I know what it’s like to sit in a Sunday service and be counting down the minutes until it’s over.
I know what it’s like to raise your hands during worship while your mind is fixed on what the person a few rows behind thinks of you.
I know what it’s like to scroll on your phone while your Bible sits inches away from your hands.
I know what it’s like to fight to keep yourself from falling asleep during prayer.
You used to be on fire for the Lord.
Sundays used to be your favorite day of the week.
Worship wasn’t about who was around you but about who it was for.
The Word was your liferaft instead of a chore.
Your prayers were honest and raw instead of quick and impersonal.
It’s as if you have silently divorced God. He lives in the same house as you. You say hi every now and then. You tell Him how your day was and then go back to doing whatever it is that you were doing. You’re right next to Him on the couch, and yet, you feel as if He’s a world away. The emotional intimacy you once had seems foreign, and you’re now just cohabiting with someone you used to love deeply.
He used to be the first person you told about your struggles, fears, and dreams. You didn’t trust that you could take a step forward, let alone your next breath, without Him. It was no longer you against the world; it was you and God and everything else.
If a husband and a wife are feeling distant and experiencing a loss of intimacy, would you tell them just to start looking for closeness in other people? Would you encourage them to take up other hobbies or interests to distract themselves from the problems in their marriage?
No, you would encourage them to fight. That’s what the call to continue pursuing Christ is—a never-ending battle to keep God on the throne of your heart.
One could assume that someone who stops pursuing God is laxidazical or blatantly uninterested—and maybe that's the case for some. But I’m more convinced that for most, this distance is actually a result of a disastrous familiarity with God.
This is an urgent call for you to wake up from the disillusionment that being around the things of God is the same as being with God. This casual familiarity with His triune, perfect, holy nature not only breeds distance, but also disobedience—God vs. our natural, fleshly desires that always lead to death. When we don’t have our eyes fixed on Him, the latter will win every time.
Instead of picturing your fractured relationship with Him as a tiny wound you can fix with a band-aid and a couple of weeks of healing, I want you to envision yourself bleeding out on a sidewalk in desperate need of an ambulance, moments from losing consciousness and your life itself, because that is how dire a situation this is.
So…you’re bleeding out. What do you do now? How do you keep from seeing God as another face in the crowd and restore reverence for Him as your Savior?
Remember.
God’s Word repeatedly tells us to remember. Why? Because we (humanity) are forgetful people. There is a reason why the theme of remembrance is riddled throughout scripture.
If you read almost any story in the Old Testament, be prepared to find yourself in a frustrating loop of God doing something miraculous, humanity forgetting, and humanity seeking God so that He does something miraculous again, only for them to forget days later.
We must remember. If you don’t have a prayer journal, start one today. Write down all of the ways He has been faithful to you in your life until this very point, and spend time reminding yourself of how far He has brought you.
Don’t just write about that job offer you received or the time He healed a loved one—God isn’t worthy of your praise only when things go your way. Write about how He has changed you. Study the fruit of the Spirit and note how you used to be disastrously impatient, yelling at people who cut you off in the car, but now you pray for them. Pen the many ways you respond with kindness instead of your usual judgment. Reflect on how He plucked you out of the grave and promised you eternity with Him. Mark the people in your life whom He has used you to minister to who were raised from death to life.
Be astonished.
I’ll never forget the first time I watched a sermon from my pastor, Louie Giglio, called “Indescribable.” I was watching this message to write the accompanying content for our website—a project that required me to watch sermons for months at a time. At this point, hundreds of messages in, I was feeling numb.
That was until I heard this specific sermon from 2005, given eight years after I was born and 12 years before I would come to know Christ. As I listened, tears streamed down my face as I learned how the creator of the cosmos cared enough to form each of us. God formed me—Giovanna, a girl with a birthmark on her left leg and a burning, innate desire for honesty and authenticity.
Allow the awe and wonder of the creator of the universe to captivate you again.
Open the Word of God and turn to Genesis 1. Remind yourself of how God created the heavens and the earth. Revel in how He made light from darkness and separated land from water. Then flip to Genesis 2, and read about how He formed humanity from dust and gave them His very own breath. Skip forward to Exodus 14 and savor how God parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could journey to the Promised Land. Go to Matthew 28 and be reminded of how insane the resurrection of Jesus was—a perfect and innocent man who was brutally crucified reappearing three days later in a brand new body, perfectly fulfilling prophecies dated hundreds of years prior.
Pray.
To try to see God without the help of God is impossible. It’s like telling an estranged married couple to just look at old photo albums to remember their wedding day, hoping mere images would pull them close to each other again instead of talking to each other.
You can’t restore your relationship with God without coming to Him in prayer.
Your prayers don’t have to be words spoken so eloquently that they sound like an English professor wrote them. In fact, in Matthew's gospel, Jesus rebukes vacant words used only to impress.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.”
Matthew 6:7
If you don’t have the words for yourself, it’s okay. Romans 8:26 says, "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”
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Here is a brief prayer if you need to borrow one:
Father,
I miss you.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation.
Remind me of who you are and what you have done for me.
Reignite in me a deep love for you, and help me to die to myself daily so that I may glorify you all the more.
Amen.
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When you feel miles away from God, remember what He has done, be astonished by who He is, and pray earnestly to Him.
It’s time to fight for your relationship with the Father instead of accepting a silent divorce. Fight the temptation to see Him as ordinary, like your life depends on it, because it does.
In this desolate place, our aim is nothing less than full-on adoration for God, and to be so enamored with who He is and what He has done that we can’t help but fall to our knees in response.
Daniel 2:20 reads, “…Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his.”
Wisdom and power don’t just describe Him—He owns these attributes, and we praise Him accordingly. Glory, glory. Hallelujah. We serve a King mightier than any king that has ever reigned on this earth, and He alone deserves to be exalted. It is the only appropriate response.
Scripture References