Growing Closer to God Through Intentional Relationships: Part 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning.

As we start this day, just think about the place God has in your life. Do you know that when you put God at the centre of your life, God gets deeply involved in your life. He reveals Himself to you more as you spend time with Him in His word, and He starts to change you on the inside as His Holy Spirit goes to work in your inner life and he starts to work through you in the lives of the people around you.

There’s nothing better than a life with God at the centre of it, and the foundation of that is your daily time with God in His Word, the Bible. We start each weekday morning at this time with you by spending time with God in the Bible, and we’re talking all this week about how to grow closer to God through intentional relationships with other people.

We’ve seen how important it is to put accountability into those relationships where you find one or two people that you can just meet with each week and be accountable to about how your life’s going, what you’re struggling with, the sin you’re struggling with, but also the things God’s saying to you in His Word. You’re praying for one another.

We’ve seen also how important it is to build a group of friends around you who all want to grow closer to God, and as you spend time together talking together and praying together, you all grow together.

Then we saw yesterday that you also need to find someone who’s a Christian, who’s less far along the journey than you are, that you can invest in to help them grow. You will grow through that experience as well.

Today here’s the lesson for us: Look for non-Christians in your life who are keen to know more about God and the Bible and get close to them to help them encounter Jesus.

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You know, Jesus was always looking for the people who were keen to know more about God or to get right with God, and he spent time with them.

You remember in John chapter 3 it says there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know you’re a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him. Well, Jesus recognised immediately, although this man was a religious man, he didn’t really have a living relationship with God. And he needed to understand that and to know how to get right with God, so he immediately engaged in the conversation with him to help him turn his life over to God.

In the next chapter he is resting by the well and the woman at the well comes up and immediately a conversation begins and Jesus tests the water with a couple of statements to see if this woman is hungry to know more about God and the Bible and to get closer to God. Well, that leads to an amazing conversation.

I’ve found in my life that this simple process of throwing out a few comments that help a person if they are hungry to know about God, know there’s an open door here, and they will then ask me something or say something about the statement I’ve made, and that just opens up a conversation.

Well, as you go through life and you engage with the people in your life who are a regular part of your life who don’t know God yet, to just throw out some statements that invite them to go into the conversation, they’ll let you know if they’re hungry for more, right? This is a way to live your life, to represent God with the people in your life.

When you sit down on the train, and the person next to you doesn’t have their earpods on, and you say hi and you start talking, just drop something that invites a conversation to go deeper. What you will be doing is just surfacing people who are already keen to know more about God and the Bible.

And you will find God using you in people’s lives in such a deep way. And you know, when you start inviting God to use you in other people’s lives, you yourself grow so much closer to God. You’re depending on Him during that conversation, you’re praying about it, you’re trusting God, you’re seeing God work through you.

You will grow as you look for non-Christians in your life, keen to know more about God and the Bible and choose to engage with them.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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