Review

The first week we looked at how God speaks to us and the three voices we might hear when we try to listen to God: His voice, our own heart or the enemy trying to imitate God's voice to mislead us. We spent the week doing exercises designed for God to better reveal our own heart to us. Hopefully that helped us to learn to discern a bit better when our own heart tries to imitate God's voice to us.

The second week we looked at how our relationship with others effects our relationship with God and how it can effect our ability to clearly discern His voice. We invited the Lord to help us examine unforgiveness and relationship issues that might be present in our own heart...

Now this week are we going to look at our relationship with God and how draw even close to Him. We know that the better we know Him, the more clearly we will be able to hear His voice.. so, the better our personal relationship with God, the more clearly we will be able to discern His voice.

Developing Our Relationship With God

Think back to any close and important relationship in your life.. did it start out as instantly close or did you have to develop and build the relationship? In most cases, our important and meaningful relationships did not instantly spring into existence.. they were grown and cultivated or developed over time. Likewise, we develop and grow in our relationship with God over time.

Do not confuse your relationship with God (in terms of closeness and intimacy with Him) with your relational position in God through Christ. If you belong to Jesus, then you are a child of God, adopted into His family (eph 1:4-5), whether or not you enjoy intimacy with Him. Let me develop this a little...

If you are born again, God is your heavenly Father (Ro 8:15, Gal 4:6), and you can depend on that.. He is not going to disown you for bad behavior or because you aren't smart enough or aren't motivated enough, or whatever. In the natural, your biological father remains your biological father regardless of your relationship with him. Hopefully most of us have good fathers and have a good relationship with him. But regardless of the quality of relationship, you biological father remains your biological father.. and there is nothing you can do to change that. He may have died before you were born or he may have been harsh or distant or absent. Your relationship with him may not have been ideal or perfect, but he is still your biological father. You still carry his genes and you are still his child.

Likewise for those of us who have been born again, God is your heavenly (or spiritual) Father. This is true even if your relationship with Him is not all that it could/should be. You are secure in that relationship.. even if you never had a role model of what a good father should look like, God remains a good Heavenly Father to you. It does not matter if you have misconceptions about God's nature / character that you have picked up from bad or abusive role models. God still remains a good father for you.. and He loves you even when you don't know how to respond properly to His. What I am trying to say here is that no matter what your relationship with God is, He will remain a good father to you.

It is possible to be His and not to have developed a close, deep and intimate relationship with Him. And God wants to invite you into a deep and close and intimate and loving relationship with Him. If you are already in one, He wants to invite you deeper into it.

If you don't know how, that is not a problem.. He is willing to teach you how. He will show you how to walk it out.. how develop a close and intimate relationship with Him if you are willing.. if you desire it. (Heb 13:20-21)

The key is NOT where you are at now, it is NOT how holy you are not or how well you hear His voice now.. the key to success is to truly desire to be close to Him and to be willing to let Him show you how, and to be committed to cooperate with Him in the process. Knowing God more intimately and building a relationship with Him is a process. You can start right now.

There seem to be three key elements in building relationship with God. Let me touch briefly on each one:

Holiness

Holiness means doing things God's way, not our own way. It means being set apart for Him, and not corrupted by the things He finds repulsive. It is not so much overt behaviors (though they are important) as our attitudes and motives behind the actions. We desire to do the things that God would do, that would please Him. Likewise, we tend to stay away from the things that displease Him or that reflect poorly on His character. It is possible to be overtly "holy" in actions but from a wrong spirit... the pharasees specialized in this and we see it did not please God at all. (Matthew 23).

To be holy means to abstain from overt sin. But it means more than that. It means we set ourselves apart for His service. It means we watch our motives. We try to not only do what pleases God, but to do it with an attitude that pleases Him. We invite Him to change and transform our heart and our motives to match up with His, and we cooperate with the Holy Spirit when He is doing this work in us.

This is an ongoing process.. we will never be "holy enough" until the day we are perfected in glory. But the indwelling Holy Spirit will work in us to transform us into His likeness. Holiness is not having achieved the end result (being like Jesus in every way). Rather it is having determined in our heart to cooperate fully with God in this transformation purpose and then walking it out as He shows us how to.

Obedience

Jesus said in John 14:15 (and again in John 15:14), "If you love me, then obey me." Jesus clearly expects us to obey Him.. to do His thing instead of our own thing. But obedience in and of itself is NOT enough.. the motive behind the obedience is just as important as the obedience itself. In fact, the motive of obedience is more important than the obedience itself.. we MUST love Him!! We must be in intimate relationship with Him.. we must know Him and be known of Him. Check out Matt 7:21-23. In this, we see people who are obeying Jesus.. they are prophesying (preaching??) in His name and they are operating in signs and wonders. Yet, they are doing this from the wrong motives.. not in love and service to God. And as a result, they are not even permitted into heaven, much less rewarded for their obedience. Obedience that is birthed out of the wrong motives does not count as obedience in God's economy.

But those of you taking this course already love the Lord, so Matt 7:21-23 does not apply to you.

Still the Lord expect you to obey Him because you are His, and because He is God. This has been His pattern since day one.. He expected Adam and Eve to obey Him in the garden and abstain from the one limitation He put on them. He expected Abraham to obey Him and leave everything he was familiar with and comfortable in to follow God. He expected the children of Israel to obey Him. In the Law, we see both the blessings of obedience and the curse for disobedience, as Moses expounded on in Deuteronomy chapters 28 to 30, and summarized in Deut 30:15-17.

When Jesus walked on this earth, He told his disciples clearly that He expected them to obey Him (John 15:9-11). As His disciples, we are not to question Him, not to second guess Him, not to weight/measure the benefits and consequences of what God commands. We are simply to trust Him because of our love relationship with Him and to do what He tells us to do.

If you want to go far in God, you must be 100% committed to obeying Him. There is no other option.. He is the Lord (boss) and He demands His Lordship in every area of our lives. Fortunately, He is a patient teacher. If we ask Him to teach us how to walk out His Lordship in every area of our lives, He will teach us. But the first step is to settle the question of who is "boss" in our own minds. It is to purpose in our heart to commit to His Lordship in every area of our lives. We must predetermine we are going to commit to obey Him no matter what He commands. That makes the process of learning to walk it out quite a bit easier.

Spending Time With God

Finally, we need to spend time with God. We have to put time into any relationship to develop it... the same is true for our relationship with God. Again, I am talking about developing intimacy with Him, not about our eternal position in Christ. I believe that we are saved SOLELY through the blood of Jesus. We can be saved and adopted into God's family and neglect to develop intimacy with our heavenly father. That will not keep us out of heaven when we die.. but we will certainly be missing out on something wonderful that God created for us while we were alive.

Jesus' desire for us was that we would be one with Him just as He is one with the Father... (John 14:20).. e.g, to be in deep intimacy with God. This is God's desire and plan for each of us.

To develop a relationship in the natural, we need to spend time with that person. Likewise, if we want to develop a relationship with God, we must spend time with Him. At first, we start with small quantities of time and as relationship builds we spend more time together. I remember once when my husband was away on a business trip. It was as three day weekend and I set the whole three days aside for God.. a great plan in my mind's eye. No computer, no TV, no telephone, no visiting friends.. just me and God... starting Friday night when I got home from work until Tuesday morning when I went back to work. I got through Friday night by reading scripture and praying. It was a long night.. I don't know what I expected, maybe to be transported into the heavenlies in an open vision?? Well, that did not happen and it was slow going, but still quality time. Saturday morning seemed to take forever .. I put on worship music and worshipped.. that was good for an hour, but now it was only 10:00 AM and I still had an awful lot of hours ahead of me. I prayed in tongues for half an hour.. then I tried something else.. and I realized I was watching the clock tick slowly by rather than really connecting with God. I finally confessed to God that I was bored and asked Him if He was bored too. He laughed at me!! Then He began showing me how I could bring Him into my day and be with Him without simply blocking off a large quantity of time and then not knowing what to do with it. He told me that there would come a time in my relationship with Him where we could easily spend 3 days together and it would be full and rich. But I was not at that place at that time when I had set this weekend apart for Him. (Has anyone else tried a stunt like that and had similar results? Did it discourage you from spending time with Him? If so, get that out of your system, and purpose to start again.. this time in a do-able fashion.)

God does want to build relationship with us. Some of the early activities we can do in spending time together includes praying, reading and meditating on scripture, putting on worship tapes/CD's and worshipping along, sitting down and discussing important areas of our life with Him, inviting Him into our day, reviewing our day with Him, etc. Start out realistically .. don't set aside 12 hours or three days and then end up being bored and frustrated. Instead, try 1/2 an hour twice a day. When that seems to short, up it to 45 minutes.. etc.

The goal is to develop intimacy with God, to allow Him to examine and transform our hearts and motives, to get to know Who He really is and to learn to love and trust Him at a deeper level. It is also to have some playtime with Daddy God .. you know, He has a wonderful sense of humor.. heck.. He is the one who invented "sense of humor" .. He has teased me, cracked jokes and even played loving practical jokes on me. He can be a great deal of fun!

Get to know Him.. explore the depthes of Who He is.. ask Him to reveal Himself to you. Spend time with Him.