“From among all the families on the earth, I have been intimate with you alone. That is why I must punish you for all your sins” (Amos 3:2, NLT).

That bold access we get with the Father comes with a responsibility. We desire intimacy with God. We long to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. We want Him to reveal His thoughts to us and make His covenant known to us, to reveal His secrets to us. But to live in intimacy with God means to live in holiness.

Sin separates us from God. We can’t live in sin and in the secret place at the same time. Jesus is the light. If we walk in the light, our sin will be exposed. That’s a good thing. We want that because we want to confess it and ask Him to remove it from our lives.

We want to grow from glory to glory into the image of Christ, the image that we were created to be in but was marred by sin. Israel is punished because they were intimate with the Lord. Israel is God’s chosen. That’s you, if you belong to Christ. We get adopted into the family and take the family name. We’re the ones who can experience intimacy with the Lord, behind the veil that separated Him from the rest of the world.

But if we’re going to stand in His presence, live in His presence, live before Him as Elijah said, then we must live in holiness and righteousness. We must be willing to let His light expose any harmful way in us and be willing to confess and reject it. We must be willing to take the discipline that will burn away all that is not of God so that only pure remains. It’s the pure in heart that see God. If you desire to stand before Him, to see Him, you must be pure. It’s a gift from God by faith, just like everything else, but we have a part in it. We choose to submit to His ways, His discipline, and His loving molding of us into the perfect image of His Son.