The temperature has been warm and the sun has been out all day. The strong breeze of earlier today has blown itself away, making perfect bike riding conditions. I’m looking forward to a ride with Diann around the section, a distance of about four miles, after I write to you.

The question in your last letter deserves a thoughtful answer. I’ll try my best to explain how a person can connect with God in a meaningful way. I can tell you now that it’ll take more than this letter to do that.

First of all, the good news is that we don’t have to search for God. The Biblical record makes it clear that God has always taken the initiative to search for people to belong to Him. In other words, we don’t have to find God; we just have to let ourselves be found.

Do you feel far away from God? Guess who moved? I’m not picking on you; I, along with the rest of humanity, have moved away from God. What has distanced us from God is the fact that we’re so unlike Him! He originally designed human beings in His own image. This God-likeness would have allowed us to relate to Him on a personal basis, but that ideal condition no longer exists. We’ve alienated ourselves from God by our sinfulness.

The suggestion that our sinfulness could keep us from God and out of His heaven might prompt some people to respond by arguing, "But I’m a pretty good person." Most of us feel that if God grades on the curve, we’ll make a passable score for being accepted by God. My reading of the Bible tells me otherwise. Such a view reveals a sadly misguided understanding of just how holy God is and just how sinful we are. The gap is infinite.

Have you ever moved a piece of furniture in a carpeted room from where it’s been since the carpet was laid? We have. You think you’ve kept up your vacuuming and carpet shampooing regime and that the high-traffic area still looks pretty good. Then you compare it to where you’ve just pulled the piece of furniture from against the wall. It’s an eye-opening experience. By comparison with the still new and clean portion of carpet long hidden and protected under the piece of furniture, the rest of the carpet looks worn and dirty.

We fool ourselves into thinking we’re not all that far removed from being like the holy God of the universe, but that just shows we haven’t a clue as to how holy and awesome in His purity God really is. If you check out the accounts in the Bible of people who had a direct encounter with God, like the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament and the Apostle Peter in the New Testament, you’ll see that they experienced sheer terror at seeing a glimpse of God’s holiness.

We should resist the temptation to do a quick count of our sins to try to assess just how far we are from God. It’s not our individual sins that paint a dark picture, it’s our sinfulness. As someone has suggested, we’re not sinful because we sin, but we sin because we’re sinful.

We’re born with a sinful nature, a fact anybody who’s ever been around little children fully understands. Kids are by nature selfish and self-centered. Their whole little world must revolve around them, and they must get their way or everybody’s miserable. We don’t have to teach them to be this way. They come by it naturally. We have to spend a great deal of time and energy teaching them how to be good.

As we grow we may succeed, to some degree, at disguising this fallen nature by being a pretty good person, but it’s always there, right beneath the surface. And often enough it erupts, sometimes surprising us and others in rather ugly ways. We aren’t fit to be in close relationship with God, not now and not forever in heaven.

I’ve given you the bad news. Now I can give you the good news: God’s taken action to rectify the problem! We can’t save ourselves, but God can save us. However, that’s another letter.

Now for that bike ride. It’s refreshing to take a road at a slower speed and with no car windows keeping out the sounds and smells of ditches and fields. I may have taken the same road the same day by car, but it seems like an entirely different road by bike.

A fellow seeker after truth,
Dave