I Have Seen Too Much to Live at a Distance

Strengthen me. Refresh me. I have seen something of His love, and now I cannot live satisfied with distance. That is the trouble with seeing Him. God can show you enough of Himself in one moment to make the life you tolerated yesterday unbearable tomorrow.

There are encounters with God that do not answer your questions. They destroy your questions and replace them with hunger. You thought you needed circumstances to change, doors to open, pain to leave, people to understand, and prayers to finally be answered. Then Jesus lets you see something of Himself, and suddenly beneath all those legitimate desires you discover the deepest ache of the human heart. I do not merely need something from God. I need God.

That discovery will wreck a comfortable Christian life.

Because once you have tasted nearness, distance begins to hurt.

Before you knew His presence, you could explain away the emptiness. You could fill the silence, stay busy, attend church, quote Scripture, listen to preaching, sing the songs, serve somewhere, and convince yourself that because you were around the things of God you were near the God of the things. Then He came close. Maybe only for a moment, but one moment was enough to expose years of religious survival.

Now you know.

There is a difference between knowing about the fire and burning.

There is a difference between preaching about the presence and carrying it.

There is a difference between believing God loves you and having His love crash through every defense you built to survive without intimacy.

Once you know that difference, you cannot unknow it.

This is one of the severe mercies of God. He will sometimes give you a glimpse that creates an appetite He alone can satisfy. We usually think hunger means God is withholding Himself, but sometimes hunger means God has already revealed Himself. The ache is not evidence that He abandoned you. The ache may be evidence that He came close enough to ruin your appetite for everything else.

That changes how I understand spiritual hunger.

Maybe the hunger itself is mercy.

Maybe the dissatisfaction is mercy.

Maybe the thing keeping me awake is not evidence that something has gone wrong. Maybe God has allowed me to see enough of His beauty that normal Christianity cannot anesthetize me anymore. Maybe heaven touched something in me, and now my soul refuses to return quietly to business as usual.

So strengthen me.

Because revelation creates responsibility.

Once I have seen, I have to decide what I am going to do with what I saw. I cannot keep asking God for deeper revelation while protecting shallow obedience. I cannot cry for His fire while carefully removing everything from the altar that I do not want Him to touch. There comes a moment when hunger has to become surrender or it will eventually become religious theater.

We have enough theater.

We know how to sound hungry.

We know when to lift our hands. We know the vocabulary of revival, intimacy, glory, presence, awakening, fire, surrender, and encounter. We can describe depths we have never entered and celebrate testimonies from people who paid prices we have never considered paying. We can become experts in the language of abandoned people while maintaining extraordinary control over our own lives.

God is not impressed by the vocabulary of surrender.

He wants the surrender.

The frightening beauty of divine love is that it does not merely soothe you. It claims you. Jesus did not shed His blood so He could become one important part of an otherwise self governed existence. The cross is not God asking to be included in your plans. The cross is God revealing what love looks like when love comes to take possession of everything death stole.

You were bought.

That should shake us again.

Not rented on Sundays. Not borrowed during worship. Not partially owned whenever obedience happens to agree with your preferences. Bought with blood. Loved at a price so violent and beautiful that nobody looking honestly at Calvary can continue pretending that casual Christianity is a reasonable response.

He gave Himself.

What exactly are we still negotiating?

This is why I am asking Him to strengthen me. I am not asking for strength so I can become impressive. I am asking for strength because there are places obedience will take me that enthusiasm cannot carry me. Emotion can get you to an altar, but only grace can teach you to remain there when the fire starts consuming things you secretly hoped God would let you keep.

Strengthen me when obedience becomes inconvenient.

Strengthen me when nobody understands.

Strengthen me when prayer feels like digging through concrete and heaven seems silent.

Strengthen me when the thing You asked me to release is still screaming my name.

Strengthen me when I discover that the greatest enemy of wholeheartedness was never the devil standing in front of me, but the divided heart living inside me.

I want the war.

Not war against people. Not religious aggression that produces arrogant men who mistake volume for authority and cruelty for courage. I want war against everything in me that has learned to survive without conscious dependence on Jesus. I want war against the secret agreements I have made with comfort, fear, reputation, self preservation, distraction, bitterness, lust, pride, and control.

I am tired of decorating chains.

I want them broken.

And real love breaks chains because real love refuses to leave the beloved enslaved. Grace is not God lowering His holiness until my compromise becomes acceptable. Grace is God entering my grave, raising me into a life I could never manufacture, and empowering me to become what sin told me I could never be. Grace does not make bondage comfortable. Grace brings dead men out of tombs.

That means encounter must eventually become obedience.

If my encounters never change my private decisions, I need to examine what I am calling encounter. If I can tremble in a worship service and remain merciless at home, something is wrong. If I can speak in spiritual language and keep feeding secret compromise, something is wrong. If I constantly need another meeting to make me feel alive because I have never learned to meet Him behind a closed door, something is wrong.

The secret place tells the truth.

There are no crowds there.

No microphone.

No reputation to maintain.

Just you, an open Bible, a closed door, and the terrifying possibility that the God you have been singing about might actually answer.

That is where men and women are made.

Not on platforms.

In surrender.

God does something in hidden places that public ministry cannot produce. He digs beneath gifting until He reaches motive. He puts His finger on wounds we turned into identities, ambitions we baptized as calling, fears we renamed wisdom, and compromises we defended as personality. Then He waits for our yes.

That yes may cost you something.

Good.

Christianity was never designed around preserving the little kingdom of self.

Jesus said follow Me, and buried inside those two words is the death of every version of you that insists on being lord. Follow Me when you understand. Follow Me when you do not. Follow Me when there is applause and follow Me when obedience empties the room.

We have spent too much time asking God to bless what He told us to bury.

Bury it.

Whatever keeps demanding the throne, bury it.

Whatever makes you continually choose distance when access has already been purchased, stop petting it. Stop explaining it. Stop writing theological permission slips for the thing God has been putting His finger on for years. Repent, get up, and come home.

The veil is torn.

Think about that.

The veil is torn, yet we keep learning how to live in the courtyard.

Jesus gave His body so distance would no longer define the relationship between God and His people. The blood opened the way. The Spirit came to make communion with God a living reality rather than an occasional religious experience.

And we are satisfied with visitation.

Why?

Why would people invited into the Holy of Holies build permanent houses in the parking lot?

Why would we celebrate access and refuse to enter?

Why would we sing about His presence while constructing lives that require almost none of it to function?

That question frightens me.

How much of my life can operate without God?

My schedule can.

My phone can.

My plans can.

My religious habits can.

My personality can.

My gifting can.

It is possible to become frighteningly competent at doing Christian things without present dependence upon Christ.

That is the poverty I want exposed.

I do not want to become good at living without Him.

I want dependence.

I want the kind of dependence where prayer is not an item on my schedule but the confession that I cannot breathe without communion. I want Scripture to become bread again instead of material. I want worship to become response instead of atmosphere. I want obedience to become the immediate answer of a heart that has settled the ownership question.

Refresh me, God.

Not because I need another spiritual high.

Refresh me because the road is long and I intend to finish burning.

Yesterday’s oil was beautiful, but yesterday is gone. Yesterday’s revelation should become today’s obedience, not today’s museum. I refuse to build monuments around places where God moved because I am afraid to follow Him into places where I have no history.

There is more.

Not more because Jesus is incomplete.

More because He is inexhaustible.

You can spend the rest of eternity beholding Him and never reach the edge of His beauty. There will never come a morning when the heart of Christ has nothing left to astonish you. There will never come a season when you have exhausted the depths of His mercy, holiness, wisdom, tenderness, authority, purity, and love.

So why have we settled?

Why are we bored?

Why are we distracted?

Why does a glowing screen sometimes command more sustained attention from us than the God who breathed galaxies into existence and then allowed nails through His hands to bring us home?

Something has gone wrong.

And I refuse to call it normal.

I do not want enough of God to improve my life.

I want enough of God to overthrow it.

I want Him in the rooms I locked.

I want Him touching the ambitions I never surrendered.

I want Him confronting the offenses I secretly enjoy carrying.

I want Him entering the memories I avoid, the relationships I control, the money I protect, the future I fear, and the reputation I keep polishing.

All of it.

Because love wants all of me, and I am beginning to understand that this demand is not cruelty.

It is mercy.

The One asking for everything is the One who already gave everything.

That changes surrender.

Surrender is not throwing your life into the hands of a tyrant.

Surrender is finally giving your life to the only Man whose scars prove exactly what He will do with it.

Look at His hands.

That is who is asking for your yes.

Look at His side.

That is who is asking you to trust Him.

Look at the cross and tell me what part of your heart is safer outside His possession.

There is none.

So take it.

Take the whole thing.

Take the polished parts and the ugly parts. Take the victories and the wounds. Take what I understand and what still makes me angry. Take my calling, my obscurity, my strength, my weakness, my money, my future, my body, my reputation, my dreams, and every secret room where I have written my own name on the throne.

I have seen too much now.

That is the problem.

I have seen too much of His kindness to believe the world has something better.

I have seen too much of His holiness to keep calling compromise harmless.

I have seen too much of His faithfulness to keep worshiping fear.

I have seen too much of the cross to keep pretending that surrender is extreme.

Maybe this is how revival actually begins.

Not with stadiums.

Not with headlines.

Not with everybody knowing your name.

Maybe revival begins when one human heart becomes incapable of making peace with distance.

One person closes the door.

One person gets on the floor.

One person stops blaming everybody else.

One person opens the Word and refuses to move until excuses start dying.

One person forgives.

One person repents.

One person obeys.

One person decides that if God is really God, then He will no longer receive leftovers.

And heaven finds somewhere to rest.

That is what I want.

Not visitation.

Habitation.

I do not want to occasionally feel His presence. I want my life arranged around His presence. I want my home to know Him, my private thoughts to honor Him, my decisions to reveal Him, my enemies to encounter His mercy through me, and broken people to discover when they come near my life that there is Another Man living here.

Jesus.

Only Jesus.

At the end of all this hunger, there is not a ministry.

There is a Man.

At the end of consecration, there is not a reputation.

There is a Man.

At the end of revival, miracles, prayer, fasting, obedience, sacrifice, missions, suffering, and every costly yes worth giving, there is still a Man.

Jesus Christ.

And perhaps this is the revelation that changes everything.

My hunger is not proof that He has stayed away.

My hunger may be proof that He came near.

He let me taste.

He let me see.

He pulled the curtain back just enough for my heart to realize what it had been created for, and now everything lesser has become painfully small.

That is why I cannot go back.

I am not dissatisfied because His love failed me.

I am dissatisfied because His love found me.

His goodness created this ache.

His beauty created this hunger.

His nearness exposed my distance.

And now the same grace that awakened the hunger must give me strength to follow it.

So strengthen me.

Refresh me.

Do not let me become skilled at explaining an encounter I am no longer pursuing. Do not let yesterday’s fire become today’s vocabulary. Do not let me preach about depths while quietly returning to the shore.

Take me deeper.

Take me until obedience is no longer something I debate.

Take me until secret compromise becomes unbearable.

Take me until love for people costs me something.

Take me until prayer becomes oxygen.

Take me until Jesus is no longer merely the most important part of my life.

Take me until Jesus is my life.

I have seen something of His love.

That is why distance hurts now.

That is why ordinary religion cannot satisfy me anymore.

That is why something inside me keeps crying when everything around me says I should be content.

I have seen Him.

Not fully.

Not nearly enough.

But enough.

Enough to know there is more.

Enough to know He is worth everything.

Enough to know that whatever it costs to come nearer is cheaper than spending the rest of my life learning how to survive at a distance.

Strengthen me, God.

Refresh me.

You started this hunger when You showed me Your love.

Now give me the grace to follow it all the way into You.

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