July 2008

Welcome to Closer to God for Newfrontiers online, brought to you in association with Scripture Union.

Closer to God is here to help you unlock the power of the Bible. If you want to see God move in power in your life and in the nations, keep reading! Closer to God is the Bible-reading guide that firmly believes that God is reaching out to his church through his Word and his Spirit with the message of his life-transforming love and all-surpassing glory. Closer to God's aim is to help you find out how God speaks to ordinary people: loving, freeing, changing and healing them in order to do incredible things for him.

It cannot be without reason that many human beings enjoy getting out into nature and away from the urban and manmade – escaping to some place where there’s no people and no hassle! The natural world just seems to testify to God’s creative power more obviously than anything you can find in a city. I used to think that there could be nothing better than to live in a cottage on the rugged Irish coast, County Kerry or Clare perhaps. But then… what about the amenities? The 24-hour supermarkets? The medical services? How can we live without the convenience of everyone and everything being on the doorstep?

The truth of it is that we have many illusions about nature and we want it on our terms, with all the mod cons, not necessarily as God designed it. And it’s easy to apply a similar attitude to God himself. We want the God who cares, saves, nurtures, upholds, blesses and heals at our convenience, but we aren’t so keen on the God who challenges us, who wants us to step out of our comfort zones, who asks us to humble ourselves, who wants us to offer his love to people we find unlovely. We domesticate God at our risk. We need to be defining ourselves in relationship to him, not defining him according to the limits of our wishes and desires. And relationships are at the core of what God is about and what he wants for humankind.

As Belinda Pollard writes in her series this month on Creation Psalms, ‘Everything in creation has something to say about how extraordinary our God is.’ It’s too easy for us to think in terms of trees and flowers, mountains and streams when we think of God the Creator, and forget about his greatest creation, us! We are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and perhaps what we’re missing with our ‘escape to the country’ mentality is that we’ve been made to be together. Cities, then, demonstrate the immensity of God’s creative power mediated through a multitude of lives. God loves community and wants us to do so too. His power is demonstrated on the earth through his collective people, the Church. What’s more, the collective churches of God in eternity become the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, where God dwells with his people (see Revelation 21).

If you live in the northern hemisphere, perhaps you’re going away to somewhere beautiful on holiday this summer. Or maybe you’re staying at home and looking forward to some ‘me’ time. Wherever we are, God wants us to be totally there with him, not on ‘holiday’. He wants us to have time together with him, for it does us good, but more than that he wants us to acknowledge that he is there with us always, even in the moments we think of as unspiritual. If we invite him into everything we do, think and say, we will be living a life that is marked by his power and blessing. And it will change our relationships with other people. We will get God’s perspective on them, see that they are made in his image too, no matter how broken that image might seem to be. Firmly rooted in him we can demonstrate through being friendly and inclusive that we serve an outrageously friendly and inclusive God, who delights in all that he has made.

Be blessed and be a blessing to others this summer,

Phil Andrews

Editor, Closer to God