Experiencing God at Home (8 page)

7. We’re a family; everyone helps out.

Everyone had a role to play in our family. Family members were expected to do their chores without complaining and to pitch in when needed. Helping kids appreciate the effort required to keep a family functioning is important. It will certainly help them later when they move out on their own. Doing laundry, cleaning up, washing dishes, vacuuming, washing the car, pulling weeds, mowing the lawn—someone has to do all these things—and kids may as well learn how sooner than later so they are fully prepared to enter the world as responsible adults. We are a family, and families work together.

8. Clear communication is important.

This has become more important to me as my hearing gets worse, but clearly communicating with family members is highly valued in our home. Over the years my wife has used a
lot
of “sticky notes” left on the microwave to remind various family members of what they needed to know or do. Now we have text messages, e-mails, and Facebook in addition to answering machines and phones. I have helped my kids mean what they say and say what they mean.

9. Try to make a difference in other people’s lives.

We have made it a priority to welcome hurting, lonely, and overlooked people into our home. Perhaps this is the “pastor” coming out in me, but it warms my heart when our kids include newcomers in their activities. I don’t want to raise selfish, self-centered children, and when I see that sinister trait creeping in, I address it quickly. One day I took my son Matt with me to help a woman move out of her home and into an apartment. Matt asked why we were doing it. I explained that this woman’s husband was an alcoholic who mistreated her. She had no family to help her, so we were going to be her family. Ten years later, this woman still remembers that day clearly and considers us her family.

These family rules must make sense to our kids, for they have not only embraced them, but they see where some of their friends’ families could use similar expectations in their homes. For a school assignment last year, Conor wrote: “If I was in charge of my family for a day, I would hand over my privilege back to my parents because that would be too much for me to handle. There aren’t many rules that I would make because all the rules that I would make are already in progress. My family is big and happy. I wouldn’t change any rules.”

By the grace of God, our parenting must be working. All three kids (so far) are doing well in school, sports, music, and church. They are generally responsible, helpful, respectful, dependable, and fun to be around. I suppose the fact that three families have asked us to be legal guardians for
their
children means our home is attractive. We are
not
a perfect family with perfect parents and perfect kids. But that is why the truths that follow are so compelling. They work with imperfect families! If they could help our family thrive, I know they can bless your family too.

Questions for Reflection/Discussion

1. What would you like your family to look like ten years from now? What specific actions are you taking to make that a reality?

2. Do you need to make any changes in how your children or their parents relate to one another to head off troubles in the coming years?

3. What is one thing you really like about your family relationships? What is one thing that needs to change in your home to increase your love and respect for one another?

Chapter 6

The Seven Realities of Experiencing God

When Henry Blackaby first wrote
Experiencing God,
the material startled thousands of Christians. Many people confessed that they had attended church all of their life; yet studying
Experiencing God
made them realize they had been practicing
religion
but not enjoying a
relationship
with God
.
These people attended church services weekly, but they were not encountering the living God. They completed their Bible readings but never heard God speak to them through His Word. They said prayers but never heard God’s answer. They were in a relationship with Christ, but it was lifeless, stagnant, and boring. Then they learned that God is a Person who is actively at work in their world and who wants them to enjoy a loving, dynamic, life-changing relationship with Him. This truth radically changed their Christian life.

In this chapter, we want to outline the foundational truths of
Experiencing God,
known as the “Seven Realities.” In the remaining chapters we’ll apply these realities specifically to your family. Our father wrote
Experiencing God
as a result of extensive Bible study as well as reflecting on his own experience walking with God. As we have described already, he assumed the pastorate of a struggling church in Saskatoon, Canada. The congregation had only ten members remaining when he arrived. Yet God granted that church a vision for starting congregations across that vast province. Apart from God’s guidance and provision, such an undertaking was ludicrous. The impoverished congregation trusted God to provide every resource required to call mission pastors for the new churches. Over the next twelve years, God led that church and its missions to initiate thirty-eight new mission churches and its missions to launch a Bible college to train pastors. God’s active guidance and provision are the only explanation for what ensued. When our father put to paper what he learned about God, based on his experience, he developed the following seven realities.

Reality 1. God Is Always at Work around You

Eternal God has been working through the ages to accomplish His divine purposes. He chose to create the universe, and it was so. He decided to create people with whom He could enjoy fellowship, and it was done. When humanity sinned and rebelled against Him, God initiated a redemptive plan to restore people into a relationship with Him once more. Speaking of Himself, God declared: “I am God, and there is none like Me. Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.’ . . . Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it” (Isa. 46:9–11). Whether you are aware of it or not, God is continually working around you to accomplish His will.

• He is constantly working to draw people to Himself through the activity of the Holy Spirit (Jer. 31:3; John 16:8–11).
  
• God uses circumstances to bring people to a place where they call upon Him for help and guidance (Jon. 1:4; Acts 9:3–5).
  
• God is always at work convicting people of their sin so they seek salvation and freedom (John 16:8).
  
• God is always working to conform believers into the image of His Son (Rom. 8:28–30).
  
• God works through people to share the gospel with those who have not heard it (Acts 1:8).
  
• God’s Holy Spirit is helping believers know what they should pray for (Rom. 8:26–27).
  

The most important factor in our world is not what
we
are doing but what
God
is accomplishing. Our focus ought not to be pleading with God in prayer to bless our plans. It should be asking God to show us what He is doing so we can adjust our lives to His activity. Oswald Chambers observed, “Spiritual insight does not so much enable us to understand God as to understand that He is at work in the ordinary things of life, in the ordinary stuff human nature is made of.”
1

This reality has perhaps been the most revolutionary truth of the seven. It encourages people to never give up, regardless of how difficult the situation may be in their family, or church, or nation. For, regardless of whether we see it or not, God is working. And what God begins, He completes (Phil. 1:6).

Reality 2. God Invites You into a Love Relationship with Himself

God’s nature is love. He cannot express Himself toward you in any other manner but perfect love. Because He wants to have fellowship with you, He will invite you into a deep, intimate, growing love relationship with Him. Scripture says:

The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. . . . We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:8–10, 19
hcsb
)

All that we know about love comes from God (
not
from Hollywood!). He invented it! He
is
love! God demonstrated what true love looks like by reaching out to us even as we were rejecting Him. From God we learn that love includes forgiveness because God forgave our sins. We discover that love requires loyalty and fidelity because that is what God demonstrates to His people. We experience that love can include discipline for wrongdoing because God loved us enough to allow us to feel the consequences for our sins. We realize that love requires sacrifice as we consider, with wonder, the price God was willing to pay on our behalf.

The Bible provides the historic record of God reaching out to people with love in the hope that they would respond back to Him in like manner. Those who return His love are blessed and welcomed into His kingdom. Those who reject His love choose to live outside of a relationship with Him (John 1:12; 3:18). God’s ultimate expression of love for us came when Christ made the supreme sacrifice for our sins.

• We should never question God’s love for us because that was settled once and for all on the cross.
  
• We should never question whether or not God’s plan for us is in our best interest since He only acts toward us in ways that reflect perfect love.
  

Even when God’s own people repeatedly forsook and rejected Him, He never abandoned them. Rather, God drew them back to Himself by His love. He redirected them from harm through His discipline. He provided second, third, and fourth chances through His undeterred forgiveness. God is not satisfied until people love Him with all of their heart (Mark 12:30).

God could have created human beings with the same capacity for love as lizards, cows, or vultures. Instead, God built within each of us the innate desire to love and to be loved. He created within us a need that only He can meet. That’s why, when we are sinning and out of fellowship with God, we cannot find contentment or experience true joy. Only when we love God and others are we living as God intended. How heartbreaking for God to offer so much and yet for us to ignore or reject His love (Jer. 7:13). You may be like many others who were taught to be religious but not to enjoy a love relationship with Christ. If that is the case, don’t rest until you are experiencing the infinite joy that comes from loving God with all of your heart.

Reality 3. God Invites You to Become Involved with Him in His Work

The basis of any healthy relationship is the time that two people spend relating to one another. God is not content for you to believe in Him or to worship Him from afar. He wants to relate to you
personally
.
God is not merely a doctrine to believe; He is a Person who wants you to become involved with Him in His eternal work.

God knows what is at stake for people who never hear about Him or who choose not to follow Him (John 3:16). Therefore, He works with a sense of urgency to redeem those who are living apart from Him. If you love God, you will share His heart. What concerns Him will concern you. And, as you relate personally to God, He will reveal His will to you. Jesus said to His disciples: “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). The closer we draw to Christ, the more we learn about what is on His heart.

As God works in the world around you, He will invite you to join in His activity. He will invite you to become His hands and feet by which He reaches out to other people (Rom. 10:14–15). When God reveals to you what He is doing in someone’s life, that is His invitation for you to join in His activity. This is the way God worked throughout the Bible:

• God invited Adam to participate in the naming and subjugation of the animal kingdom He had created (Gen. 2:19–20).
  
• God asked Noah to adjust his family to the cataclysmic judgment He was bringing upon the earth (Gen. 6:13–22).
  
• God invited Abraham to leave his country and to join God’s activity in creating a holy people (Gen. 12:1–3).
  
• God invited Moses to leave his shepherding business and to join Him in freeing a nation from slavery (Exod. 3–4).
  
• God invited Joshua to join Him in claiming the Promised Land for His people (Josh. 1:1–9).
  
• God invited Mary and Joseph to participate in raising the Messiah (Matt. 1:20–25; Luke 1:26–38).
  
• God invited fishermen to join His redemptive work (Mark 1:16–20).
  
• God invited Paul to join Him in taking the gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 26:12–18).
  

God continues to invite people to join Him in His activity. If you keep your spiritual senses alert, you might be surprised at where God is working in your world and how He wants you to become involved!