Walking with God – Part A
Sue Redman – March 15, 2008
Those of you who were at Chatswood Church’s Spiritual Retreat last year may remember that Grenville read us some letters people had written to God? Well this morning I have some more letters to read to you, and like the ones Grenville read these letters also illustrate where people are up to in their walks with God . . .
Okay let’s read about some other people who walked with God and let’s start with Enoch. I will first read what the book of Genesis says about these people and then what the book of Hebrews says . . .
Genesis 5:21-24, “When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.”
Hebrews 11:5, “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.’”
Genesis 6:5-9, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created . . . But Noah found favour in the sight of the Lord . . . Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.”
Hebrews 11:7, “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.”
Genesis 12:1-3, “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from the country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.’”
Hebrews 11:8-12, “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.”
Have you ever wanted to walk with God like Enoch, Noah or Abraham? Have you ever wanted to walk with God like Moses, Mary or Paul or any of the biblical giants? To encounter an albeit invisible God like you might a friend. To encounter God like you might a father. Are you experiencing the kind of intimacy in your relationship with God that the Gospel of John tells us Jesus came to give? Would you say you know God and you know Jesus Christ whom He sent? (John 17:3) Do you even believe it’s possible?
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 only one doing all the talking?” “Is it possible that God still wants to speak to us today?” “Does He even care to?”
At the ripe old age of 21 I wouldn’t have thought so. I thought I’d seen enough of life by then to conclude that yes, I could believe there was a God, but anyone who thought this God was so invested in them as to knit them together in their mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13) or give them a future with hope (Jeremiah 29:11) was seriously deluded. 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. A God who’d set the world in motion and only seemed to care enough 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 talk to me, to have a closer relationship with 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 on Sabbaths 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 too weird 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 thank you very much, or only through open and closed doors. None of this subjective stuff.
That was until I came home from my first pastoral placement 14 years later. When I came home from New Zealand I was broken, very 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 a few years later, but now I had no sense of direction and I was desperate. Desperate not only for direction but desperate for an end to the gnawing emptiness of knowing Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so, but not even being able to say to God, “I love You because You first loved me” (1 John 4:19) let alone, “I love You with all my heart and soul and mind” (Matthew 22:37). The gap between my head and my heart was too huge. I needed to close the distance.
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 trust Him. And all this came to a head at the end of August in that second year when my appendix burst an estimated week before I was diagnosed with appendicitis, and my body was so poisoned I was not able to go back to work for 8 weeks. It was during that 8 weeks that I finally surrendered my all to Jesus and this happened just in time for me to accept a call to Chatswood Church which I never would have done if God had not told me this was His will.
That was just over four years ago. Four and a bit 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 this morning is because my life has changed so dramatically in these four and a bit years that I now want to do whatever I can to inspire others to also surrender their all to Jesus, so others can also 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 our walks with God this morning. That’s why I’ve been praying that something will happen right here this morning that will inspire each and every one of us beyond where we are at in our relationships with God, and onto a place where we can all honestly say we love God with all our heart and soul and mind. Amen?!
So what do I think is the answer? What do I think it takes to have a dynamic personal relationship with God? What do I think it takes for someone to have a relationship with God that they could call alive, in fact 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 in this sermon and my next sermon, and this is the one thing I believe everything else hangs on. You might even be able to guess what it is if you think back to my previous slides. By what was Enoch taken? By faith. By what did Noah respect God’s warning? By faith. By what did Abraham obey God’s calling? By faith. 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 at least 3 good reasons.
If we want to have a living relationship with God:
1. We will need faith to believe God truly wants to have a living relationship with us/that He truly wants to interact with us. Unless we believe God truly wants to have a living relationship with us, we will never get to know God personally, we will only ever know about Him from what we read and what others say.
2. We will next need faith to believe it really is God who is interacting with us/revealing Himself and His will to us so we can get to know Him. It’s one thing to believe this stuff in theory but it’s totally another to put it into practice, and this is where I think a lot of Christians get stuck.
3. We will then need faith to believe whatever God tells us when He is interacting with us, and this is especially true when it comes to whatever God calls us to do. If we want to grow in our relationships with God, we can expect Him to call us to do things that we cannot do without Him, just so we have to interact with Him, so we have to experience Him, so we can get to know Him. Are you with me?
We’re going to unpack each of these points one by one but this morning we’re just going to look at 1. To have a living, that is alive, full of life, vibrant and transforming relationship with God, we will need faith to believe that God truly wants to have a living relationship with us.
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 observe 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 Scripture than on living in relationship with the God of the Scriptures. People who subscribe to this view tend to see Christianity as a theology, or as a set of doctrines to follow, so they aren’t so much worried about growing a relationship with God as they are about studying the Scriptures 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. 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, just talk about Him. Jesus came to this earth so we could know Him.
The second group of people Blackaby and Blackaby observe, recognize and even emphasise the importance of having a relationship with God but they also believe everything we need to know about God and His will for our lives has already been revealed in the Scriptures so there’s no need for God to interact with us today. People who subscribe to this view believe that God did speak 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 the category I would have once fallen into, and had I not been humbled over and over these last four and a bit years I still might.
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 face the side wall as it was at the time, or revert the pews to facing 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 how much it would cost to make our temporary AV 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 I started our meeting with one of those routine prayers we so often pray. I think I only got to “Dear God, please guide us,” when I had an overwhelming impression that we were to revert. I couldn’t believe it. I knew most of us wouldn’t like it. We loved the informality of facing the side wall. We loved being able to see everyone across the room. We loved the sense of community it seemed to engender. For the life of me I did not want to deliver such a message so I came to God one night and I asked Him how in the world He expected me to lead a church based on an impression, and it was then that the words “Exodus 3:12” came into my head. Having no idea what Exodus 3:12 said, I opened my Bible to find, “I will be with you, and this will be a sign that it is I who has sent you . . .” and long story short I believe God was totally faithful to us, and I learnt from this experience that while yes, God does give us a brain for a reason, we will ever limit His work in our lives if don’t surrender it to Him.
That’s what the apostle Paul did. 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 too surrendered everything he had gained and in Philippians 3:8 he said he came to regard all that as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing 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, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8-9), and “There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12), 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 to trust Him with all our heart, and lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5, 6), to call to Him and He will answer, and tell us great and hidden things we do not know (Jeremiah 33:2-3), 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 to knowing God are wary of this kind of talk, and that’s because when we move beyond these supposedly objective approaches 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 of these, 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 had been further enlightened. Let me read what he had to say about these people. 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 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 very healthy fear of delusion and we will talk about safeguarding against delusion next time, 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. Think about 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. 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 the price of eggs?
Tell me, did Jesus engage this woman in her Impersonal or The 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 that Jesus was able to apply all the same truths to her life but in a way that transformed (John 4:7-29, 39-42).
This is the difference between The Impersonal or The Bible and the Bible Alone approaches to knowing Jesus and The Relational Approach. When we live in relationship with Jesus, when we live in relationship with God, it is God who applies His eternal truths to our lives 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). Paul explains it further. 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 we will experience God’s love in such a way that we will not be able to help but love Him with all our heart and soul and mind.
To have a living relationship with God; to have an alive, full of life, vibrant and transforming relationship with God, we most definitely will need faith to believe that God truly wants to have a living relationship with us, and the next time I preach we’re going to unpack why we will also need faith to believe it really is God who is speaking to us, and why we will need faith to believe whatever God then tells us and that He will accomplish His purposes in and through us.
Having said all that, right now I just want to invite you to sit back, to listen to a song, and to let God speak to your heart . . .
Be Still, Stephen Curtis Chapman
Be still and know that He is God
Be still and know that He is Holy
Be still oh restless soul of mine
Bow before the Prince of Peace
Let the noise and clamor cease
Be still and know that He is God
Be still and know that He is Faithful
Consider all that He has done
Stand in awe and be amazed
And know that He will never change
Be still
Be still and know that He is God
Be still and know that He is God
Be still and know that He is God
Be still
Be speechless
Be still and know that He is God
Be still and know He is our Father
Come rest your head upon His breast
Listen to the rhythm of
His unfailing heart of love
Beating for His little ones
Calling each of us to come
Be still
Be still
_____
(1) Blackaby and Blackaby, Henry and Richard, “Hearing God’s Voice,” (Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2002). This book is available from Koorong or by order from Adventist Book Centres.
Sue believes the key to walking and talking with God like the great men and women of faith is indeed faith, and in this now 5 part sermon series she will explore 5 reasons she has needed faith in order to journey more closely with God in recent years.
