How to Get Closer to God

You Are Not Trying to Close a Distance Christ Already Removed

When we first receive Christ, many of us are hungry. We want to know Him. We pay attention. We ask questions. We read Scripture because we want to understand who He is. Then life gets busy, attention shifts, and the feeling of nearness can change.

That does not mean Christ changed.

Paul describes the love of God in 1 Corinthians 13 as patient, kind, enduring, and unfailing. The problem in our relationship with Christ is never that He has become moody, resentful, or unwilling to deal with us. We do not have to sit down with Him and negotiate the terms of our relationship again.

This is where the search for how to get closer to God can begin in the wrong place. If I assume my feeling of distance means He has actually withdrawn from me, I will start trying to repair something Christ has already secured. I may confess harder, perform better, make promises, or build a religious routine in hopes of getting back into His good graces.

But secure fellowship with God does not work that way. The question of whether a Christian can move in and out of fellowship is developed more fully in Can You Lose Fellowship with God?. The foundation is the same here: Christ is not moving in and out of relationship with you according to your latest performance.

You can live distracted. You can live as though He is far away. You can stop depending on Him and turn back toward your own understanding. But none of that creates a new position in Christ. The feeling changes. The relationship He established does not.

Union With Christ Changes the Question

The reason I can say that is not sentimental. It comes from what Scripture says about our union with Christ.

Paul reaches all the way back to Genesis when he writes in Ephesians 5:31–32: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

That marriage language is more than an illustration about affection. Paul uses it to describe union. When we receive Christ, we belong to Him. We are joined to Him.

The same movement appears in 1 Corinthians 15. Adam is the first man, the man of dust. Christ is the last Adam, the life-giving Spirit. We begin with an identity in Adam, but salvation gives us a new identity in Christ. Eternal life is not something we keep alive by maintaining enough mental concentration to believe correctly every minute of every day. If it were, we would be in and out of eternal life constantly.

This is why 2 Timothy 2:12–13 matters so much when it comes to eternal security. Paul writes, “if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.” The denial belongs to those who reject Him. But once we are His, our faithlessness does not make Christ faithless. He cannot deny Himself.

That last phrase makes sense in light of union. We are His. He remains faithful because His faithfulness is the foundation, not ours. Christ Lives in Me? develops that indwelling identity from Galatians 2:20.

So the Christian question is not, “How do I become close enough for God to accept me again?” It is, “Why am I living as though the One who joined me to Himself is far away?”

Feeling Far From God Is Usually a Problem of Belief

The ability to turn away from God and toward ourselves is old. We see it in the garden. Adam and Eve stopped believing what God had told them and trusted another word instead. They did not need a statue in order to commit idolatry. They treated God as though He were the liar and built their next decision on something else.

That pattern did not disappear because Christians received the Spirit. The apostles repeatedly wrote to born-again people and told them to continue in what they had heard, hold fast, stand firm, abide, walk by the Spirit, and live by faith.

In fact, Adam and Eve had the Spirit of God when they disobeyed the Lord and sought their own wisdom.

That is why I sometimes think “regenerate” or “born again” can be more precise than simply calling every Christian a “believer.” Believing is something Christians themselves can struggle to do. They can have the Spirit and still begin living according to lies.

John tells his readers, “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you” (1 John 2:24). Paul asks the Galatians whether, having begun by the Spirit, they are now being perfected by the flesh (Galatians 3:3). Hebrews warns its audience to pay much closer attention to what they had heard so they would not drift away from it (Hebrews 2:1). The point of those warnings is not that Christ keeps leaving His people. The problem is that His people can stop living by what is true.

When we follow lies about God, we can feel far from Him because our minds are operating from a false picture of Him. We can imagine a Christ who is holding forgiven sin against us, a Father who is keeping His distance until we improve, or a relationship that rises and falls with our emotional state.

None of those pictures can make us closer to God because they are not the God we actually have in Christ.

The Flesh Is Life Apart From Divine Influence

That brings us to the flesh. The word translated “flesh” can refer simply to the physical body, but Paul also uses it for human life operating apart from divine influence. That distinction matters because our bodies are not the enemy. Christians are not unholy bodies with holy spirits trapped inside them. We belong to the Lord, and our bodies are His temple.

Walking in the flesh is the problem of turning back toward human nature as though we can produce spiritual life from ourselves.

The Law of Moses exposed this problem over and over. Paul says the law came in to increase the trespass (Romans 5:20), and Romans 9 explains that Israel pursued righteousness as though it were based on works rather than faith. The Law was a constant reminder that they needed the Lord. When it became a mirror for admiring their own righteousness, something had gone wrong.

The same mistake can happen under grace. We can be saved by faith and then begin living as though spiritual growth is a self-improvement project. We can turn Christian living into another works-based gospel.

Paul’s question in Galatians 3:3 is wonderfully direct: “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” Put another way: you were not saved by a works-based gospel, so why would you live by one?

That is also why getting closer to God cannot be reduced to adding rules. The study How to Be Obedient to God develops the same issue from the obedience of faith. Christian obedience grows from trusting the Lord, not from building a better law system after Christ saved us from self-reliance.

God’s Sovereignty Does Not Make Every Event a Message

Living by faith also means learning how to think about what happens to us.

The Lord is sovereign. His good purpose will prevail. Nothing catches Him off guard. But that does not mean He is the direct cause of every event or that every inconvenience is a coded message from heaven.

If we treat every stubbed toe, illness, delay, or disappointment as a personal signal from God, we can become superstitious very quickly. Paul did not do that with Timothy’s stomach problems. In 1 Timothy 5:23 he told him to use a little wine for his stomach and frequent ailments. He did not turn the ailment into an accusation from God.

Paul himself also says in Galatians 4:13 that it was because of a bodily ailment that he first preached the gospel to the Galatians. God used the circumstance. That does not require us to say God directly caused the ailment as a punishment or a secret message.

The Lord allows us to have a will inside of His. Our will is never outside God’s reach or beyond His sovereignty, and we are not robots whose every movement is automated for us. His will stands, and within it we respond, trust, refuse, learn, wander, and return to dependence.

That frees us from two opposite fears. We do not have to think we ruined God’s plan because we made a bad decision. And we do not have to think God is torturing us every time something painful happens. We can live by truth instead of trying to decode every event through emotion.

Walk by the Spirit, Not by a Works-Based Gospel

Before salvation we were slaves to sin. Paul says in Romans 6 that those who were once slaves of sin have been set free from sin and become slaves of righteousness. That is a change of identity.

Yet a Christian can still live as though the old master owns him. We can return to familiar patterns, old assumptions, self-reliance, and desires that belong to the flesh even though we are no longer bound to that old identity.

This is where Galatians 5:16 becomes practical: “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” Notice that the desires of the flesh do not stop. Paul says we do not gratify them. We do not receive a new brain at salvation. Our minds need renewal. Old desires and old habits can remain. But now we can turn to the Spirit rather than being trapped in ourselves. Prior to Jesus, we had no other direction to turn to but ourselves. Now we have a greater alternative.

That is what words such as abide, walk in the light, walk by the Spirit, hold fast, humble yourself, and seek the Lord are calling us to do. They are not different ladders for climbing back toward God. They are different ways Scripture describes dependence on the One who is already present.

Abiding in Christ is not maintaining a fragile connection that Christ will sever when we fail. It is believing and depending on Him rather than turning back toward ourselves.

That also changes the way we look at other Christians. Poor behavior does not automatically prove that someone was never born again. The apostles confronted real sin in churches because Christians could live in unbelief. We should not excuse destructive behavior, but neither should we put on a self-righteous hat and imagine our own pleasing works came from us.

Ephesians 2:8–10 leaves no room for boasting. We are saved by grace through faith, not by our own doing, and even the good works we walk in belong to what God prepared. The gospel of condemnation and slander did not save us, and it will not produce the life of Christ in us.

Suffering Does Not Mean God Has Moved Away

None of this means the Christian life becomes easy. Jesus told His disciples that suffering would be part of life. Feeling pain is not a failure of grace, and suffering does not mean we need to take a break from living by faith until life becomes pleasant again.

In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). An angel appeared and strengthened Him, but the agony did not simply disappear. Luke says He prayed more earnestly.

Strength from the Father did not mean the absence of suffering. It meant He was not abandoned in it.

Yet the true reason for the distress Jesus was under had to do with becoming separated from His Father for a time as He bore the sins of the entire world on the cross.

And even there, something remarkable happened. The criminal beside Jesus had no opportunity to rebuild his life, prove himself, get baptized, or create a record of good works. He simply trusted the Lord. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus answered him with the promise of paradise.

I have always seen that moment as an encouragement from the Father to the Son in the middle of His suffering. Even there, at the climax of agony, the Father was at work.

We do not know exactly what tomorrow holds. When we mentally live out every negative possibility before it happens, we place ourselves inside a false reality. The Lord cannot be with us in our imaginations of what is to come because those things are not real. Whatever actually comes, the Lord will be there when we arrive.

That is why the answer to “how do I draw closer to God?” is not to manufacture a new relationship. Christ is the perfect Bridegroom. He has made His dwelling in you. You cannot improve the union He created.

If you feel far from God, tell Him. Ask Him to expose the lie, fear, self-reliance, or distraction that is shaping your thoughts. Turn again to what is true. He has not moved away.

The Christian cannot get any closer in position. We can only learn to live more fully from the nearness we already have in Christ.