, I don't know if you're like me, but I will say there are some things I'm not proud of. There are some things I just wish people would forget about. Wouldn't it be nice if you were in a community of people who said, "I'm more concerned about with your present and your future than I am about your past?" because I serve a God who is more concerned about restoration than humiliation.

That's the God we serve.

When we recognize Jesus for who He is, you and I feel humiliated.

When you see holiness, you feel dirty. When you see God and you experience God, you go, oh, it's like the man who experienced God, "What a wretched man I am." David said, "Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in your way. I am dirty. I am unclean. I am unworthy when I stand in your presence."

But he never pushes that narrative. He never calls that out.

He says, "I know that's why I'm here."

See, Christ's work to restore is to restore his image in your life and bring you back to the life that the enemy convinced you that you were not worthy of. 

The number of people I've sat with and talked to about the Lord Jesus Christ and their relationship with him who've said, "But you don't understand how many bad things I've done," is so sad to me because the enemy has convinced you that your past, your history, your mistakes, your issues, your things are going to determine the way you live the rest of your future and your life, and that is not the case.

I serve a God of restoration and a God of hope, a God who says, "If you're willing to humiliate yourself, I'm not going to humiliate you any farther. I'm just going to bring you home."

Somebody needs to hear that today. He's not intimidated by your mess or how much you have or how little you have, or how you think of yourself or how somebody told you this, or how this went, or what you did when you're in fifth grade or you didn't get toilet-trained well. He's not worried about it. He's more concerned about your heart and knowing that you are home.