Some distance from God has nothing to do with doubt. You still believe what you believed last year. You still show up on Sunday. Nothing has broken. God simply feels less present than you assumed a believer would feel him. Dr. Tony Evans, founding pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, offers a pointed explanation: God relates to us at the level we hand our lives over to him. Belief makes you his child. It does not automatically open every room of your life to him.
That answer deserves a fair hearing, and it deserves testing. It explains a great deal about the quiet, low-grade distance many Christians live with. It does not explain every case, and knowing where it stops is part of using it well.
Isn’t believing supposed to be enough?
Most people carry an unspoken assumption: if I believe the right things and belong to the right people, closeness to God should follow on its own. When it doesn’t, the natural conclusion is that something is wrong with God, or with the belief.
Evans pulls those two things apart. Belief settles who you are. It does not settle how much of you God has been allowed to touch. In his words, “Just because you are a child of God doesn’t mean you’re experiencing all of God in the same way.” He compares it to a family. A father can have several children and still relate to each one differently, because they are not all connected to him in the same way. None of them stops being his child. Some of them simply share more of their lives with him.
That is the center of his argument. Evans puts it plainly: “God will relate to you on the level of your engagement with him.” He describes a common pattern in which Christians give God certain areas of life and keep the rest. His conclusion follows directly: “until he’s the comprehensive ruler of all areas, we don’t get the comprehensive involvement of him in all areas.”
Notice what this does to the original question. If Evans is right, the feeling of distance is not evidence that your faith is fake. It may be evidence that your faith is real but fenced. You trust Jesus with eternity and with Sunday morning. You may not have asked him about your money, your ambitions, or the decisions you make on autopilot. The distance you feel could be the accurate experience of a relationship that has been confined to a few rooms.
What passage is he reading, and does it carry that weight?
Evans grounds the idea in John 2:23-25. The KJV reads: “Now when he was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast day, many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did. But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men” (John 2:23-24). Verse 25 adds that he “needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.”
Evans reads this as a picture of people who believed but were not all in, and so Jesus did not entrust himself to them. The archaic “commit himself” means something close to “entrust himself.” There is a genuine insight here. Jesus is not obligated to hand himself over to enthusiasm. A crowd can be impressed by him without being given access to him.
The passage also needs to be read for what John himself says. The reason given is Jesus’ knowledge of the human heart. John does not say why their faith fell short, and he does not describe a ranking of believers. Many interpreters understand this as faith stirred by miracles that had not yet become real trust. In John’s Gospel, belief that rests on signs is often treated with caution, and later chapters show some who believed turning away. Faithful Christians read the spiritual state of those people differently, and the text does not settle it.
So John 2 supports the broader point that Jesus looks at the heart, not the crowd’s excitement. It is a thinner foundation for a detailed theory of how much of God each believer gets to experience. Evans’s case is stronger where he leans on the wider pattern he names: Scripture is full of exhortation about a believer’s level of commitment, because commitment shapes experience. Jesus’ own call makes the point without needing John 2: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). The word daily matters. Following him is not a single decision filed away. It is a life handed over again each day.
How would you know if you’ve been keeping God in reserve?
Evans’s most memorable image is blunt: “for many people, God is a spare tire.” The rest of the picture is just as uncomfortable. “So we want him close enough when something goes flat, then when we get it all fixed up, he goes back in the trunk again.” What God wants instead, Evans says, is plain: “He wants to be the full God of our lives.” Lisa Fields sharpens it into a single line: “That Jesus becomes a means to an end, not the end in itself.”
The spare tire image is useful because it describes a faith that feels fine most days. Nothing about it looks like rebellion. You pray when the diagnosis comes, when the job falls through, when your child is in trouble. Then life steadies, and God returns to storage. The trouble is not that you called on him in a crisis. Scripture invites that. The trouble is that a God you only consult never becomes a God you know.
Evans names the underlying tension with a household picture: grown children who want the comfort of home without its rules. As he puts it, “you want the provision of the parent without the authority of the parent.” Many of God’s children, he says, want the benefits of the King without being subject to him, and that creates conflict whether they recognize it or not.
A fair self-check, then, is not “Do I believe?” You already do. It is closer to this: which parts of my week would I be uncomfortable letting God weigh in on? Wherever the answer comes quickly, that is probably where the distance lives.
Does this mean God’s nearness has to be earned?
This is the objection that matters most, and it should not be brushed aside. If closeness depends on my level of surrender, it can start to sound like grace with an asterisk. God loves you, but he will only show up once you perform well enough.
Evans does not frame it that way. He calls what God offers a gift. Speaking of Jesus’ promise of the kingdom, he says God wants to give “me showing up, ruling your life, and it’s a gift.” Paul draws the same line between gift and response: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). The next verse adds that we are “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Ephesians 2:10). Surrender belongs on that side of the line. It does not buy God’s love. It is what love does once it has been received.
The way Evans describes surrender also shows it is relational rather than transactional. He imagines a believer saying to God, “I am acknowledging your comprehensive rule, and there is no longer any distinction between you and any other area of my life.” Then he adds something easy to miss: “I’m also inviting you to tell me when I’m out of alignment so that I can get reengaged.” Fields calls this “the openness to be corrected.”
That detail changes the picture. Surrender here is not a flawless record. It is an open door, including a door left open for God to say no, wait, or turn around. A person who keeps failing but keeps inviting correction is more surrendered, on Evans’s terms, than a person who behaves well and keeps God out of the conversation.
Where does this explanation run out?
Evans makes some strong claims. Without openness to God, he says, we will not see answered prayer, power, guidance or purpose, because “God doesn’t wanna give you all that so you can leave him out more.” There is real wisdom in that sentence. God does not hand out his presence as a resource we can use to keep running our lives without him.
Read as a guarantee, though, it would go further than Scripture does. The Bible includes faithful people who felt abandoned while they were seeking God, not hiding from him. Psalm 13:1 opens with a believer’s complaint: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” Nothing in that psalm suggests the writer was keeping God in the trunk. Sometimes the sense of distance belongs to lament, and the faithful response is to keep praying honestly through it rather than to search for a hidden failure.
There is a second limit. Evans links surrender to emotional steadiness through Luke 12, where Jesus repeatedly tells his followers not to worry and then says, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). From that, Evans concludes that “the more engaged you are with the king, the more he controls your emotional wellbeing.” That is a real insight about where we put our weight. It is not a diagnosis.
A flat, persistent inability to feel anything, including God, can be a symptom of depression, and depression is not cured by a better level of commitment. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. If the distance you feel comes with exhaustion, hopelessness or a loss of interest in everything, talk to a doctor or counselor as well as a pastor. Treating a medical problem as a surrender problem only adds guilt to pain.
Evans’s question is still a good first question, and often the one we most want to skip. It just should not be the only one.
What would handing God the whole day actually look like?
Evans offers a practice drawn from his school years, when students began each day by pledging allegiance to the flag. He suggests a daily pledge of a different kind, telling God that he now owns the day. In his closing words, he describes it this way: “God, you can own me today. Whatever comes my way, I wanna link it to you.”
The point is not the ritual. The point is erasing the line between what feels spiritual and what feels ordinary. Evans says that “now that you belong to the king and this kingdom, everything just got sacred.” The budget counts. So does the conversation you keep avoiding.
Fields draws out why this is good news rather than a demand: “you’re not missing out submitting your life to God.” Evans’s summary is that “your experience with God will be directly tied to your willingness to be ruled by God in every area of life.”
In practice, this is less dramatic than it sounds. Pick the one area you usually leave off your prayers and name it to God tomorrow morning. Bring a real decision to him before you have already made it. Ask where you are out of alignment, then listen for the answer in Scripture and in the people who know you well. None of that manufactures a feeling. It does change how much of your life God is actually part of.