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.

Knowing the Love of God

All we really need is to know is how deeply loved we are by God.

If we really experienced being profoundly loved by God, think of all the issues in life that would become unimportant.

1. I would no longer have to try and find my significance in other things. I would be significant already.

2. The meaning of my life might still be a question, but it would not carry very much power to it because I would have nothing to prove.

3. I would be able to love others out of security and not insecurity.

4. Th center of who I am would be a place of peace and not storms.

5. Fears and worries would no longer have a foothold because I would know that God will take care of me.

6. Sin in my life might discourage, but no longer devastate.

7. In fact, much of the reason I sin - to find comfort & self-protection - would already be met and sin would not have such power over me.

8. I would be free to be who I really am because rejection by others, while painful, would no longer threaten the core of who I am.

9. I would be able to take more and greater risks, because the outcome would not threaten my sense of acceptance by God.

10. I could love God and others without the selfish motive of needing to be loved. My love would be pure.

11. I would be able to live out of my real identity as a son/daughter of the Father.

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.

Christianity with Power

In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the disciples that they would be given power for ministry. It reads:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Here are a few thoughts on this verse:

1. The verse is not referring to merely receiving the Holy Spirit. That happened to the disciples earlier (John 20:21-22).

2. This empowering was so important that Jesus told the disciples to do nothing until they received it (Acts 1:4).

3. This verse was fulfilled in Acts 2 at Pentecost and it involved much more than speaking in tongues. After Pentecost, we see in the disciples a new boldness, unity, and spiritual power. There is also a remarkable lack of selfish ambition.

It seems to me that we in America lack spiritual power. Only a small percentage of what is accomplished by most churches is the unmistakable work of God. Much of what we do is based on human efforts and abilities instead. What will it take for us to finally enter into power? Here are a few ideas:

- We need to admit that the way we function now is powerless. It is time to quit pretending that our candles are bonfires and confess our poverty before God.

- Like the disciples, we must wait on God, seek after Him, and receive power from Him.

- I do not think that receiving God’s power is done merely “by faith” as we often think of that phrase. Receiving things by faith is often an excuse for being lazy. Instead, there has to be an intentional pressing in that costs us something – an ongoing asking, seeking and knocking. That is faith at work in a way that allows us to receive.

The American Church is losing ground with each passing year. And sadly, rather than humbling ourselves and seeking God, we are caught up in all kinds of human efforts to make things better. The only solution that will work, however, is a genuine move of God in power.

I think that when this happens, God will be seeking out people who are willing to abandon themselves and their reputations and their security to follow Him. God will not be looking for the talented or the leaders to further His purposes. He will be looking for people like Mary in Nazareth – people who have no other qualification except that they are willing.

Am I willing? Are you?

Worthless Christian Activities

1 Corinthians 3:10-15 (NIV)

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

Yikes! This passage gives us a very strong warning that it is possible to do all kinds of Christian things and then discover that God considers all of our work to be pretty worthless. Can you imagine serving the Lord for years and discovering that He thought all that you did was a waste of time? Sadly, I think this is true for most Christians and Christian ministries. I know that is the case for me.

You see, although Paul warns us about worthless activities (wood, hay and straw), he does not tell us what God's standard is for evaluating our work. What makes what we do wood as opposed to gold? The answer is found in the book of John.

John 15:1-5 (NIV)

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

Here at the end of these verses, Jesus says that if we are not abiding in Him, we can do nothing. What does that mean?

To start with, abiding in Christ is not simply being a Christian. It is living in a love relationship with the Lord in which we have an active, on-going communion with Him. We are able to sense what the Holy Spirit is saying and we respond in loving obedience to His leading.

Secondly, when Jesus says we can do nothing, what He is telling us is that apart from abiding in Him, nothing we do matters to Him. We can do plenty of things apart from Christ, good and bad, so the saying that we can do nothing must apply to the value of those works.

So, here in John, Jesus says that if the things we do are not birthed out of an on-going love relationship with Him, they are worthless in His eyes.

Sadly, I think much of my Christian life has been wood, hay and straw. I was taught how to be a performer for God, not a lover of God. It also seems to me that most American Christians fall into that same category - and most churches and ministries as well. We have programs and activities and we are very, very busy. But in the process, we, like the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-5), have lost our first love. As a result, even if God uses our efforts, they amount to very little in His eyes. Our works, because they are not grounded in a genuine relationship with God, are wood, hay and straw, if even that.

So, if you have a very successful ministry, but do not have a deep love-walk with Jesus, do not deceive yourself that God is pleased. He is using your efforts, but they are wood, hay and straw. Likewise, if all you do is mop floors for a living, but your work springs out of a deep love for your Savior, then there is precious gold every time your mop slides across the floor.

What will is take for us to quit doing all kinds of stuff and learn instead how to be lovers? At what point will we finally lay aside our wood, hay and straw so that we can pick up the gold, silver and costly stones that are found in loving God?

Finding Ourselves

A few decades ago, it became popular for people to step back from life and take time to find themselves. They would leave college or work and venture out into the world to discover who they were. Many became temporary hippies. Others made it their vocation.

What these people had right was that they understood how the world around them had defined them and they wanted to find a place of deeper meaning. They did not want to be known as an accountant or as so-and-so's child. They wanted to discover who they were apart from those things.

What they had wrong was the notion that humans can define themselves apart from the world around them. We all get our identities either by what we do or who we are in relationship with. Men tend to focus on the task-based identity, i.e. "I am a writer." Women, on the other hand, lean a bit more towards the relational identity, i.e. "I am Kevin's wife." In either case, we cannot separate who we are from the world of tasks and relationships we live in. That's just how it is. The idea of the autonomous identity is a false one.

The problem, however, is that when we choose to find our identity in the tasks and relationships of a fallen world, we will end up with a fallen identity. The mirror we are looking in is too badly damaged to give us a true picture of ourselves.

The only way to discover our true self is to draw our identity from the One Who made us. It is as we understand who we are in relation to God that we see our real identity. Therefore, the more we are able to see God for who He really is, the more we are able to see ourselves for who we really are.

And, as we look upon the cross that Jesus died on, we discover that we are the well-loved children of an incredibly loving Father. We can then step into an eternal identity that is better than any earthly identity we could ever find.