I hope that the Easter season has invited you to get closer to God. But for most of us, we have a lot of general dreams in life
that we never make a practical plan to live out. How many people here have said, I really should save more money? I bet you kids get an allowance and some of you have seen a game or video that you want. Have you thought to yourself,
‘I really should save my money so that I can get that for 
myself?’ These are like New Year’s resolutions
, we think about them for 10 seconds and then get back to our real life.
If you want to be closer to God, we are going to take the next three Sundays to talk about New Beginnings. I want you to come away from this time with a closer daily walk with God, a stronger relationship to other Christians, and a better understanding of how God wants you to use your gifts. I hope that you’re here for all three of these messages because it will help you to accomplish your goal of getting closer to God.
Today we are going to look at a key problem of Christian life. We are all born with a desire to know God. If you have been wanting to draw closer to God, that’s a natural function of the way you were created. You were born to seek God. The problem is that the practice of seeking God is not natural.
In the service today, we are going to work on how to develop a daily practice of being with God. If you are just starting in your faith, this may be completely new. But even if you are an experienced Christian, I find that a moment like this helps me recommit to the practice of knowing God. Bishop Park has asked every pastor to attend a session this Spring led by someone who has a committed daily practice of prayer and Bible study. The more I think of the idea, the more I like it. Pastors can get so busy organizing the life of the Christian community that we lose the daily practice to be closer to God. When I was working with college students, we continually were doing trainings on how to practice the presence of God. It may have had an impact on the students, but it certainly had an impact on us leading the sessions.
I hope that you will open your heart now, asking God to help you make a practical step today that will place God more at the center of life, ready to support you as you make choices during the week and live a life of faith.
You start the practice of being close to God with desire. God is a lover, following us with the passion of a human mate. Paul says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church. If you don’t feel that God loves you yet, then you still are in the committing stage. These thoughts on practice will still be helpful. If you feel that God loves you, then you need to respond to that love with some very practical devices that are artificial, not the relationship with God itself, but still needed.
The first artificial thing to do is to get a Bible. I particularly like the Message which we used last Sunday and today for the Bible reading. Its clear, forceful, a real translation, and actually written by a man that I became friends with years ago. Now, take the Bible and decide to follow a reading guide like The Upper Room or just choose a book and begin to read each day. I am reading through the letters of Paul after I realized how much he has to say about love. Since I don’t think of Paul as a person who would talk about love, I got interested in some of his remarks and decided to read through the letters.
Make a spiritual center in your home where the Bible is always open. You have to make this process as simple as possible. Father Bernie Poppe was the pastor at St. Mark’s Church up the street and a friend. He has a very disciplined practice of the presence of God which I have admired. One of his secrets is a special place in his apartment only for prayer and Bible study, always set up and ready for him.
The goal is to choose a time each day where you read and study a little of the Word of God. The Bible helps us get to know who God is and what God wants for us and for the world. Some people see the Bible as a rule book. I see the Bible as a group of stories about how God has been in relationship with people and the Bible explains God’s heart to me.
So now you have a regular time to hear a word from God, and you also need a time to speak back to God in prayer. I use a very simple acrostic to balance my prayer life – ACTS, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Many of us already stop three times during the day to pray at meals. Why not make the quality of those prayers a little better so that they truly express thanksgiving? Then spend a little time at your worship center with the ACTS prayer. And then make prayer comments to God during the day, one line thoughts that make sense to you and to God. With three prayers at meals, a prayer time in the morning and a couple of prayer comments during the day, that is 6 or 7 times during the day that you are consciously in touch with God. That’s the kind of relationship you want with your human partner. You want the comfortable intimacy of checking in with each other during the day just for the joy of it, to encourage each other and pray for their needs, and to help in trouble. That pattern is taken from the relationship that we can have with God.
Friends, as soon as you are born anew spiritually, you are either in the process of living or dying. Which is more natural? The more natural process is dying. We were created to live, but sin has taken such hold on the world that its more natural to die. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with spiritual practices, you can still follow your heart’s natural inclination and force more and more new life into your system.
I plan to preach about this more. I can’t remember the last time that I specifically preached about Quiet Time with God. Just like the stewardship time of the year, I want to have times when I bring this to our worship. It affects your spiritual health.
And so the morning has given you a question. When you get here next week, are you going to have died a little more spiritually or lived a little more spiritually? It’s a question for me as well as you. I urge you to accept the challenge and practice the presence of God this week.
