God Wants to Walk WITH You

The two main things I want to communicate to you tonight are these:
1. Your role in living for God is as essential as His role is. Although, His role is much greater!
2. There is no need to ‘hurry up’ to be righteous or holy. Do your best to obey God's Word, yes! However, the only ‘hurrying up’ needed is for you to get in good communication with God. A relationship is what He wants to have with you, not some business transaction.

Like a coach training a football team, God wants to train you. Like an athlete, you must have the willingness to be trained. (Otherwise the coaching would have been done in vain) If you are willing to be trained and you seek Him out to train you, then you are good as gold… right? Well, sure... except that the efforts given by the athlete are ultimately what determine his or her success in the area of training. In other words, you can ask God to train you all you want - but nothing will happen until YOU begin to hear Him and YOU decide to put effort into living in righteousness.

God accepts you the way you are, and for a reason. He doesn't merely want to change you; He wants YOU to change, too! What I mean is that our relationship with God is a mutual relationship (that means that something is needed to come from both ends in order to fulfill the reason for coming together in the first place). This is similar to the relationship between a coach and an athlete. The coach needs to teach and guide while the athlete must listen and act on what the coach advises. It takes effort from both people in order for the athlete to get better. (1 Corinthians 3:8)

James 1:22 gives incredible account for the athlete: "Do not merely listen to the WORD and so deceive yourselves, do what it says."

For the athlete, this reads: “Do not merely listen to the coach, and in doing so waste your time at football practice, do what the coach tells you to do!”

God could always flip a switch to make you righteous and holy when you ask Him to... but this would make your relationship with God more like a business transaction than a personal relationship. If He did flip a switch, what effort would we have given in order to become holy or righteous?

God wants to spend time with you. In your walk with God, He has a place He wants to bring you to. Holiness – Righteousness – SALVATION. More than simply arriving at that place, however, He wants to walk with you the whole way. I believe that God desires to walk with you just as much as He desires for you to arrive at your destination.

(Think of it like this: A man and a woman who are in love take a walk. What is their intent: to arrive at some destination, or to be with each other? Likewise, God isn’t in a hurry on our walk)

(Or like this: When I’m a father, I will hope for my son to grow up as an honorable dude and to one day be a godly husband and father. By no means will I want to skip his childhood! I want to take life as it comes, teaching him the importance of kindness, love, respect, black forest gummy bears, and the endless other lessons he will learn, as well as laughing with him and enjoying his company. In the same way, God wants to have a relationship with us – taking time to get to know us - not to be our taxi driver!)

So, the two main things I want to communicate to you tonight are these:
1. Your role in living for God is as essential as His role is. Although, His role is much greater!
2. There is no need to ‘hurry up’ to be righteous or holy. Do your best to obey God's Word, yes! However, the only ‘hurrying up’ needed is for you to get in good communication with God. A relationship is what He wants to have with you, not some business transaction.