Together We Are Stronger, Part 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As we head into this day, keep your mind focused on your relationship with God, the most important relationship there is in your life, and build your life around your time with God. Don’t just sort of try to squeeze some time with God in here or there at the beginning of your day or in between some other activities so you can get on to the real business of your day.

Give it a place of priority in your life. Make it the first thing, and then build walls around it to protect that time with God because that time with God is what builds your relationship with God, and your relationship with God is what matters more than anything else in your life.

Your whole life revolves around what God is doing in you.

Well, that’s what we try to build into your life a little bit each day with these spots, and we’re looking this week at the theme of ‘Together we are Stronger’. What a powerful theme this is all through the Bible.

We see it in Jesus’ own life and ministry.

You may remember in John chapter 4 in the Bible, Jesus encountered the woman at the well, that Samaritan woman, probably an immoral woman, and the disciples had been in town getting food, and they came back with their food and saw Jesus finishing up his conversation with this woman, a deeply spiritual conversation that impacted her life in an amazing way. And they got back and they said to Him in verse 31:

Rabbi, eat. But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about. The disciples therefore were saying to one another, no one brought him anything to eat, did he? And Jesus said to them, my food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.

Do you not say there are yet 4 months and then comes the harvest. Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields that they are white for harvest. Already he who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for life eternal, so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.

For in this case the saying is true. One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you have not laboured. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.

So there’s this beautiful picture of together we are stronger as Jesus says, He who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. And as Jesus is talking about his ministry in that area, this is an area that John the Baptist had had ministry in – prior to Jesus coming on the scene.

And Jesus is now coming, and John the Baptist was sent as kind of the forerunner, the one to prepare people’s hearts for the arrival of Jesus, and he’s been in this area, and people’s hearts are prepared so that as that woman goes back to her town in the rest of the chapter and shares about her encounter with Jesus, just about the whole town comes out to meet Jesus and to hear from Him, and they too put their faith in Jesus and are saved. And so in an amazing way, this partnership between John the Baptist, who’s sowing into people’s lives and Jesus, who’s reaping, comes to bear spiritual fruit.

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So in your own life as you think about the people in your life that God has put you with, that He wants you to have a spiritual impact on, don’t feel like you’ve got to be the whole spiritual answer to that person’s life. No, you’re just a step, you’re just a part of a partnership between you and other people that you may not even know, but that God is using in those people’s lives to also draw them closer to Himself.

I’m John North.

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

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