Come near to God

In chapel today, we talked about James 4:7-10 - ⁷ Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

There are a couple interesting points about this section of scripture...   look at the action words in these verses... Submit, resist, come, wash, purify, grieve, change, humble.... Those are all things that we are to do as believers!

Imagine you are standing at a door. Imagine that on the other side of this door stands Jesus Christ. Let’s look at those actions we just talked about….

1. Submit - take a step towards the closed door. Your heart races as you realize you need to surrender your life.
2. Resist – we take a step back in human fear. We fight the notion from satan that God will not accept us as we are.
3. Come – you approach the door and raise your hand to knock. We think about how He will see us.
4. Wash – we consider that we are about to stand before a Holy God. You ask yourself, “What is the condition of my heart?”
5. Grieve – we drop to a knee and confess our sinfulness and short comings.
6. Humble – when nothing is left of us; no pride, no selfishness, no attitude. We knock…

The door opens slowly and we see Jesus on the other side of the door. We look up and he smiles at us. He holds out his hand and says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." - Luke 11:9.
Humble yourself and God will lift you up. The more you move toward God, the more you can count on God moving toward you. Where do you stand? It's your move...