The whole idea of religion is built around the question of relationship with God.  You may have heard a thousand sermons in which someone basically made a mockery of the how and why of man relating to God.  But that still doesn't eliminate the basic issue of the possibility of it occurring.  There are people on television every day who connect your relationship with God to whether or not you send them some money.  There are those who paint God as some kind of dozing grandfather.  Some portray Him as the nitpicking judge.  Others portray Him as the great crutch invented to make us feel better about ourselves.  All of these false representations of God lead people into empty and pretend relationships with Him or to give up on Him altogether.  These do not however eliminate the real possibility of relationship with God and His desire to enter into relationship with His creatures.  The fact that God allows people to misrepresent Him doesn't make Him cease to exist. 

The fundamental issue with God is to acknowledge His existence.  Once we allow Him to exist in the world where we exist then every other question can only be about understanding and misunderstanding.  The first chapter of the book of Romans divides all the people who ever exist into two categories.  Those who acknowledge God and those who don't.  It really doesn't make sense to decide if God exists based on our evaluation of His actions.  The number one argument against the existence of God has always been about our judgment of how He should behave.  Very educated people say that if God existed He wouldn't allow suffering or He wouldn't allow evil people etc.  This point seems to be disconnected.  The question of existence is not about evaluating behavior.  It may very well be correct that you don't think God is behaving the way you think He should.  But that doesn't really somehow prove that He isn't there.  The fact that we all know things are happening that are beyond our control and we wish God would do something about it speaks more to the reality of a greater power.  The question of existence is a simple question of being.  Is the being of God a reality at least to the degree that my being is a reality?  If we allow that He exists then we can go to town so to speak on evaluating Him if we think that wise but we shouldn't equate our ability to comprehend God with His existence.

The question for every casual religious person as well as every unreligious person is this.  Would your current approach to life allow you to acknowledge God if there were reason to do so?  Paul says that those who live as though God does not exist do so because they refuse to allow Him into their reality.  Many people will die having in a sense made their decisions about God based on personal preference.  Whether or not I want God to exist or whether or not His existence would fit with my preferred world view is completely beside the point.  If the Bible message is true though those who allow themselves to recognize God will see it bear fruit in their lives.  So the issue then is perhaps not my ability to be smart enough to decide God's existence but my ability to live in a way that allows Him to break into my reality. 

Some approaches to life allow no entry of God or His things.  There is a certain place where God fits and He does not desire to fit into any other places.  He will not take the role of insurance provider or emergency room.  He does not seek to be our tool or our weapon.  He is not our happy pill or the one to validate our choice of lifestyles.  Sometimes people open these kinds of doors to God and He doesn't walk through them so a decision is made that we are on our own and have to simply make the best of it.  Any personal shaping of God leaves us with no God at all.

The people to whom God is most real are those who have allowed Him to work in their lives.  God has not opened Himself to us just to allow us to examine Him.  He has opened Himself up to us for relationship and this is the only way to prove Him.  You will know that God is real when you know that your life could not be what it is without Him.  When you realize what your life would have been like without Him then you know He exists.  So we are left with a fairly concrete issue before us.  If you open yourself to God in a way that allows Him to be God He will enter.  As long as you offer Him some other place He will be foreign.  The capacities you have to be humble and unselfish and honest will ultimately be of greater value than your capacity to be superior or respected or famous or talented.

Jesus told His followers to pursue the reign and solutions of God in their individual lives as the first and highest priority.  He suggested that when this was done all the other things of life would be brought along accordingly.  So to acknowledge God and strive to give Him the place of God in my life as the greatest and overriding pursuit is the best way to live.  I must give Him the authority to be the ruler and King of all of existence.  Jesus as the image of God has claimed this place.  I must also allow God the freedom and dominion to work out the reclamation and redemption of myself and others in the way that He sees most suitable. 

The only way to acknowledge God is to shape your life in a way that would allow Him to be God.  Acknowledging God as a force or power or mother nature or vague spiritual presence is to fail to acknowledge Him as God.  Trying to use God to promote your own ideas and agendas is no more an acknowledgement than any other.  Jesus said unless you believe that I am who I say I am you will simply die in your sins.  Unless you give God the right to be God specifically in the form of Jesus Christ you will also die without Him.  Those who are not giving God the right to be God in their lives are not doing so out of intellectual superiority or unique insight.  They are also not doing it because God has failed to sufficiently show Himself.  They do so because the true God does not fit through the door they have constructed for Him.

Untold numbers of people have made some vain attempt at relating to a made-up version of God and then given up when it was fruitless.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with having considered a false version of God but the tragedy is to then give up on all efforts at relating to the true God.  The people who have humbly laid aside their personal preferences and preconceived notions and genuinely opened their inner person to the hand of God in obedience have not found emptiness.  Those who have expended genuine resources on a significant scale to know the truth about God as Jesus has revealed Him in scripture have found substance and fullness.

Romans 1:(19)  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  (20)  For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.  (21)  For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.