The Accessibility of God
If anyone knows me more than a little, they know that I bleed black and gold - I’m a Pittsburgher through and through. So of course, I love the sports - the Penguins and Steelers in particular. For the Steelers, I have my Terrible Towel and my Polamalu wig and my hard hat that I wear when I go to Heinz Field to watch them play. I joined 250,000 other people downtown to cheer them on after they won the Super Bowl in 2006. Do I need more cred? I’m a big fan.
So why is it that, even though their annual summer training camp is literally five or ten minutes from my house, I never made it out (excluding being too young to remember) until I was 21 years old? It’s funny…the reason I even went this past summer was that my cousins had come in from Ohio for the sole purpose of doing so. I only went to tag along with them.
The accessibility of the Steelers training camp is a great thing! For free, I can go see the guys I cheer for, basically whenever I want. They’ll drive right by you in golf carts and you can see their big cars in the parking lots. Sometimes, you can even get autographs. But, because I can go whenever I want to, I never go.
What’s the point?
God is super accessible. It’s something Christians emphasize a lot, and rightfully so. People think that no one sees them cry or hears their pleas for help. People need to know that God is always watching, always listening, always acting. As it says in the Scriptures:
Joshua 1:5c
I will not leave you or forsake you.
God’s promises don’t stop there. Jesus makes this bold statement:
Matthew 7:7-8
7 Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.
8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
See? God doesn’t limit Himself to just standing around in your life. He’s always waiting for you and me to step up and communicate with Him! Anytime you want to repent, you can run to your Father and He will receive your humble heart. Anytime you seek Him, you will find Him. This is great stuff, right?
Right! But it comes with an inherent challenge. Challenges are fine and natural. If you stay single, that comes with the challenge of no sex. If you get married, that comes with the challenge of fidelity. With every benefit, with every situation, comes a challenge, and the challenge with the awesome accessibility of God is that we will be tempted to fall into the “I can do it whenever I want to” line of thought.
A picture of an inaccessible God
Can you picture what life would be like if God was not accessible? Austin Phelps did. Phelps was an American minister lived during the 1800s. In Harry Emerson Fosdick’s book “The Meaning of Prayer,” Fosdick quotes him as saying:
In the vestibule of St Peter’s, at Rome, is a doorway, which is walled up and marked with a cross. It is opened but four times in a century. On Christmas Eve, once in twenty-five years, the Pope approaches it in princely state, with the retinue of cardinals in attendance, and begins the demolition of the door, by striking it three times with a silver hammer. When the passage is opened, the multitude pass into the nave of the cathedral, and up to the altar, by an avenue which the majority of them never entered thus before, and never will enter thus again. Imagine that the way to the Throne of Grace were like the Porta Sancta, inaccessible, save once in a quarter of a century. Conceive that it were now ten years since you, or I, or any other sinner, had been permitted to pray: and that fifteen long years must drag themselves away, before we could venture again to approach God; and that, at the most, we could not hope to pray more than two or three times in a lifetime. With what solicitude we should wait for the coming of that Holy Day!
I researched the Porta Sancta, known simply in English as the Holy Door. It’s just another doorway into St. Peter’s Basilica, but if you go through it, you get a plenary indulgence. To explain this takes us into a drawn-out explanation of Catholic soteriology, so I’ll spare the details. Just know that it’s a big deal.
All I know is that if I could only pray to God once every 25 years, you’d better believe I’d be ready for it. I wouldn’t sleep an extra hour or come back to it later or do it after work because I had blown the morning off on the Internet.
I think that God realized this issue when He decided that He was always going to be around for His people. So then, it’s okay that we rearrange our schedules sometimes, so long as our dominant desire is Christ, and knowing Him. That’s the key to this whole thing. If you could only pray once a year, you would have a strong desire to pray that day. But you can pray or read everyday, so have a strong desire to do so! That’s where I want to be.
Grace and peace,
Brendan
