(Sue is Thornleigh's Church Pastor)

Walking with God (Part A)

 
By way of introduction this morning, I thought I'd read you some letters that were written to God. These letters illustrate where a group of people are up to in their walks with Him . . . :)

Have you ever wanted to walk with God like Enoch, Noah or Abraham? Like Moses, Mary or Paul? Have you ever wanted to encounter our albeit invisible God like you might a father? Like a friend? Could you say you are experiencing the kind of intimacy that Jesus Christ came to give? Do you know God and Jesus Christ whom He sent? (John 17:3) Do you even believe it's possible?

Truth be told, I wrestled with questions like these for about 16 years. For about 14 years part-time and what felt like 2 years full time, I wrestled with questions like, "How does a person have a personal relationship with God?" "What kind of relationship is it if I'm the one doing all the talking?" "Is it possible that God still wants to speak to His people today?" "Does He even care to?"

At the ripe old age of 21, I wouldn't have thought He cared to. I thought I'd seen enough of life by then to conclude that yes, there was a God. But anyone who thought this God had knitted them together in their mother's womb (aka David) or planned to give them a future with hope (aka Jeremiah) was seriously deluded. (Psalm 139:13, Jeremiah 29:11) Back then my prayer life was little more than a way to process my thoughts and feelings. If you had someone else to process your thoughts and feelings with, I wasn't sure you really needed to pray. My God was a distant God, you see. A God who'd set the world in motion and only cared enough about us to want to meet up with us at the other end.

It probably hadn't helped that I'd actually been begging God since the age of 14 to keep His distance from me. Whether He had or whether He hadn't, I'd somehow come to think by this age that God wanted to have a closer relationship with me, that He wanted to talk to me. But because no-one else I knew was talking to God, or I should say listening to God. Because every other Christian I knew was just reading their Bible and applying good biblical principles to their lives as they saw fit, the thought of walking and talking with God like the great men and women of faith seemed just that little bit cuckoo to me, and like the people at Sinai who said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die" (Exodus 20:19), I too wanted to stay at the foot of the mountain. I didn't want God to get that close. Sure I'd let Him speak to me, I decided. But only when I needed Him to and only through biblical principles that I would deduce and only through open and closed doors. None of this "subjective" stuff!

That was how I approached my relationship with God until I came home from my first pastoral placement 14 years later. As I've mentioned before, when I came home from New Zealand, I was broken. I still had a sense of purpose, praise God, because I still knew God had spoken to me at 14 and I had identified this calling with Isaiah 61:1-3 a number of years later. But I no longer had a sense of direction and I was desperate. Desperate for direction and more than that. Desperate for an end to the gnawing emptiness of knowing in my head that Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so but not knowing it in my heart. Knowing that I was supposed to love God with all my heart and soul and mind but knowing I didn't (Matthew 22:37).

It was during those next two years that I wrestled what felt like full-time with whether or not I would let God take control of my relationship with Him; whether or not I could truly trust Him. And all this came to a head towards the end of that second year when I finally surrendered my all to Jesus and I did so just in time to accept the call to Chatswood Church which I never would have done had not God spoken to me.

That was six and a half years ago. Six and a half years does not make me an expert on relationships with God like someone might be an expert on relationships with spouses or an expert on relationships with children. The only reason I am here today is because my life has changed so dramatically in the last six and a half years that I now want to do whatever I can to inspire others to also surrender their all to Jesus. I now want everyone to come to comprehend the breadth and length, height and depth of God's love. Like Paul, I now want nothing more than for people to "know" the love of Christ that surpasses what? "Knowledge." So they may what? Be filled with the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:18-19). And that's why we're talking about walking with God today, and we will be again the next time I preach. That's why I've been praying that something will happen right here that will inspire each and every one of us beyond where we are in our relationships with God and onto a place where we can all honestly say that we love God with all our heart and soul and mind. Amen?!

So what does it take? What do I think it takes to have a dynamic personal relationship with God? To walk with God like Abraham, Moses or Noah. To have a relationship with God that we could call alive, full of life, vibrant, and transforming.

From my limited experience I believe it takes a few things but I'm only going to focus on one of these things this morning and it's the one thing I believe everything else hangs on. You might even be able to tell me what it is? By what does Hebrews 11:5 tell us Enoch, one of the great men of faith, was taken?

"By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and 'he was not found, because God had taken him.' For it was attested before he was taken away that 'he had pleased God.'"

By what does Hebrews 11:7 tell us Noah, one of the great men of faith, respected God's warning?

"By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir to righteousness that is accordance with faith."

By what does Hebrews 11:8-12 tell us Abraham, one of the great man of faith, obeyed God's calling?

"By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old - and Sarah herself was barren - because he considered him faithful who had been promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, "as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."

To have an alive, full of life, vibrant and transforming relationship with God, to move beyond static, lethargic and stuck, I believe we first and foremost need faith, and I believe we need it for a few good reasons. Today we will look at just one.

1. If we want to have a living relationship with God, we will need to believe God truly wants to have a living relationship with us. Are you with me? Unless we truly believe God wants to interact with us, that He wants to walk and talk with us, we will only ever know about God from what we read or what others say, we will never know Him personally.

In their book, Hearing God's Voice, (1) Henry Blackaby and his son Richard observe that not all Christians believe God truly wants to have a living relationship with them. Blackaby and Blackaby observed that Christians tend to approach their relationships with God in one of four ways and the first way they call The Impersonal Approach because it places more importance on the teachings of the Bible than on living in relationship with the God of the Bible. People who subscribe to this view tend to see Christianity as a theology or a set of doctrines to follow so they aren't so much worried about growing a relationship with God as they are with studying the Bible or keeping the laws and commandments. And what did Jesus have to say to such people? John 5:39-40,

"You pour over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, yet they testify about me. And you are not willing to come to me that you might have life."

Jesus wasn't condemning the Pharisees here for studying the Scriptures. That was the good bit. What He was condemning them for was spending so much time studying the Scriptures that they failed to look up and see Him for who He was and why He had come to this earth. "This is eternal life," John 17:3 says, "that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Jesus did not come to this earth so we could just know about Him. He did not come so we could just study about Him, talk about Him. Jesus came to this earth so we could know Him!

The second group of people Blackaby and Blackaby observed recognize and even emphasise the importance of having a relationship with God but they don't believe God needs to interact with His people today. Yes they believe that God spoke to the Bible giants like Abraham and Moses and Paul, but they don't believe these people are meant to serve as role models for us because they believe God only spoke to them in order to get the Bible written and now that the Bible's written, God rarely, if ever, needs to speak today.

This is actually the category I would have once fallen into. And I still might had I not been humbled over and over during the last six and a half years! A classic example of my being humbled was in my second year with Chatswood Church when we were trying to decide if we would spend money on setting up the interior of the church to permanently face the side wall, as it was temporarily faced at the time, or if we should revert the pews to face the front of the church, as it was originally designed. Our PA technicians had had enough of setting up and packing up the speakers each week and we were trying to work out if it was worth our while financially to make our temporary audio-visual system permanent.

Not thinking for a minute that God would have a specific will on this, I met with the AV Leader one night, and as we often do, I started the meeting with one of those routine, "Dear God, please guide us" prayers. I didn't get very far however. In fact I didn't get any further than that when I had an overwhelming impression to revert the pews to face the front of the church as it had been originally designed, and in all honesty, I couldn't believe it. I knew how much Chatswood Church loved the informality that came with facing the side wall. I knew how much they loved being able to see each other across the room. The sense of community it seemed to engender. For the life of me, I did not want to be the one to deliver such a message!

One night, in the midst of great angst about this, I came to God and asked Him how He expected me to lead a church based on an impression and it was at that point that the words "Exodus 3:12" came into my mind. Having no idea what Exodus 3:12 said at the time, I opened my Bible and found, "I will be with you, and this will be a sign that it is I who has sent you . . ." The long story short is that God was totally faithful to me and to Chatswood Church as we processed His will, and what I learnt from this experience is that yes, God has given us a brain for a reason but we will ever limit His work in our lives if we are not willing to surrender our brains to Him.

That's what the apostle Paul did, right? The one who had every reason to be confident in the flesh. What did he say? He was ". . . circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born to Hebrews; a Pharisee; a persecutor of the church; blameless" (Philippians 3:4b-6). And yet when Paul was confronted with the living God, He surrendered everything he had gained to this God and in Philippians 3:8 he said he actually came to regard it all as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing who? Christ Jesus his Lord.

In Ephesians 3:20 Paul tells us we have a God who, "is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine," and this text along with others like, Isaiah 55:8-9 which says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" lead me to conclude that there must be more to knowing God than just reading His written Word. If God's written Word tells us, "There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way of death" (Proverbs 14:12) and to "trust in the Lord with all our heart, and lean not on our own understanding." To "acknowledge Him in all our ways and He will direct our paths" (Proverbs 3:5, 6), there has to be more to having a living relationship with God than just reading the Bible and the Bible alone.

Having said that, I can fully appreciate why Christians who subscribe to either "The Impersonal" or "The Bible and the Bible Alone" approaches are wary of this kind of talk, and that's because when we move beyond these supposedly objective approaches to our relationship with God we can find ourselves even deeper within the realms of subjectivity and I'm sure all of us have had at least some degree of exposure to people who approach knowing God through experience. ?

The major and the minor prophets of the Old Testament tell us people like this have been around since the beginning of time. A number of writers in the New Testament also warn against such people and Jude possibly provides the best take. He had to deal with a group of people in the Palestinian Church who were rejecting Bible truths because they thought they'd been further enlightened and let's read what he had to say about them. Jude 10-11, 13,

". . . these people slander whatever they do not understand, and they are destroyed by those thing that, like irrational animals, they know by instinct. Woe to them! For they go the way of Cain, and abandon themselves to Balaam's error for the sake of gain, and perish in Korah's rebellion . . . They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever."

The sad reality is that these were ordinary people. Ordinary deluded people. I think it's tragic when people claim to hear a word from God as an excuse to do what they want but I think it's even more tragic when genuine Christians are deluded by their own experience, or their own imaginations as the Old Testament puts it, and they base their decisions on what they think to be a word from God only to find out later that it wasn't.

But that's not enough for me now. While I still have a healthy fear of delusion, my fear of delusion is now not enough reason for me to revert to The Impersonal or The Bible and the Bible Alone approaches to knowing God where I sat static, lethargic and stuck for too long, and I want to invite you to turn your thoughts to the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well. The one who had had five husbands and the man she was with at the time wasn't even her husband. This woman was an educated woman, right? A bit mixed up and out of sorts, but educated none-the-less. When Jesus asked her for a drink of water, how did she respond? She asked Him why He, a Jew, was asking her, a Samaritan, for water. When Jesus told her she should be asking Him for living water, how did she respond? She asked Him if He thought He was greater than her ancestor Jacob. When Jesus told her to go and get her husband, realizing Jesus was a prophet she asked Him why the Jews believed Jerusalem was "the place to worship." What did that have to do with anything?!

Tell me, did Jesus engage this woman in her Impersonal or Bible and the Bible Alone approaches to knowing God? Did He engage her in any of her theological debates? He could have. He was very capable of it. But He didn't. What Jesus did was He invited this woman into a personal relationship with Him, and it was by inviting her into relationship with Him that Jesus was able to apply all those same truths to her life but in a way that transformed it! (John 4:7-29, 39-42)

This is the difference between The Impersonal or The Bible and the Bible Alone approaches to knowing God and The Relational Approach. When we live in relationship with Jesus, when we live in relationship with God, it is the Holy Spirit who applies His eternal truths to our lives and in a way that transforms us, in a way that changes us. Just like God spoke to the Samaritan woman through Jesus, so too God speaks to us today through His Holy Spirit. "When the Spirit of truth comes," Jesus said, "He will guide you into all the truth . . ." (John 16:13), and Paul explains it further in 1 Corinthians 2:9-12,

"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God . . . no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given us."

These verses tell us that when we accept Jesus Christ as our Saviour, the Holy Spirit wants to come into our lives and among other things, reveal God to us so we can know Him. God wants nothing more than for us to know Him because to know Him is to love Him. And when it is the Holy Spirit who personally applies God's written Word to our lives, I can promise you that you will experience God's love in such a way that you will not be able to help but fall in love with Him!

To have a living relationship with God; to have an alive, full of life, vibrant and transforming relationship with God, we will most definitely need faith to truly believe God wants to have a living relationship with us, and the next time I preach we are going to talk about why we will need faith to believe we can trust God because if we want to grow in our walks with God we will need to obey Him!

Between now and then I would like to encourage you to take some time to think and pray about how you have been approaching your relationship with God. Which of the four categories that Blackaby and Blackaby observed have you fallen into and is this the kind of relationship Jesus came to give you? If yes, praise God. If no, praise God because you now have an opportunity to make a change!

References

(1)  Blackaby, Henry and Richard. "Hearing God's Voice," (Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2002).

Home > Church Family > Sermon Summaries > 26 Jun 2010, Pr Sue Redman - Walking with God (Part A)

 
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