Walking with God Honestly

Jesus said that He is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).

One of the implications of this verse is that, because He is truth, we will experience the presence of God on a consistent basis only as we live in truth. In this case, truth means far more than simple honesty. It speaks to being genuine and truly yourself. This is difficult to do in a world that expects each of us to be and to behave certain ways. In addition, we live in a church culture that places its own burdens of performance on us.

In response to these pressures, and out of a desire to be a good Christian, we learn early on how to behave properly - often at the cost of being ourselves. We no longer feel safe in church being ourselves, so we hide ourselves and put on a show of acceptability to those around us.

I have decided that one of the most precious gifts I have in my life are the people who are safe enough that I am able to be myself with them. They help reconcile me to myself and draw me closer to God. I wonder what would happen if we decided to leave behind the dysfunctional rules of how we ought to behave and decided to be genuine, to walk in truth.

Maybe we would find that sense of community and belonging that we long for.

Maybe we would come to terms with our struggles instead of hiding from them.

Maybe we would find God in a deeper way.

Lessons of the Trinity

I have been spending some time in the past few weeks pondering the Trinity.

From all eternity, there has been one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These three are distinct, yet inseparable.

What does that have to do with life today? Here are a few thoughts:

1. Because the Trinity has existed since the beginning, this means that the very nature of God is one of relationship. Before He did anything, the members of the Trinity were in relationship with each other. Relationship existed before task. It is at the very core of the nature of God.

2. The Trinity functions based on a relationship of love. In other words, the Son does not obey the Father because the Father has a higher place in the hierarchy. The Son obeys the Father because the Son loves the Father and the Father loves the Son.

3. It is our calling to enter into this same relationship of love. The Lord is the majestic, awesome God of all creation, before Whom we are nothing at all. He could rightfully demand our service and obedience. Yet, He lays all that aside and seeks a people who will:

- follow and obey Him purely out of love for Him and for no other reason.
- lay aside all tasks as secondary and take the more difficult and perilous journey of intimacy with the Holy One.

These are people who have fallen so deeply in love with the Lord that they have abandoned all else to have Him.

The Trinity lives continually in a relationship of love and intimacy. When Jesus says to abide in Him and He in us, He is calling us to dare to seek that same level of communion that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit enjoy with one another. It is a much more difficult journey than mere outward obedience, but it is in this journey of the heart that we truly find God. And when we do, nothing else matters anymore.

Stages of Learning and the Presence of God

I have have been having some fun thinking of being in the presence of God in terms of the four stages of learning. The four stages of learning may be presented as a quadrant like this:







We start out as an unconscious incompetent. We don't experience the presence of God and we don't even know that such a thing is possible.


In the next stage, we learn that it is possible to walk in the presence of God, but we also realize that we are not experiencing His presence. We are now a conscious incompetent.

As we seek to walk in the presence of God, we become conscious competents. We experience His presence, but it takes concentration and effort on our part.

At some point, though, being in the presence of God becomes second nature to us. We no longer have to think about it. We are now unconscious competents. In the Apostle John's choice of words, we are now abiding in Christ.

Using this framework, here are a couple of thoughts that may be helpful:

1. Learning to walk in God's presence is a natural process that includes a lot of trial and error, especially in the transition from being a conscious incompetent to a conscious competent. God designed it that way, just as He designed how we learn to walk. Therefore, there is no need to get upset at ourselves as we struggle. The struggle is an essential part of the process. And whether we realize it or not, we are learning something valuable each time we try.

2. The enemy would like to discourage us or cause us to feel condemned by our failures. In truth, learning to walk in God's presence is a process and not an event. Therefore, there is no guilt or shame in failure, just as a child learning to walk has not guilt when he or she falls.

3. The conscious competent stage is characterized by work. In that stage, staying in God's presence is a matter of doing. In the unconscious competent stage, however, doing falls away and we enter into the act of being in the presence of God. In effect, learning to walk in God's presence starts out with our focus on ourselves and our efforts, and it ends when the focus shifts to God's love and His keeping us in His presence.

4. Most writings about experiencing the presence of God are written without a sense of growth in mind. As a result, we may feel like our efforts are futile if they don't result in mountain top experiences that we read about. In fact, those efforts are all very valuable because they take us along the path into even deeper places in the presence of God. It just takes time and perseverance.

5. It seems that many who want to walk in the presence of God get discouraged and quit when the going gets hard. They read about how easy it is to be in God's presence and decide that it must not be for them. When we realize that each stage experiences the presence of God differently and that the struggles we face today will bring us to a point of breakthrough, then there is good reason to keep pressing in.