Together We Are Stronger, Part 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As you head into this day, don’t forget, number one in your life is your love for God. That’s what Jesus said, isn’t it?

The greatest commandment in all of Scripture is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.

God wants to transform your life, and He does that as you put Him first in your life, not just first in your sense of morality, your sense of what you should and shouldn’t do, and so you try not to do the things you shouldn’t, and you try to do the things you should, by all means do that too, but that’s not what he’s talking about. By putting him first, he means relationally first.

The most important relationship in your life. Well, what do you do with the most important people in your life? You try to spend time with them. You try to get close to them. That’s what you need to do in your relationship with God. And spending time with God means opening up your Bible, allowing Him to speak into your life with a listening heart.

And then responding to him, praying to him, talking to him about the things that he’s saying to you.

I try to get you started on that journey each day at this time by opening up the Bible with you and looking at something the Lord has said to us, and this week our theme has been ‘Together we are Stronger’.

There has been so many beautiful passages that have pointed us in that direction, and I think you will agree that this is one of the great truths of life, that together we are stronger. Listen to how the apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Rome in the book of Romans in the Bible, chapter 1, verse 9.

He says:

For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you always in my prayers, making request if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you in order that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established, that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.

Well, isn’t that awesome? Paul says, I’m longing to come and impart some spiritual gift to you, but really it’s going to happen together. It’s going to be that I am really blessed by my time with you and you are blessed by your time with me. I’m going to be encouraged by your faith. You’re going to be encouraged by mine, and we’re both going to be established. We’re going to be built up. We will be spiritually stronger for having been together.

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Wow, that’s awesome, and that’s how you should think about your relationship with the people in your life.

Don’t just think of it as a one-way street in either direction. Sometimes we just think about relationships in terms of what we can get from them, what we want from this person, what they are not giving me, that I expect, that I demand, building life around me and all the expectations that other people should be focused around me as well.

No, that’s unhealthy, isn’t it?

But it’s also unhealthy to be totally focused in the other direction.

To be sitting there thinking only of how you want to share Jesus with this person in your life and all your thoughts are just about what you are going to communicate to them, what you want to pass on to them, and you’re not listening to them. You’re not receiving from them, you’re not letting it be a two-way street. Both ways are unhealthy.

And you need in all your relationships, whether they’re with Christians or people who don’t yet know Jesus, to be building this, this mutual giving into your relationships, learning from them, receiving from them, acknowledging and affirming their input into your life, and at the same time looking for ways to encourage them and build them up as people as well.

I’m John North.

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

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