I love my family, immediate and extended. I am loyal to their well-being and want every best thing for them. I love my friends. I am loyal to their health, relationships and our boundaries. I love my nation. I am loyal to it's safety, community, culture and capital exchange.
All of these are material principles I have etched in stone. It's a give and take and involves a multitude of apologies and forgiveness.
However... How can we be loyal to God who we see as an ideal, another name for beauty, goodness or truth? He is spoken of in the Bible as a living, breathing, feeling human being. How can we keep him at arms length as just a set of rules and moral guidelines after reading his many counts of forgiveness, love, healing, guiding, protection, mercy and grace?
We need to come to the Bible as you would a counselor, a therapist, a Father who knows your every lie, distrust, pain, and achievement with open arms. How can you have a private conversation to a being with these qualities believing there is a great chasm you have to shout across to be understood?
Picture yourself entering a room and He is sitting, waiting for you... he gives you a hug, says "I love you," then counsels you.
His voice is inside you.
We all have the capacity to come close to God, to feel what the disciples felt when they walked and talked with Jesus. We fall short on our immediate faculties, seeing and hearing, and forget about feeling and our intuitions. It's hard to push past the constant noise of the visible world, fighting itself, climbing the ever rising mountain of self-proclamation. We doubt the spiritual world as real in the accepted meaning of the word. It's hard to push past the noise of the visible world demanding its reality and finality.
Shut your eyes, shut out the world that demands your attention like a 3 year old spoiled child. God has no favorites. (Acts 10:34-36)
We are like Peter who loved the idea of Christ, but when he started walking on the water and trusted the physics of water more than the Creator of the elements, he fell and started drowning.
God is real. He is all around us. As we come to Him, he will reveal his wonders, His Presence. There is no place where God is not.
Psalm 139:7-10
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
