Heb 4:15-16 – “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
Have you ever hesitated in God’s presence? Have you ever prayed, confessing your struggles and concerns, but then stopped short of full disclosure? I have.
There are a lot of good reasons that you and I share this experience. I say “good” to mean compelling or logical reasons in the human sense, yet in the end, there is no truly good reason, for we became spiritually deprived in that moment. Deprived of the full power, love, and grace of our beautiful God.
Guilt first keeps us from confessing our every sin and struggle and worry. Just look at the first human encounter of sin in the Garden of Eden to see the “natural” human response to the awareness of sin in God’s presence: “They…hid themselves” (Gen 3:8). They physically hid because of such shame. This feeling of shame or guilt is good in that it demonstrates that we have the righteous wherewithal to recognize sin as sin. Furthermore, Jesus says in Matt 5:4 that “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Have you ever mourned your sin? The healthy outlet for the guilt of sin is spiritual mourning of the separation from God, which is sin, followed by Jesus’ promise of comfort. What a great and gracious outcome!
But going further, I have found myself hesitating in God’s presence when sin isn’t even in question. This is when I am self-conscious of repeatedly asking for the same thing. For you or I, this could be asking for something that we desire in life, or when we have been continuously fighting to overcome temptation, or just keeping our eyes fixed upon Jesus (Heb 12:2), yet we have failed to do so again.
These hesitations can be uniquely different because they are not necessarily sin related, but rather, our hesitation comes from having to once again ask for help. My thoughts are that I should have made more progress by now, but I feel like we’re right back at square one and therefore God must be…disappointed. And I don’t want to disappoint Him. In those moments I want to man up, gear up, armor up, suit up, just get up and conquer those things in God’s name. And I’ve already asked for help like 1000 times. I feel like I need to come back to Him with some progress instead of saying, “Lord I still need your help, I’m struggling…yet again.” You may identify with my sentiment. In fact, these thoughts make a lot of sense, concerning our interaction with those from which we ask for help on earth. How many times could you ask your teacher, professor, or mentor to show you how to do something before they would think you were just un-teachable? How many times could you ask your closest family member for forgiveness for the same wrong-doing before they may think that “you’ll never change?” How many times could you go back to your boss for a project review with no progress, asking again for help to start out on the first steps? In each case, not many times…certainly not as many times as I’ve had to approach God with those exact same requests. We see God as our Teacher, our Mentor, our Father, and even our “Boss,” and we apply what we know about humans in these roles to our perfect God. This of course leads us astray, for we have tried to build a Creator out of the creation. Realizing this, we can more easily understand why this approach is wrong, but we must then apply it to our prayer conversations with Him.
You see, inside, I desire to come back to God with a finished me. I desire to bring before Him a perfect me. I desire to submit myself to Him, a pleasing sacrifice, unblemished and pure. The problem is that of course, I cannot. In fact, I can only become those things by first coming to Him and confessing all my spiritual blemishes, impurities, and imperfections. That includes sin, yes, but it also includes the life-long pursuit of righteousness and purging of selfishness, which does indeed take an entire lifetime—and even an entire lifetime by itself is terribly insufficient because in Christ alone are we made perfect. But we are made perfect indeed (Eph 4:13; Col 1:22, 28). It is why we can come “boldly before His throne” (Heb 4:16). We come humbly, yet confidently before the throne of God and are made pure and perfect by Christ, who is “seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2). What an amazing instantaneous turnaround.
So what have you been praying to God over and over and over? Don’t stop. Pray it through to completion. Have you not only failed to make progress but even regressed in an area? Then we need Him even more than ever…and He already knows. Until you seek His strength and mercy, you will have neither. But instantly upon seeking Him, you will have both abundantly. Simply seek and find. Ask and receive. Knock and the door will be opened. (Matt 7:7-8, Luke 11:9-10) Have you knocked, entered, then somehow found yourself outside again? Knock again and the door will be opened again. The more honestly and transparently we come, splaying out all that is within our souls to God, the more immediately and gloriously His power of transformation can be realized in you and me. Hold nothing back.
If you’ve had the thought, “well, then it doesn’t matter what I do today, he’ll open the door again,” then you have taken this seriously the wrong way. At that moment, you are only going through the motions of knocking. Let me ask you this: if you show up at my home and hold your hand up in the motion of knocking, never actually knocking in sincerity, never making contact with the door, will I hear you? No, of course I will not, and will therefore not acknowledge you nor let you in. Be careful of “going through the motions.” Make sure you knock with all sincerity, and I assure you God will open His door of love, grace, mercy, healing, and strength wide to you. He has for me. He has for thousands and millions of your neighbors. He has for multitudes upon multitudes since the beginning of time. How do we know this? Start reading the Bible from Matthew 1:1 through John 21:25. It’s the most amazing Truth. I encourage you to read and judge for yourself. But don’t just go through the motions, or you’ll be wasting your time. Read it with the most sincerity you can muster, even as a skeptic. You will find answers. You will have some more questions. Keep digging and you will continue to find new answers and new questions, each bringing you closer to Truth, and along the way you’ll come to realize that there was no greater pursuit in your entire life.
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