WALKING… I hope you’ve not grown tired of the encouragement to physically get outside and take some walks with God :).
If you’ve yet to take some breaks throughout your day to do this, PLEASE give it a try as I’m fully confident it will help. And when I say ‘help’, yes, there are many physical benefits to walking every day, but I’m talking about the spiritual benefits. I 100% believe that the LORD meets with us on those walks to not only slow us down from the frenetic pace in which we often travel but to also align (or realign) our hearts with His.
And if you have been taking some ‘walks with God’, well, keep walking with God at His pace which as we all now know is three miles an hour.
As you can probably tell, WALKING has been on the forefront of my mind and heart lately. During the month of September, we did a sermon series entitled WALK THIS WAY. And over the past few emails, I’ve been talking a lot about WALKING. And just so you know, I’ve got a few more weeks on WALKING to share with you. :)
WHY SO MUCH ATTENTION ON WALKING?
In short, walking is the language of INVITATION. If I were to ask you to go on a walk, that would be my way of saying, “I want you to be with me and I want to be with you.” And if I invited you to walk with me, well, it would also communicate that I’ve got a place in mind for us to walk. The invitation to WALK is both relational and directional.
In the same way, when God invites us to WALK WITH HIM, it’s both relational and directional. When Jesus invited people to FOLLOW HIM, Jesus was making clear, I want you to be with me where I am going.
Whether you are brand-new to Christianity or have been a Christian for some time, the metaphor of WALKING in the Christian faith is really important because it’s God’s language of invitation.
When God’s prophet Isaiah was seeking to discover and discern the plans and purposes of God, very specifically for His people, would you know it, God used WALKING as the means of helping Isaiah and His people understand where He wanted them to be.
“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” Isaiah 30:21
WALKING… it is both relational and directional. God’s invitation is ALWAYS to be with Him where He is going.
Maybe you can relate with this but there have been many seasons in my life where I ‘felt’ disconnected not only from God but what God had for me in the season I was in. In looking back, I can almost always trace those seasons of disconnect and confusion to RUNNING.
Meaning, the pace at which I was traveling made ‘hearing’ from God, both at a relational and directional level very difficult. If you’re in a space and place right now where you are ‘struggling’ to either connect with God relationally or directionally speaking, well, thankfully, the solution is NOT complicated.
Disconnectedness and directionless has everything to do with slowing down… dare I say to a walking pace of three miles an hour.
I realize that walking at that pace might not get us very far very fast, but as I mentioned this past Sunday, God is just as concerned about the process as He is about the destination. Very specifically, God cares deeply about who we are becoming as He leads us to places, He wants us to be and to the people He wants us to be with.
WALKING is the language of INVITATION.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share in greater detail the places in which God has already invited us to walk with Him, but until then (next Wednesday), take a walk with God, and maybe, invite someone else to join you on that walk. There is something powerful about walking with God in the context of community.
