ChosenRebel's Blog

It is an overstatement of course, but it is a question that is only asked by Christians. No one else is in the culture is interested in walking with God. They are interested in making a living, getting ahead, rooting for their favorite teams, having sex, drinking beer, collecting hobbies, piddling around in their gardens and garages, but walking with God? No, that is not on the radar screen of most people. 

Unfortunately, that first paragraph is not true. It’s another overstatement, but a telling one I think. Because, in my experience, most Christians aren’t interested in walking with God either. We are interested in getting things from God. We are interested in witnessing for Christ, or bringing glory to God, or loving our neighbors, or loving the family of God, or raising our families to believe, and we are interested in all the things listed in the first paragraph. But walking with God? . . . Walking in a daily, moment by moment communion with God is not in the center of our radar screens either. Every Christian that reads this has to fight this battle and most of us, myself included, lose with redundant repetitiveness.

² I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven you for His name’s sake. ¹³ I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him who has been from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I have written to you, children, because you know the Father. ¹⁴ I have written to you, fathers, because you know Him who has been from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.

1 John 2:12-14

There have been times in the history of the church when things were different.

Today I was listening to a mini-biography on the life of John Owen, one of the greatest of the English Puritans and a man who knew something about walking with God. Here’s the portion of the bio that caught my attention: (I hope you will read it slowly and reflectively. Trying reading it out loud; that might help.]

Owen Passionately Pursued a Personal Communion with God

It is incredible that Owen was able, under the pressures of his life, to keep writing books that were both weighty and edifying. Andrew Thomson, one of his biographers, wrote,

It is interesting to find the ample evidence which [his work on Mortification] affords, that amid the din of theological controversy, the engrossing and perplexing activities of a high public station, and the chilling damps of a university, he was yet living near God, and like Jacob amid the stones of the wilderness, maintaining secret intercourse with the eternal and invisible.60

Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them . . .

. . . communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.61

But God was seeing to it that Owen and the suffering Puritans of his day lived closer to God and sought after communion with God more earnestly than we. Writing a letter during an illness in 1674, Owen said to a friend, “Christ is our best friend, and ere long will be our only friend. I pray God with all my heart that I may be weary of everything else but converse and communion with Him.”62 God was using illness and all the other pressures of Owen’s life to drive him into communion with God and not away from it.

Contending for Our All: Defending and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of
Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen
By John Piper, p. 105-106

Packer says in the quote above that when Christians get together, they talk about a lot of things but “rarely of their daily experience of Christ”. I think he is right and I think that is tragic.  But maybe, if we would begin to pursue communion with God, an actual close daily, hand-in-hand walk with God, we could give the world something more. Maybe we could give them not only the announcement of the greatest news ever proclaimed but also a living picture of the difference walking with God makes in our lives.

Let’s find out. Let’s change the narrative and become a people that knows how to walk in communion with God.