Spiritual transformation into Christlikeness comes through a process and that process is one of living in relationship to God. And in this hour, we want to talk about what that relationship is like. The nature of our relationship to God, how are we to live in that relationship, what is our part, what God does and how that makes us able to become increasingly like our heart says we should be and like God wants us to be. So, we are addressing this question in connection with the phrase hearing God but hearing God is simply a short way of talking about a conversational relationship with God. We want to try to say as clearly as we can what that is like so that we can live in it to the greatest advantage of our spiritual growth in Christlikeness. [1:10]
It is very touching to observe how God approaches us. One of the most heartwarming scriptures to me is the picture in Genesis 3 where it talks about Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden. You have to pause a moment to think about what that tells you about God. God walking in the garden—what was he doing? Well, He was enjoying His creation, and He was coming to visit. Now, God, as He shows up in the early chapters of Genesis turns out to be a very chatty God. You will remember that even after Cain began to get in trouble, God shows up essentially for a counseling session and says, “Now, Cain, what’s the problem? You can do it. It’s true sin is crouching at the door, and it would like to have you, but you can overcome it. Come on, Cain.” That interaction is very interesting also because do you think he could have stopped Cain from killing Able? You see what emerges here is not only God’s interest in our lives but the space that He gives us. He does not stand over us. He gives us opportunity to work and be on our own. He gave Adam and Eve distance, but He came to visit. I don’t know how you handle that question, “Adam where are you?” But you might try thinking that by His choice, God didn’t know where Adam was. Now, don’t get too worked up about what He could know. There is no doubt that if he wanted to know, He could know where Adam was, but He gave Adam the distance that allowed him to respond to the question. When we come to think about the basic relationship of intimate fellowship, friendship with God, we want to understand that it is one where God is both available but gives us the option of turning away and practically speaking now for our studies together here, we need to come to grips with that option and think about how it is exercised. God comes. God walks in our midst. He’s there as Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst. The Kingdom of God is in your midst. The Kingdom of God is just God acting. He is everywhere but you don’t always see Him and yet He does show up and He gives us these wonderful words like the great Aaronic blessing in Deuteronomy 6. He told Moses—God told Aaron through Moses—that Aaron should put this blessing upon his people. Now, just think about the words. “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you—don’t go too fast there—you have to think about what that meant—the shining face of God: the face of God shining on me. Isn’t that a wonderful picture? The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.” I especially like the phrase, “The Lord lift up His countenance upon you.” As a child, I couldn’t make much sense of lifting up your countenance. What it means is the Lord look right at you. The Lord look right at you. Lift up His countenance upon you. The Lord be gracious. See, that’s presence and that’s what God has made us for is His presence and He seeks fellowship with us. God seeks fellowship with us. What does that come from? That comes from His nature as loving community. That is the basic nature of God, and we shall have to talk later about the trinity because the trinity is not just the driest dust old doctrine. It’s a picture of the living reality of God and the community of God. But then there is our response—what is our response? Well, the Psalmist says in Psalms 27, “When you said, seek my face; I said thy face oh Lord will I seek.” That’s our side so there is an area here where we realize that our relationship to God is not a consumerous relationship. [7:20] Religion as Christianity understands it isn’t a consumer relation. We don’t consume the merits of Christ. We don’t consume the services of the church. We are participants. We are not spectators. We are in the game and the game is producing the greatest creative goodness possible under the power and character of God in which we share. We find that God is not just a creator; he creates creators and that’s you and me. We were meant to live in a fellowship that is at least for the beginning to be described as a conversational relationship with God. There are some wonderful words from Brother Lawrence. “There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it; yet I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure that we ought to seek in this exercise but let us do it from a principle of love and because God would have us do it.” [9:03] Our part, our response is to speak to God and listen to God in a conversational relationship. We seek His face, but we don’t just seek it to look at; we seek it to interact, and that interaction is primarily one of speaking and of hearing. We have these great verses that show up and get quoted very often like “If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves;” that’s how you come before God. That’s why we don’t seek it just for fun and pleasure because it isn’t for our use to get what we want. We humble ourselves. That really means to see ourselves realistically before God as dependent upon His goodness and as an expression of His goodness. The verse there in 2nd Chronicles says, “If my people—not everyone—my people—who are those?—the ones who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, seek my face, turn from their wicked ways, then I will come.” I will remove the distance. I will come. I will hear them. I will forgive them. I will heal. And so, where we start from is a position of alienation. That’s the natural condition of humankind. But we are invited to live before the shining face of God and in that place to live out a conversation where we speak, and we hear and that is the place of the friend. The 23rd Psalm says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Why?—because God is with me. That “with-God” is the key to understanding who we are and why we are here and the nature of the relationship that we have with God. Brother Lawrence tells us to practice the presence of God. He wasn’t the first to say that, but he did it probably in the best way that we are all familiar with. Others like—there is a little book called The Way of the Pilgrim where a serious person decides that they want to learn how to pray without ceasing and the technique that they learned comes down to us in the form of what we call “the Jesus Prayer” which is a repetition…”Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” You don’t have to use exactly those words but what he was learning was how to keep a conversation running—talking to God, listening to God. Frank Laubach, another more modern figure—a great person who learned how to be with God by turning his mind once a moment in some way towards God whether it was a verse from a hymn, an image of a saint, a prayer for a need because that’s one thing he learned how to do was to pray moment by moment for what he needed in that moment. He saw the remarkable answers that came in those moments for such things as, “What’s the next word I should type?” And God—that interactive relationship was one of friendship. [13:18]
Now, Jesus calls us friends if we simply do what He commands. But it isn’t slavishly; it is doing it as one who understands what’s going on. He says in John 15, “You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer I call you slaves or servants for the slave does not know what his master is doing.” The intimate relationship with Christ that we live in is one where we know what He is doing and we are His friends by cooperative activity; not just because we get something that blots out our personality, pushes away our wants and our desires but rather we live in that relationship where our desires are as important to God as His desires are important to us. You may think that’s a little too much, but you are living in a relationship where God not only answers your prayers but is working around you to help you desire the right things. So, it isn’t just that He gives you what you desire, He gives you the desires of your heart as you live in the conversational relationship with God. God’s intent for each of us is that we should grow to the point to where He can empower us to do what we want. Now, there is a lot of work on our “wanter” before we get there and that’s what goes on in the relationship as we walk with God, listening and hearing, moment by moment, day by day as we grow. [15:14]
Now, I want to go back and lay a more scriptural foundation for all of this, and you have in your notes a whole bunch of scripture and I want to talk about some of those in detail. Actually, the single most important scripture in all of this is Genesis 1:26 and you can turn there if you want. You don’t need to. I think you recognize it. This is the point of creation. What are we created for? And we are created to have dominion under God…. dominion under God. That passage is a little insight into the community that is God before creation and during creation. We call it the Trinity, of course and the wording there is, “let us make human beings in our likeness.” Now, God never said that about anything else and there is this unique feature of creation for human beings. How He did it, of course, we don’t know but we know His intent. He said, “Let us make human beings in our likeness.” You might go off into a theological cloud trying to spell that out, but I would encourage you to just look at the next words to understand what that means. “Let them have dominion.” Now, dominion is a scary word because it has been pulled away from God’s rule and when human dominion is on its own, it is bound to be destructive but under God, it is bound to be creative and good and actually, the creation ethic—the green Gospel—comes out of Genesis 1:26. Let them be responsible. Let them have dominion.
What you start with there isn’t all that encouraging because the first thing you get to have dominion over are fish. [17:44] You have to remember that this is way back in the beginning and by the time this gets to Psalm 8, you start with sheep. You probably haven’t seen many sheep this morning or this week so you see that’s a progressive but what remains the same is responsibility for good and that is the call of God and now, His intent is that He would be in the midst of that. Humanity is to be a dwelling place of God and that’s the intent in Genesis 1:26 and that develops. You have on your list there Exodus 29:43-46. Now you may not be familiar with that one. I hope you will become familiar because this is in the wilderness experience of people coming under the leadership of Moses out of Egypt going to the Promised Land and they build a tabernacle. Now, a tabernacle is a kind of a tent. It really isn’t a very grand sort of thing and it’s interesting that later on, the Gospels will say that Jesus came and tabernacle among us in flesh. It’s a kind of temporary dwelling but the point of that passage is, why did they have the tabernacle, and it was so that God could dwell in their midst. Now, that of course grows into something bigger and in Ephesians 2:22, you find that the church that is being pulled out of the earth is to be a dwelling place of God. In Ephesians 2, you find the story about how it starts out with Israel and so on and the Gentiles are brought in, and the foundation is the apostles and the prophets and Jesus Christ Himself being the cornerstone, but it’s built up to be a dwelling place of God. That is what history is about. That’s what your life and my life is about, and I won’t have time to go through the rest of those verses there. I encourage you to study them and especially to look at the last one on the list, which brings to conclusion—that’s the other bookend of Genesis 1:26—“and they shall live and reign with God forever and ever.” [21:00]
So, now what are you going to be doing 2,000 years from now? What do you think? Well, you are not going to be quite to Revelation 22:5. What is your future? Your future is reigning with God in His universe and that’s why I encourage you to say to yourself at least once or twice a day, “I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” As you grow older and you cease being pretty and you become lumpy and ragged, and you look in the mirror, remember to say that. What you see in that mirror is not you. You are an unceasing spiritual being created to live in friendship with God forever. Now, that helps us understand the intimate relationship with God because when we start talking about hearing God and receiving guidance and so on, we are very likely to lose the main point about friendship and that is that communicating with God is not always or primarily a matter of being told what to do. For many people, they cannot progress in their relationship with God because they are just thinking in terms of being told what to do. Being in the will of God requires that you go beyond that. Jesus told a story about a person who had a servant, and the servant was out in the field working and when the servant came in, the master asked him to prepare a meal, and the servant would eat later. He made a stunning statement there. He said, “If your servant does what you tell him to do, you don’t thank him and He says, “so you likewise, if you only do what God tells you to do, say we are unprofitable servants.” Do you remember that? Think about it now. If you only do what you are told to do, you are an unprofitable servant. Who is a profitable servant? A profitable servant is someone who knows what needs to be done and does it without being told. Right? Now, that fits in with Jesus’ statement about “you are my friends because you know what I am doing. I call you my friends because you understand what’s going on.” That’s the picture of a co-worker, not of a servant who stands around waiting to be told what to do. Your wants and your desires are important in God’s plan for you. In general, in human relations also, things are beginning to get to be what they ought to be if you have people who don’t need to be told. I like to illustrate that as I do in the book Hearing God by talking about our children, John and Becky and when they were small. If they were playing in the yard or getting into the peanut butter in the kitchen or whatever, they were certainly in our will though we weren’t telling them what to do. That’s crucial in coming to understand the nature of our friendship and intimate relationship with God. We are, of course talking, listening—there are times when we are told what to do and that’s perfectly all right. That’s a good thing. We should expect it when it’s appropriate and I believe that God will provide it, but we are not in the relationship of simply a master and slave—not in that relationship. [25:58]
Interestingly, Paul and some of the other apostles call themselves slaves of Jesus Christ but that slavery is on the other side of friendship. You’ve already gone through friendship to get to that kind of slavery. That is the kind of service that makes God’s will and His purposes; what Christ is doing in the world—makes that primary but it is not something that you are driven to—it is something you are drawn to. You are drawn to by the goodness and beauty of all that is in God and in His creation and in His world and, in that relationship, we experience complete service as free people under someone who respects our wants and our wills and refines them and helps us become the individuals that He wants us to be. You know, the only real individuals are saints and when you get to know them, you find that there are no two alike. Sinners are boringly similar and it’s so depressing to see that scene—predictable because there is nothing of uniqueness in what they are living for. They are living for themselves. They are living for their wants without reverence to God. They are enslaved to their desires and the world has ahold of them and is pressing them into a mold. They are all very, very similar and all you have to do is watch a little television to see how similar they are. But the saints are unique because God has shaped their wants and their wills as Psalm 37 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I think that is a pleasing ambiguity in that phrase because He actually does give you desires in the sense that He shapes your impulses, what you are ready to do, what you want, so that they match up with His. That’s where that saying I give you comes in where I say that “God is developing us.” His intent for us is to come to the place to where He can empower us to do what we want, and then He works on the other side—the object of the desire—and gives us the desires because He has already given us the desires for what we desire. So, now then, that is a unique combination that makes every individual living in the conversation with God to be something no one else has ever seen. [29:10]
There is an old theological idea called, “the great chain of being” which says that God is trying to create the greatest possible good and of course, that will never be done because He is infinite and the good, He is producing is limitless. Then, in the process of doing that, He makes individuals not alike but different to fill out the greatest possible good and then He puts in their hands the power of creativity on their own. That’s why your best moments are undoubtedly your most creative moments. No matter if it’s something rather humble and simple. [30:00]
I try to do a little physical labor from time to time. I enjoy working with brick and mortar and plants and so on. Very interesting because if I pour some concrete or do some brick work or something of that nature, it’s never really very good but I always find that I have to go back and look at it. Are you like that? That’s Genesis 1:26. It’s built into us. It’s something that we really can’t produce in ourselves, and it is an illustration, I think, of the desires of our heart that God gives us. Now, it needs to be carried out within the boundaries of the divine conversation because God needs to constantly be guiding us and directing our thoughts and our actions and arranging our circumstances and helping us understand that whatever we are doing, we want to be in that with God—even if it’s a brick wall and you really don’t know how to lay brick in the first place. So, that conversational relationship with God of which Brother Lawrence talks is something that we carry on with God as we go about leading our unique life and that is God’s intent for us. As we do that, of course, we always have the larger framework, the community, the work of the fellowship that we are in as a part of our lives, so we don’t just go off in a corner and do something creative. We are people who live in community, and we delight in other people and so, the friendship spreads. We find our fulfillment in our relationships to other people and that moves us toward the Trinitarian nature of human community that we will have to speak more of later on today because the Trinity actually turns out to be the model of life as it is intended to be in human existence. That’s the basis for genuine human community as an extension of human dominion because dominion is never meant to be exercised on our own. It’s always meant to be exercised in the community of love. Of course, that should be in our families, but our families often are broken. And when Jesus says that we must forsake everything if we would be His disciples, that really is so that we can turn back to the family to all of the broken relationships and bring them into wholeness of dominion under God. So, when Jesus comes and says, “Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at hand,” He is inviting us into community that returns to broken human community and heals that community so that the greatest part eventually of God’s intention in human life will be fulfilled. Not probably in the world as we know it but the resolution of the problems of the world as we know it does begin now and we can bring that wherever we are as we learn to live the life of intimate friendship with God and that spreads to those around us. We are seeing the healing of the nations that will be fulfilled at some point in the future when God completes his work in Christ and brings everything in subjection to Christ as Paul lays out so wonderfully in Colossians 1 and in Philippians 2 and elsewhere. [34:52]
The 23rd Psalm now is a reflection of the life that we lead as friends of God. There is a wonderful old denomination that we call Quakers. They didn’t call themselves Quakers. They called themselves friends of God—friends of God—and when you go back and read about their fellowship when they started around a man named George Fox and you see the beauty of that community of friends of God and they took their name explicitly from the passage in John 15 that I quoted, “No longer do I call you slaves, we are friends.” That friendship with God is what we carry forward in the intimacy of our conversational relationship now in a communal setting offering the answer to all of the problems of humanity. [36:10] Those problems come from the rupture of the relationship of man to God. They are restored in Jesus Christ by those who become His students in Kingdom living and learn how to live with their minds constantly interacting with Him, with the Holy Spirit, and with God the Father. That Trinitarian fellowship we will have to talk about a little more in our third talk for today, but it is the glorious culmination of human life. OK; we will have to quit for now. Thank you!