Give Your Relationships to God: Pt. 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. I love meeting with you each morning at this time and going together to listen to God.

How do you listen to God? Well, just open your Bible. God is there, not just in the words on the page. He Himself is in your life, and he’s going to use his word, the Bible, to speak to you personally, not just general truth for everyone, but what he wants you to hear right now in your life.

And that’s what we do each weekday morning at this time. We open the Bible, we listen to God, we let Him shape our lives, and our lives become so much richer as we respond to what God is saying to us. All this week we’ve been looking at the importance of giving our relationships to God.

We talked about giving your relationship with your kids to God and how God wants to use you in your kids’ lives.

We talked then about giving your friendships to God and recognizing that as God works in you, he wants you to pass that on into the lives of your friends who are around you.

Yesterday we talked about giving your relationship with your workmates to God and just having this awareness that you don’t just have that job because you’re awesome – you work where you work because God put you there and He put you there to represent Him with those people. To encourage them to get to know him, to grow in a relationship with him. As you think about your workplace, why do you think God would have put you with the people that you’re with? What’s going on in their lives? Where do you see a brokenness and a need for God? How can you share with them what God can mean in your life?

And today I want to challenge you to give those that you lead or those that you minister to as a Christian – to God, give those relationships to God.

You know when Moses was the leader of the people of Israel in the Old Testament, he was an amazing leader. He walked with God so amazingly that the Bible says that God said, I speak with Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend – Well, that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

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And then by faith he led them out of Egypt across the Red Sea, and they had so many miraculous experiences as God led the people of Israel through Moses. But Moses recognized that God just hadn’t sent him to a general ministry, but he had a specific role in the lives of the people that he led – and he needed to pass this role onto them.

Moses selected a young man named Joshua, and he began investing very significant time with Joshua teaching Joshua to pray and to spend time with God, engaging Joshua in his decisions about the nation of Israel, and Joshua then went on after Moses died to become one of the greatest leaders in the nation of Israel.

Who at such a crucial time was used by God as they went into the promised land and faced so many enemies and challenges, God kept the nation following Him because of how Moses had prepared Joshua for that role of ministry and leadership.

Joshua applied all he got from Moses, but you know one thing he didn’t apply. He didn’t learn the lesson of passing things on to the next generation.

And so when you come to the book of Judges, which is immediately after Joshua, this is what it says.

When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land, and the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110. They buried him.

And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel, and it goes on to describe how they walked away from God.

Don’t forget that your responsibility is not only to minister to the people that God has sent you to, but also to develop some of them to be effective leaders and ministers for the next generation.

Give your relationships with those you lead to God.

I’m John North.

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

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