One of the biggest barriers to having a great relationship with God is: if you're addicted to being right, and are a control freak - which wouldn't apply to any of us would it? Making others bend to their will?
With God we lose control. To worship a God, who is spirit, means: we have to give up control, and choose to just trust. You can't get your head around Him. You can't be right about it.
God does not expect you to be right. The pressure is off from that. The rabbis said it this way: If we spend two hours tonight talking about God, if 95 per cent of what we said was wrong, God would still be pleased - just because we gave up a night to talk about Him. You're a 4-D being. You're just Joe and Jane man, just Joe and Jane. You're doing your best to try to figure out a God, an infinitely-dimensional God, and you're a four-dimensional person.
God does not expect you to get it right; God just expects you to journey. When you look at Jesus, the people who ticked Jesus off the worst was the people who actually thought: they figured it out; who thought: they were in, and everybody else was out.
One rabbi said: “There are things that I can know about God because He revealed it, but there is also a sense of God that I cannot fathom. To walk with this God, means I have to embrace both sides”.
I have to embrace both sides. God is indescribable. Let me give you one example (I stole this from Louie Giglio) that really spoke to my heart. If you just take a piece of paper, and you look and the thickness of the paper; the distance from the earth to the sun (one astronomical unit) was one piece of paper. To have a stack of paper representing the distance from the earth to the nearest star, you would need a stack of paper 21 feet tall (268,335au). That's unfathomable!
To represent the distance across the known galaxy (10e5 light years, or 6.3 billion au), we would need a stack of paper 310 miles tall). To represent the distance across the known universe, we would need a piece of paper 31 million miles tall.
What if we could get in a capsule, and go to the end of everything we can know about God's creation? What would happen when we got to the end? There would be a door there, and you would open that door, and there would be a whole other realm unexplored. God is Olam - you can never get to the end of His bigness. If you got to the end of the known universe, and you opened the door - there would be a little garden gnome playing a flute!
If you got to the end of the known universe, and you opened the door, you would actually open it to a whole other realm of things we haven't even thought of. God is that big. This is why we're constantly learning things.
Think about medicine now, versus then (50 years ago). When I was 12 or 13 years old, I had a stomach ache, and I told mum. I said: mum, I can't go to school today, I've got a stomach ache; but she wasn't sure if I was faking it or not, so she said: I might have to take you to the doctor - and normally that would do it; but I said: don't care, I'm hurting.
She told the doctor: he says he's got a stomach ache, I can't tell if he's faking or not; and the doctor said: don't worry about it, I'll figure it out. He said: this ain't my first rodeo, I'll figure it out. So he walked in there and he said: son, let me ask you. He said: you're stomach's hurting? I said: very badly. He said: well I'm going to have to check it out. I said: what? He said: I'm going to have to look up in there!
Now I was only 13 years old, but I know there was only two ways there - I had a 50/50 shot - neither one of them sounded pleasant; and I said: is that really necessary? Can't you just give me some pills or something? He said: well I can give you pills, but I need to look to see if what I'm giving you pills for is actually it - so I need to look. So he reached behind him, and he picked up something that looked like this. He held it, and he looked at it in such a weird way. He said: this is called the ‘Iron Horse’ - that was his word for it. “This is called the Iron Horse - I'm going to lube this up, and I'm going to insert it in your rectum”. They say it so nicely!