Spend Time with God by Justin McTeer

Let's pray real quick and get started.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for bringing us all together this morning, Lord.

We love you.

And Father, we praise you.

Just like that last song, God, you know, we just want to lift your name up because you are incredible.

And this morning, Lord, as we focus on you, we ask that you would just speak to us, Holy Spirit, that you would just translate every word that's spoken directly to our hearts into something that we can use to walk out of this room and walk out of here closer to you than we were when we came in and ready to just know you better.

And we ask all this in your name.

Amen.

Well, I wanted to actually get started this morning by just giving you a quick update on some of the stuff that has been going on with our student groups.

It's actually a pleasure to be able to lead our elementary, junior high, and high school teams, and I get to interact with so many awesome young people.

God has really given us an incredible group of young people at this church.

I mean, it really is pretty amazing.

I know everyone on the student team and parents, you obviously know that, they're your kids.

But they're incredible, and we have such an amazing time together.

Uh this, we actually just got back with our high school students from uh a road trip that we took.

We do one every summer, and we went to Gatlinburg.

Yeah, I hear a few faint woos.

That's the that's the high schoolers who normally know that they can just yell, but in this context, they're not sure.

So they just sort of woo, you know, like, I wonder.

Um but we had a blast.

We went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Uh, there were 62 of us that went down there and stayed in a couple cabins, um, and we had a great time.

We had a lot of fun.

We got a lot closer to one another, uh, and we definitely, definitely got a lot closer to God, and that was the most important thing.

Um, you know, God's doing really cool things with our kids.

He's doing awesome stuff to get them closer uh to him and excited about him.

And one of the highlights of the trip was baptisms.

Uh, we have baptisms here in the big room about twice a year, and usually we'll have a few students that jump up there and and go all in with Jesus.

But on the trip, we had a bunch of students that just you know took the plunge uh literally into a into a river and uh and got baptized.

We actually had 30 students that got baptized on the trip, and it was, yeah.

It was awesome.

Yes.

What I wanted to share this morning is something that we did on the trip that actually had a big impact on me personally.

You know, everything that we do when we do stuff for our students is designed for their benefit.

You know, we want them to really what we want them to do is get excited about Jesus, and we want them to have as much fun as possible while they do it.

That's really the simplicity of it.

And what happens almost always for me, and I know for other people on our teams, is that in the process, and this is true if you're on the coffee team or welcome to anything, or just doing whatever, opening a door for someone, is that you end up having as much fun as as possible, and you end up getting closer to Jesus through it, even though you're doing something that's meant to help somebody else out.

And so we went on the trip, and everything we did was designed for our students to get closer to God, and what naturally happened was I walked away feeling like, man, I needed that.

I needed, you know, to do some of those things.

And specifically, one thing that we did that I want to share about this morning has had a big impact on me, uh, and it's something I've been trying to do a lot lately, this last month or so, and that is that we encouraged our students to spend the first part of their morning.

These are teenagers, so by morning we mean 11 a.m.

It's a different thing.

Um but the first part of their morning, spending some quiet, focused time between them and God.

You know, and we actually asked them to spend 45 minutes in the morning.

That's a lot.

Um but but it was awesome.

I and obviously, since we asked them to do it, we had to do it.

You know, I there were a couple mornings where I was like, man, I'd love to sleep in a little bit more.

Um, but I'm like, no, I've got to I've got to do this too, because we're asking our students to do it.

But I had such an incredible experience doing that, and it just reminded me how important and how good spending some focused time on our own with God can be.

And it's one of those things that it sounds so simple, but it can actually become really hard to do because life is busy, and it's hard for us to set aside 10, 15 minutes, you know, to do much, it seems like.

But it even though it's a simple thing, it is so life-changing.

It really is.

Actually, one of the things that I was thinking of this week was uh when I graduated college, I worked for a little marketing company in Kansas City, Missouri, and we sold direct mail.

We sold junk mail.

I'm just I'm not gonna be honest.

But you know what?

Actually, not all of it is junk.

And so I'll just say that because it makes me feel better.

But uh, like ladies, when you get the uh when you get the bed bath and beyond 20% off coupon in the mail every month, you know, that's not junk.

That's gold.

You know?

Free pe free pizza coupons or discount.

I mean, that's that's practically money.

So it's not all junk, but most of what I sold was.

Um but uh but the job, it was actually kind of a tough job.

And for me, the what was tough about it was the the cold calling.

I had to, you know, call people I'd never met before.

I'm sure a lot of us in the room have either do that in our jobs or have done that.

And you know, it's just picking up a phone and you know, dialing a number and hoping that someone you know talks to you, and most of the time they they the last thing they want to do is talk to you, and you just gotta figure out how to how to use that because that's how you're making you know your livelihood.

You've you've got to talk to these people and set up meetings and all this stuff.

And and I had a hard time learning how to do that very well.

I would get very nervous when I would talk to people, and when I get nervous, maybe I am right now, I don't know, but I just talk really fast, you know, and uh and I say things like you know a lot, you know.

Um but it was tough.

And so I bought a book called Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work.

And I I was at Barnes and Noble and I saw it and I was like, sold, I need some help.

And I read through it, and there was this one story in this book, it was a true story, and it had a big impact on me.

Really, not so much even just in terms of you know the sales at my job, but but just I don't know, it stuck with me, and it still sticks with me today.

And basically the story was it was a true story of a guy who was a mid-level sales guy at his company, you know, just a good salesman, uh wasn't necessarily struggling, but wasn't knocking the ball out of the park.

And uh and in a very short period of time, he went from being kind of middle of the road in terms of his success at his job to being his company's top salesperson consistently.

And it wasn't a big period of time that the transformation happened, but it was drastic.

And someone interviewed him and asked him, you know, what what caused this big jump in your sales?

What it what's your secret?

What'd you do?

And he said that all he did was he started making one extra sales call every single day.

That at 5 30, when everyone else was packing up their stuff and walking out of out of the office, he would get on the phone and make one more call, talk to one more potential client, and that small change was the catalyst that took him from being, you know, from doing doing well to doing extremely well.

It was small, it was simple, it didn't drastically alter his schedule, but that small change had a huge impact on his life.

And and that's what life is for a lot of us.

Sometimes it is the smallest stuff, it is the smallest changes that that make the biggest difference.

And spending time focused, you know, with us and God, it's like that.

You know, 15 minutes every single day, or 15 minutes as many days as possible, can can have a huge, will have, I'll say that, will have a huge impact on our lives.

And it's a small, simple thing.

So this morning, I just kind of want to look at that.

What it is to really spend time with God, what does that look like?

You know, ever since I was in in junior high, uh I've been going to church and and you know, it was late elementary school, and I really started going to church a lot, and and I remember from a young age being told, you know, to spend time with God.

It was something that was that was focused and it was an important thing, except it was never really explained to me as spending time with God.

It was always called a quiet time, and I don't, I'm a talker, and so quiet time sounded like a punishment to me.

You know, it's like go in the corner and have quiet time with, you know.

Um, or it was a devotion.

And it was something that I've always known it's important, but I've had a really hard time doing it consistently.

I've done it off and on pretty much my whole life, but it's just one of those things, it's been tough for me for most of my life to do it on a regular basis and not have these huge long gaps where I'm not doing it, and then I try to do it again and all this kind of stuff.

Uh and I can think off the top of my head of a couple of reasons why it's been so hard to stay in that, and I think what God has sort of helped me do, and I think what God will help all of us do is to change, to change our perspective so that we can see spending time with Him differently than we do.

Because a lot of times in life, when we have a really hard time with something, when there's something that just isn't clicking, or you know, we're we're really frustrated, maybe it's between us and God, maybe it's between us and someone else, but when there's a frustration and there is something that we just can't seem to grasp or to do or whatever, a lot of times the solution is for us to have our perspective changed on that situation.

It's kind of like this.

If you're, I know this has probably happened to a lot of us.

This is an analogy that Steve has used before, that you know, if you're if you drop a penny on the ground, you know, it's on carpet, and you know it's within three feet of you, but you're just standing up and you look all around you, and you cannot find it.

And you can look for two, three minutes at a time, and it's like everywhere you look, you know it should be here, but you can't find it anywhere.

And so what do you do?

You you bend down and you get eye level with the ground and you see it right away.

The penny didn't change, it didn't move, it didn't get bigger, your perspective changed.

And because you you had a change in your perspective, you were able to see it.

What was difficult became easy.

And so for me, it's always been difficult to consistently spend time with God.

And to do it in the right mindset, and to do it to where I'm enjoying it, and actually feel like I'm getting something out of it.

And the solution is for me was to have my perspective changed.

And so I'll just give you a couple examples of some things that that changed my perspective on it and that are changing my perspective on it, that are making it a lot easier to do it.

You know, first of all, like I said, you know, growing up, I always saw spending time with God, it was it was a devotion.

It was a quiet time.

It was something that I was supposed to do in order to please God.

And because that's how I viewed it, what it really was was a ritual.

It was just this thing that you do.

You know, you want to be close to God.

Well, you get up in the morning and you read three chapters in your Bible and you pray, and that's that's supposed to change everything, and those are awesome things.

I mean, reading, you know, God's word, praying, yeah, I mean, those are great things, but because I saw it as a ritual, because I saw it as this thing that was was I was supposed to do it.

What what happened was is that when I would do it, I wouldn't have any joy in doing it because my attitude to it was I gotta do this.

It's like mowing the lawn.

I hate to mow the lawn.

I hate it.

I'll just be honest.

I do not enjoy it.

I get angry at grass for growing because I'm like, if you would stop, I don't have to do this, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

Um and I approached, you know, getting getting with God, I approached it the same way.

I'm like, I have to do this, I gotta do this, I have to do it.

So when I'm doing it, I'm like, I'm doing my thing.

Uh, you know, I'd I'd have uh some devotional books with you know readings and I'm always flipping ahead.

How many pages are left?

Five, great, oh man.

All right, so that that's the way I approached it.

And so when I'm doing it, I'm not enjoying it.

And when I wasn't doing it, I felt guilty constantly, because I'm like, oh man, it's been a week, and I haven't done this.

I know God's upset, I know he's angry, I need to do this.

And so that was the cycle that I went through.

But the thing is, I had it all wrong.

It's not a ritual at all.

Actually, Jesus didn't really care much for rituals.

Uh and what happens a lot is, and this happened a lot in Jesus' day with the Pharisees, is that things that were meant from God to be good things, that were meant for our good, to be enjoyed, to be, you know, to give us life, were easily, you know, people were misled to believe that they were something that they had to do, it was a ritual from God, it was a rule.

And because things that were meant to be good became rituals, they became burdens on people.

And so when Jesus would interact with the Pharisees, who were all about these ritualistic things that people had to do to please God, and they became these burdens that people had to carry, Jesus didn't really care for it.

So, like in Matthew chapter 23, verses 1 through 4, it says that then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses.

Matthew 23:1–4

So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don't follow their example, for they don't practice what they teach.

They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.

He said that they they give people burdens and they don't lift a finger to help.

And so when we when we carry around these ritualistic things, and in our minds, when I say ritualistic, I just mean things that we feel like I've got to do this.

I have to do this, you know, before before God will be happy with me, I have to do this.

I when that they become a burden.

And we carry that burden and it gets in the way.

And so that's how I saw spending time with God, but that's not how it is.

And what what I think that God needed me to realize was that spending time with him was simply about spending time with him.

And we didn't have to do anything.

You know, if you have someone that you love and you want to spend time with him, it doesn't matter what you do.

You you can sit on a couch, you can talk, you can go see a movie, you can eat, you can do whatever.

The point is that you're spending time with someone that you love and someone that loves you.

It doesn't matter what you're doing.

And so we spend time with God, not because it's this thing that we have to do.

We spend time with God because he really wants to spend time with us.

Because he loves us.

And when we see it that way, there's no there's no burden, there's no you know, restrictions on on how we have to do it.

There's there's nothing like that.

We're just saying, hey, I know that God loves me, and I know that he wants to spend time with me.

He wants to know me.

He wants me to know him, he wants us to have a real relationship.

And so I'm gonna carve out 15 minutes to enjoy our relationship.

That could be reading the Bible, that could be praying, that could just be sitting and just thinking about how awesome God is.

It doesn't have to be any of those things.

So that was that was one thing for me, from it going from a ritual to going to something really normal, which is just spending time with someone that I love.

I know another thing that has always stood in my way of being able to do that consistently is just a frustration.

I think a lot of us have felt this a frustration with feeling like I don't hear from God.

I mean, I think this is a lot of us.

We all want to hear from God.

We all want God to talk to us.

And so maybe you're like me, maybe you've tried to do this before, carve out time and pray and read and listen or whatever, and it can get frustrating when you can go long periods of time and you don't feel like God is saying anything back.

And the longer that happens, the harder it is to get into it because it just gets more frustrating and more frustrating, and pretty soon you lose your passion for it, and then you you drop it out of discouragement, maybe frustration, whatever it is.

And it gets even worse.

You might be feeling like God doesn't speak to you, and so you open your Bible and you read about Jesus or or Moses or Elijah, and there's things like, and God said to them, do this, and they're like, okay, and it seems like they're having this audible conversation with God, and you're like, I want that, and I don't have that, and it's it's hard.

And I know for a long time I would go weeks at a time and I would read the Bible every single morning, or I would spend time in prayer every day, and I would feel like I just got nothing.

I mean, I would get some wisdom from reading things, I'm like, man, that's awesome.

I mean, that's something I need to apply to my life.

But in terms of like a personal interaction with God, I just felt like I didn't get any of that, and so I dropped it for a while and tried to pick it up again.

But this week, Steve and I were talking, and I was, he was helping me get ready for this morning, and he said something that, just like that penny analogy, that changed my perspective on God talking to me.

Because I was saying how, you know, I get frustrated because I don't feel like I hear from God.

And what Steve said was this he said that what if God's concern is not to talk to us, but what if instead his concern is to communicate with us?

Because there's a difference between talking and communicating.

Talking is one way of communicating, but that's not the only way to communicate, and God is a big communicator.

Y'all, for example, my son is three months old, and he can't say anything yet, but he can communicate very well.

Most of it, I mean he can.

Most of it's crying, that's the gist of a lot of it.

But there's smiles, and there's now he started laughing, and he's got all these, even these little facial expressions, and I feel like he's communicating with me.

But he doesn't say a word.

And so what happens, I think, a lot of times, at least for me, is that we can spend a lot of time trying to hear from God and getting frustrated that we're not.

When in fact, what might be happening is that we've got our minds so focused on this one way of communicating.

We want God to we want to hear his voice, or we want to hear his voice internally.

You know, we want to hear it like talking that we miss out on all the other ways he's communicating with us.

Because, I mean, as people, we have a lot of different ways to communicate, and oftentimes words aren't even the best.

I mean, guys, how many times have you said something that sent your wife or your girlfriend out of the room with you following, saying, What did I say?

You know, that happens to me a lot.

And usually it's a situation where I communicated something verbally that I should not have.

Or I could have found a better way to communicate it.

You know, talking is one way we communicate, but if you think of the person in your life that you're the closest with, you probably communicate with that person hundreds of ways.

For me, it's my wife.

And we communicate in all kinds of ways.

Yeah, we talk.

Because, you know, as humans, that's like our normal way of communicating, but God has has even more ways than we do.

I mean, my wife and I will, you know, we'll just sit on a couch and just be together.

That's a way of communicating.

We're spending time together.

We've written each other letters, we've written each other poems, you know, we'll we'll one of us will be watching TV and we'll see something is on that the other person likes, and maybe we don't, but we'll go ahead and turn the channel for them to that program, and that's a way of communicating, you know, love.

We'll put our arms around each other.

Maybe one of us is driving and the other one just screams to say that I don't agree with your driving decision.

You know?

And I I won't say who's the driver and who's the screamer in that situation.

What I will say is that Megan is terrified of brake lights and believes that I don't see them.

That's all I say.

But I do.

Anyway.

But that's you know, that's a way of communicating.

She's concerned for me.

You know, we we hold hands, I'm saying there's there's hundreds of ways that we communicate, and I actually a lot of those ways are way more effective at communicating love for one another than just words.

You know, if one of us does a chore around the house that that isn't our thing and it's the other person's thing, but we do it to serve the other person, I mean that communicates love a lot of the times way more effectively than just saying the words.

And God is like us.

We're created in his image.

He is a communicator, and he communicates in thousands of ways all the time.

And if if maybe we can change our perspective and move from trying to hear God talk and instead try to hear him communicate, we might be shocked at how often we we do hear him.

You know, you're you're praying about your kids because you're worried about them.

And all of a sudden, peace comes over you, and you just feel like it's gonna be okay.

God gave you peace.

That's communication.

He is communicating to you that he cares about what's going on and that he wants to help.

You know, you're you're having a rough day, and out of the blue, someone that you really love gives you a call and just says, Hey, I was just thinking about you, and it lifts your spirits up, and they don't realize that you really needed that, but God may have put you on their hearts to call.

And that's his way of communicating to you.

He's using another person to show you that he knows how you feel and he wants to help.

You're driving in your car and you almost have an accident, and at the last possible second, your wife screams and it helps you see that other car.

And could that be God communicating, I don't want you to get in an accident, and he's just using, yeah, I mean, it's possible.

That's all I'm saying.

There's there's hundreds of ways he communicates this.

You know, I've I've had times, I'm sure, things like this have happened where you're having a you're having a hard time and you you you turn on the radio, and there's some like lyric on a song that just is like, bam.

I mean, Meg and I, when when our son was in the in the ICU, he was in there for nine days, and we were driving home one night, and uh and we just turned the radio on, we were talking, but it was late, and we were coming home, and it was probably around midnight, and we turned the the radio on and it's on a station I don't really listen to.

Um so I'm about to turn the station and it was a song, I think it was it was the fish or it was a it was a Christian station, but the the words right before I'm gonna turn the radio, it says, You're with me in the ICU.

And I'm just like, whoa.

God communicates.

And He communicates to us all the time.

And so what we're talking about this morning, the point is that God loves us and he wants to spend time with us, and he wants to communicate with us.

And so if we're in that position where we want to hear from God, he wants us to hear from him too.

And we want the same thing.

And it's always good when we want the same thing God wants.

He loves us.

He wants to speak to us.

He wants to spend time with us.

He wants us to know him.

He wants our relationship to be close.

And so the question really is just what do we have to do?

And the good thing is, not a whole lot.

Is we just put ourselves in the best possible position to hear from God.

And it can be as simple as carving out 15 minutes every day, morning or night, lunchtime, it doesn't matter.

And just having that time be just quiet, focused time on God.

It may feel weird at first.

But I think we would be amazed at how often we would hear from.

Maybe we'd be amazed at how much more often we would recognize when he's talking to us.

Especially if we're if we're viewing it just to spending time with him, and especially if we're focused on hearing him communicate.

And we can read the word, we can pray, or we can just listen, because that's that's half of communication.

Listening.

And I know for me, I've spent a lot of time, you know, hey, I'm gonna spend 15 minutes with God, and I just pray, pray, pray, and I'm talking, talking, talking, and when I'm done talking, that's it's alright, see ya.

And I'm like, that's not really communication.

That's just me talking.

That's normal.

That's just what I do all the time.

God loves us so much.

And he cares about us, and he wants us to know him.

And so it's a simple thing.

It's very simple.

But if you would go one week and just try 15 minutes every day of just quiet time focused on you and God, it's life-changing.

And it's a small thing, but it's life-changing.

You know what, in this room, there's about a thousand of us.

And so if every single day, all of us are spending 15 minutes with God, that's 15,000 minutes a day.

God can do a lot in a short period of time.

If we give God 15,000 minutes a day, I think my math's right.

I'd really be embarrassed if that's wrong.

I think that's right.

Okay.

If we gave God 15,000 minutes a day, I mean that's a lot.

God can do a lot with that.

And he will, because he loves us.

And so I would just encourage all of us to do that this week.

It's hard for me, but I've been trying it and it's good.

And some mornings I'm like, that was awesome.

And some mornings I'm like, I don't really know if anything happened, but I know that at the very least, God really appreciates that I'm setting aside time for him.

And I know he'll honor that.

I know he'll do that with all of us.

Because he loves us and he wants to spend time with us and he wants to communicate his, you know, really what he really what he wants to communicate to us is his love for us.

That's what's great about it.

So the more we we put ourselves in a position to hear from him, what he's communicating to us most all, most of all, is his love.

That he loves us, that he's with us, that he's not gonna abandon us, that he's gonna help us, that he's gonna help us in our problems.

He's communicating love.

And so when we do this, all we're doing is opening ourselves up to experience more of his love than we ever have before.

And that's good.

Let's pray.

God, thank you so much.

Um, thank you for this morning.

Thanks for an hour, an hour and a half of focused time with you.

Lord, we love you.

And we want to uh we want to experience you, Father, more than we can even imagine, God.

And so we just ask that you would uh that you would meet with us.

God, that when we would spend time with you, that you would be present.

We know you will be, Father.

We know that you love us.

And we just ask that you bless all of us, God, in our lives, in our families, at home, at work.

God, that you would just work in our lives and at every moment of every day that we would realize that you are constantly communicating your love and your passion for us, God.

And we thank you for that.

And we ask all this in your name.

Amen.