https://vimeo.com/59783928

I'm Wayne Jacobson, and this is Engage. I hope you're not just rushing through these videos. I've designed them so they can be something you can listen to every couple of weeks so that you've got plenty of time in between to explore your journey, which is where this is really going to happen for you. It's not going to happen watching a video. It's going to happen as you're thinking about God, talking to Him, listening for Him in your own life and journey. And you don't need to carve some special time away from it all, some special quiet time somewhere. You can talk to Him, listen for Him, think about Him when you're driving to work taking a shower or going for a walk in the neighborhood. He just wants to make Himself known to you, and I want to encourage you to explore that, to let Him press His heart into yours, to press His thoughts into your mind as you're just going about your daily life with your focus on Him. If discipleship is about building a relationship with God, I'd call this the anti-discipleship approach. But in actuality, I think this is what discipleship really is. It's not you building a relationship with Him. It's recognizing how He's building one with you. That changes the scope of it entirely, because now I'm not focused on what I'm doing. I'm focused on what He's doing. And that's where this works. Even if you've been disappointed because you've been in past discipleship programs before, you've tried to build a relationship with God in the past, and you felt disappointed. Even maybe felt for some reason that God wasn't going to do it with you. You were some exception to everything because you couldn't make it work. Here's the good news, religion was never meant to work. This relationship works very differently than the way we were taught to build it on our own. So the most important question at this point is how do you see God? When you're thinking about Him, or talking to Him, or listening to Him, how do you picture Him in your own mind? Is He cold and distant so that you have no hope of getting to know Him? Is He stern and angry so you don't even want to know Him? Or is He so disappointed in you that you feel like you have to crawl out of a huge hole before God would even think of smiling at you? How you think of Him is incredibly important to where this journey begins. You won't enjoy a relationship with Him if you don't know Him as the Abba. That tender father whose lap you can crawl up into like a daddy or grandpa. That's the image Jesus wanted with us. We're not to fear Him. We're not to be terrified of Him. Instead, we are to be endeared to Him because He's endeared to us. Now how do you get there? If your viewpoints of God are this stern taskmaster, this demanding judge, this distant sovereign, then it's going to be tough to make that connection. So you've got to begin as in your own heart and mind to explore who God really is and how do we know? There's a couple of areas that we can look at to help us understand that. Number one is we can look at our own experience, but as I've said to you before, if that's only been informed by religion, then we may not think God is the endearing father we want to know. But the other is the testimony of our friends, people we know who are journeying with God and they're finding this God to be incredibly tender, incredibly compassionate, incredibly patient, and that in our journey He's actually for us, not against us. He's not trying to get you to conform to His life. He wants you to enter into a relationship with Him, which will then do everything in your life God would want to accomplish. And the other place we can look and perhaps the most significant is in the Scriptures themselves, particularly the stories of Jesus. Jesus was the exact representation of the nature of the Father. So when He comes to someone who's struggling or failing or hurting or in sin, how is Jesus treating them? Is He the angry taskmaster demanding their conformity? And we'll see that loving brother that went into their lives, found them where they were and began to invite them to a different kind of reality. The most important question you need to answer is who is this God? Is He the kind, tender, compassionate Abba? Or is He this distant, angry parent who's doing try to push me into being something I don't want to be? God wants to be the tender Abba. Jesus showed us that He was that. Read those stories of Jesus, watch how He treats people, and find your way into a relationship with both of them that begins with His tenderness. Now I may take a bit of you suspending what you're so convinced might be true. We've known God to be distant, to be angry, to not care about me, to not be involved in my life. Well, that's not who He is. So that view of God is false. How you can begin to slide into a different view that this God is kind, compassionate, tender. He's actually for you, not against you. He wants to help you learn to live this life. He's not demanding that you do it for Him. That's where this journey begins. That's where it begins to take on meaning. Ask Him to show you. If you haven't listened to transitions at the Lifestream website, you might try that. You might try reading He Loves Me or reading it again if you've read it before because that salts in our heart and mind this reality that God loves you, that He cares about you. That this is a relationship He wants with you more than you want it for yourself. And it's when you come to realize, and can at least rest in the fact that He might love you, might be on your side, that this relationship can take its course. So spend the next season of your life as you're spending time with Him, asking Him to help you see Him as the loving, tender Abba, and beginning to believe that that's in fact who He is, because that is how much He loves you.