How to Get Closer to God: 3 Ways to Grow Your Relationship

Humans, of course, don’t always love an easy answer. Throughout history, we’ve built imposing temples, denied ourselves creature comforts, sought out oracles, carved statues, embarked on dangerous pilgrimages, fought centuries-long wars, and even sacrificed children on altars—all in an effort to touch the divine; to appease or curry favor with the gods.

But God, the God of the Bible, doesn’t ask for any of that. He says simply: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

He wants our love. He wants a relationship with us. So much so that He sacrificed His son, Jesus, to give us that opportunity. Jesus’ death and resurrection demolished all the barriers that stood between humanity and God, making a relationship possible like never before.

How do we develop that relationship with God? What does getting closer to God actually look like? The short answer: spending your time.

The science is clear. Spending and investing time is foundational to any close, connected relationship. Jeffrey Hall, a top researcher in the psychology of friendship, found that while “Americans only spend about 41 minutes a day socializing,” to have even a 50/50 shot of going from acquaintance to casual friend requires an investment of at least “43 hours together in the first 3 weeks after meeting.”¹ Taking that into consideration, along with the fact that “self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America,” it's no wonder we feel far from God.² We don’t spend enough time with Him—or anyone else for that matter—to develop any sense of closeness.

Time is the answer, but you only have so much of it. If you want a closer relationship with God, here are three ways you should spend it:

1) Spend Time With God

This might sound obvious, but if your goal is getting closer to God, this really is the first step. A healthy relationship with God grows the same way every healthy friendship does: by spending intentional time together. Aristotle put it this way: “...a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.”³

One powerful method of getting closer to God, and a great use of our time with him, is reading the Bible. The Bible is the divinely inspired words of God. It’s the most tangible form of communication we have with Him. And the more you read God’s words, the easier it will be for you to recognize his voice when it’s not written down on a page. It has power. It’s a privilege to hold a Bible, one that many Christians have fought and died for throughout history because they recognized its life-changing power (and why Gary Oldman’s character in The Book of Eli is willing to kill Denzel Washington just to get his hands on the last known copy). The Bible becoming available to everyone, not just the religious elites, literally changed the world. We have that world-changing power at our fingertips, on demand. Take advantage of it, not out of a sense of duty or obligation (though if you start there, that’s okay), but out of a sense of wonder and discovery. It will change your life.

Prayer is another essential tool we have to pursue closeness with God. We tend to trivialize, ritualize, or mysticize prayer, but it transcends all of that. Every time we pray, we’re having a conversation with God. We’re chatting with the Creator of the universe. We’re shooting the breeze with the Lord of Hosts. It’s an incredible and vital line of communication. Theologian and pastor Eugene Peterson declared that prayer is “...a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul,” and I think he’s right.⁴

This time with God—a combination of reading your Bible and prayer—will start to shape your understanding of who God really is, bringing you closer and closer to him. The false understandings of God that were keeping you separated from him will start to fall away. Maybe you sometimes see God as a judgmental king who was always disappointed in your performance. Maybe you see Him as your buddy you call when you’re in a pinch, but ignore when things are going well. Or maybe you see Him as distant and cold, uninvested in your day-to-day existence. Whatever your perspective, the more time you spend with God, the more a complete and vibrant picture of who he actually is will come into focus. And you won’t be able to get enough.

TRY IT OUT: You can invite God into any activity and any moment of your life, even if it’s not explicitly and inherently religious. Whether you’re driving, cooking dinner, or waiting in line at the grocery store, any ordinary moment can become time with God. You could start with a simple prayer, something like, “God, I want you to be a part of this moment. I miss you. Will you join me?” Then wait, listen, and see how he shows up. There’s much more freedom in the ways we get to interact with Him than we think.

2) Spend Time With Yourself

Just like a wrong perception of God will keep you far from him, a wrong perception of yourself will too. Which means spending some dedicated time with yourself, alone with your own thoughts, is one of the most impactful exercises you can do when building your relationship with God. We live in a world full of distractions that keep our brains constantly engaged, eliminating most opportunities for introspection (this was a big reason why I broke up with social media for a while). As distracting as modern life can be, that isn't even the root of our problem: it’s our fears.

Ronald Rolheiser is a beloved Catholic priest and theologian. I think he puts it well when he writes:

“We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened…aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: all these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness. So long as we avoid the painful journey inward, to the depths of our caverns, we live at the surface.”⁵

It’s hard to resist the undertow of inputs and uncertainties desperately trying to keep us trapped at the surface, but it's worth the effort to avoid spending your life in shallow water.

Spending time with yourself—actually knowing yourself—is essential to developing meaningful relationships with others and with God. As Arthur Brooks writes, “The best life is lived after you’ve done enough introspection to achieve some self-knowledge so that you can turn your attention on others. The worst life is lived by those who have done no introspection and achieved no self-understanding but who are nonetheless utterly self-centered.”⁶

If you don’t spend time with yourself, you won’t know yourself. If you don’t know yourself, you can’t bring honesty into your relationship with God. And that honesty is what will bring you closer together.

TRY IT OUT: If you don’t know where to start, try keeping a daily journal. Record the experiences, goings on, and events of your life AND your honest feelings about them, without judgement. Over time, you’ll start to notice emotional patterns that’ll give you insight into who you are. Or if you’re more artistically inclined (like I am), try drawing, painting, writing poetry, or composing music that represents your current emotional state and see what happens.

This one’s actually pretty easy for me, as I’m an introvert by nature. I can actually spend too much time with myself, which leads to a different kind of warped feedback loop. We all weave internal stories about our thoughts and experiences to make sense of them, but those stories don’t always reflect reality. This is precisely why we need to include other people in the process.

3) Spend Time With Other People

Yes, I did just say spend time with yourself, but there’s also such a thing as too much alone time. And increasingly, our world is designed to keep us there, on our own and self-sufficient.

As someone who lives on my own, I have no forced social interaction in my day outside of work (and sometimes, thanks to Zoom and online connectivity, not even there). If I chose to, I could hang out in my apartment all day with my books, TV shows, and video games, not even having to leave for food (DoorDash and grocery delivery can take care of that). A phone call or Discord chat could serve as a substitute for an in-person conversation. If I did venture outside to go to the gym or pick up a Jersey Mike’s sandwich (which everyone knows is worse when it's delivered), I could slip in my AirPods, which are always beckoning me into a curated, private world of music and podcasts. That could be my life, and to be clear, it would be an empty one. So every day I actively choose to invite people into my life—into my home, my hobbies, and, for a trusted few, even my innermost thoughts.

We need other people. Every human being is created in the image of God, which means every time we look at, spend time with, or talk to someone else, we’re interacting with a piece of the divine.

In my experience, God often speaks through other people, especially when I’m being vulnerable or honest. I get to know my Creator through his creation, just like I catch a glimpse of who a painter is through their paintings, or who a musician is through their music. And human beings are God’s ultimate masterpieces: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

TRY IT OUT: If you need a first step, take a moment and close your eyes. Start imagining the faces of different people in your life. Does one jump out at you or stick in your mind? Invite whoever does to grab a cup of coffee and catch up. Worst case, they say no. Best case, a connection starts to form.

Time Is All It Takes

If anything I’ve shared above sounds performative, overly intellectual, or just another thing to add to an already busy calendar, I want to put your mind at ease—starting with an often neglected picture of who God is. Throughout Scripture, God is described as the Master of the Feast, a generous host who prepares a banquet for his people:

• Psalm 23:5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

• Isaiah 25:6: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.”

• Matthew 22:1-4: “And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.”’

God has laid a table for you. He’s invited you to sit with him—for 5 minutes or 5 hours, while you’re washing the dishes, sitting on your porch, or having dinner with friends. However and in whatever state you are, He doesn’t mind.

All you have to do to get closer to God is sit down in the seat he’s pulled out for you. Give Him the gift of your time, attention, and presence, and he’ll do the rest.

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¹ Jeffrey A. Hall, “How many hours does it take to make a friend?” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Volume 36, Issue 4 (2019): pp. 1278–1296.

² Derek Thompson, “The Anti-Social Century,” The Atlantic, 2025](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/).

³ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII.

⁴ Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant, pp. 135-136.

⁵ Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home, pp. 120-121.

⁶ Arthur Brooks, “Marc Andreessen’s Mistake,” The Atlantic, 2026](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/introspection-knowing-yourself/686602/).

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