The God Who Draws Near
Have you ever quietly felt like you were burdening God just by coming to Him? Pastor Mike O'Connell opened this week's message with a friend's honest confession — that deep in his subconscious, he'd been living with the belief that when he brings his requests to God, he's bothering Him, because surely God has more important things to deal with.
If that instinct sounds familiar, pastor Mike's whole point is that it feels like humility but it's actually a lie about the character of God.
To dismantle it, he walked the entire arc of scripture, and it starts with loss. In the garden, God "walked about" with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8, NLT) — an ongoing, habitual nearness. Eden, Pastor Mike said, was not primarily a paradise of nature; it was a paradise of proximity. The fall didn't just introduce sin and suffering. It severed the one thing that mattered most: access.
The second movement is that God built a house.
Pastor Mike pointed to the years David spent preparing the temple he would never walk into — gathering materials, organizing priests, receiving a blueprint by divine revelation — so his son Solomon could build "a magnificent structure, famous and glorious throughout the world" (1 Chronicles 22:5, NLT). Why the obsessive detail? Because the quality of the preparation was entirely determined by the identity of the occupant. When the temple was finished and the worshipers sang that God is good and His faithful love endures forever, His presence came down and filled the room so completely the priests couldn't stand (2 Chronicles 5:12–14, NLT). Then Solomon prayed the sentence that reframes everything: "But will God really live on earth among people? Why, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this Temple I have built!" (2 Chronicles 6:18, NLT).
"This building cannot contain the God that we built it for."
The temple was a chapter, not the ending. Its glory would later leave (Ezekiel 10), followed by 400 years of silence. And then, with no announcement from Rome, a baby was born in Bethlehem. The Word "became human and made his home among us" (John 1:14, NLT) — a word that means He pitched His tent, tabernacled, among us. God didn't just visit.
When Jesus took His last breath, the temple curtain was "torn in two, from top to bottom" (Matthew 27:51, NLT) — a direction that matters, because it's God's act, not ours. And in Acts 2, the same fire that once fell on sacrifice and filled the temple came to rest on ordinary people. That's why Paul can say your body "is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you" (1 Corinthians 6:19, NLT). He became the house, and then He moved into us.
So what do you do this week?
Sit with the two questions Pastor Mike ended on. Do you know how much God wants to be near you — that you are the point, not the burden? And do you live like you know it — not with performance or low-grade anxiety, but with reverence and a real hunger for God? One more to carry: what would our city look like if ordinary people walked into every room this week actually carrying His presence?
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