Authentic: Cultivating Authentic Relationship with God - Softcover

Reimer, Dr. Rob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1956370501 ISBN 13: 9781956370508

Publisher: Carpenter's Son Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

How do we develop a deep lasting intimacy with God?

One of the problems with being a Christ follower is that we can substitute religious expressions and religious behaviors for authentic experiences and encounters without even know we are doing it. The longer we go to church the more we know the right words to say and the right things to do, but we can easily say those words and do those things without transformational intimacy with Jesus? We can start with significant, transformational encounters with God, and end up with dusty old religion.

In Authentic, we will explore the following:

• What is religion and how do we avoid falling into its traps and snares?
• How does intimacy with God and people work?
• How do we develop depth with God and sustain it over a lifetime?
• What are the practices and attitudes that we can develop to help us draw near to God so we can learn to live an authentic spiritual life in Christ?

We don’t want to settle for the counterfeit, when Jesus offers us abundant life.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Rob Reimer’s passion is to see the kingdom of God advance through spiritual renewal. Rob began Renewal International to assist pastors, leaders, and churches to equip the people of God to live in freedom in Christ, and to walk in the fullness and power of the Holy Spirit.

Passionate about Jesus, personally transparent, and committed to the Word, his books including Soul Care, River Dwellers, Spiritual Authority, The Soul Care Leader, and The Tenderness of Jesus incorporate lessons God taught him over the years through life and ministry. Rob draws on these lessons for his conference speaking and while mentoring pastors and leaders globally.

In addition to his work with Renewal International, Dr. Reimer is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Alliance University in NY, NY. Explore more of Rob's resources, view his itinerary, or invite him to speak at www.renewalinternational.org  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: From Learned Behaviors to Authentic Experience

Think about the season of your life when you connected with God most deeply. When was it when you felt His love the strongest, heard His voice the clearest, experienced His presence the deepest? I remember the first time I experienced Jesus in a significant way. It was after a breakup with a girlfriend in college, and I had a life-altering encounter with the risen Christ. I felt His overwhelming love. Then, years later, I remember experiencing Jesus deeply in the midst of a crisis in the early years of my marriage with Jen. I experienced God’s voice, His sustaining presence, His daily strength, His tender compassion, and His transformational work. I remember the time I began to hunger and thirst for God’s presence, when I longed for more.

I sought God with all my heart in seasons of prayer, fasting, retreating, and prayer watching through the night. And God met me in amazing ways. I was living in the floodgate of God’s presence. I could write about many deep seasons I have had with God. Thinking back on these times makes my heart long for more of God. I don’t want to lose the passionate edge, the palpable presence, of God in my life. I don’t want to settle for the mundane, the routine, or the ruts of religion. I want the authentic. I don’t just want to know about God; I want to know Him deeply and personally. I want to experience more of His love, presence, and power. I want to hear Him more clearly, follow Him more closely, and honor Him more completely. I want to draw near to God in real and authentic intimacy.

One of the problems with being a Christ-follower is we can substitute religious expressions for authentic experiences and not even know we are doing it. We can start with significant, transformational, authentic encounters with God and end up with dusty old religion. We can lose contact with these real connections with God and look back on them with distant memory, wondering how we lost our way and how we get back to where we were. Or we can chalk them off as anomalies.

After that first encounter I had with God, I remember asking people about their spiritual journeys, if they had similar encounters. I asked them about experiences where they were filled with the Spirit. Many people told me about some encounter they had many years ago, but it was now a distant, twenty-year-old memory. When I asked about their current experiences with God, they were often left with a loss for words. They weren’t living in the current fullness of the Spirit. They had a previous encounter they recalled with fondness, but they were now living in a bit of a spiritual desert. And sadly, they often talked with me as if that were the norm.

I think there are a multitude of reasons why we trade authentic encounters for religious activities. As Christians, sometimes we can end up doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. We spend regular time alone with God, pray, and read our Bible every day, because that is what good Christians are supposed to do. Over time our motivation for our spiritual practices morphs from moved by love to motivated by duty, and we don’t even notice the subtle slide. We keep doing the right thing, but we no longer draw near like we once did. We keep on with the old activities, but we no longer have that fire burning in our hearts. When we continue to practice these disciplines devoid of the authentic encounters with Jesus that lead to deep, life-changing intimacy, our spiritual life often becomes dry and shallow. At other times we shift toward religion because our rhythm becomes tired. It was once fresh and powerful, but now it is stale and routine. We are still doing the same spiritual activities, but we’re no longer seeing the results we once saw.

Still other times we move away from the authentic because we are carrying unprocessed pain. We are hurt and disappointed. We become a little distant from God because our trust has been undermined by life’s pain. We still do what we once did because it has become our routine, but we no longer carry the trust, enthusiasm, and passion that used to characterize us. Sometimes we drift into the ruts of religion because we are busy doing so many things—good things, things with family, things at church, things for God—but we lose our first love for Jesus in the process of life’s wearisome busyness.

Too often the problem is we are still doing the same things we were doing. So much is the same that it makes us feel like we are on the right track, but in reality we have lost our way. We aren’t doing bad things, but our hearts are drifting from Jesus. We are no longer passionate for Jesus like we were, and we are no longer encountering Him like we once did. We look back on those earlier days with gratitude and nostalgia, but they are fading into a distant memory. So many other people have the same story to tell, so we normalize it and, all the while, live beneath our potential.

We can be on this road toward religion and spiritual dryness . . . and not even know it, because we are doing the right spiritual things. We miss the subtle shift that has taken place in our hearts because there hasn’t been a significant shift in our behaviors. Remember: the Pharisees read their Bible vigilantly, yet they killed Jesus. Their reading was full of knowledge but devoid of revelation. They learned all the right religious behaviors, engaged in all of the right spiritual disciplines—like fasting, praying, tithing, and Bible study—but they missed out on authentic, life-giving encounters with God. Somehow all their religious activity didn’t lead them to the right outcome. Engaging in the right spiritual activities doesn’t guarantee the right results. It could just make us religious and actually lead us far from God. It could leave us hard-hearted, judgmental, angry, and not like Jesus at all. How do we avoid simply being religious, and live a vibrant Christian life? How do we avoid substituting learned behaviors for authentic encounters?

One of the keys is to live an examined life. If we keep doing our regular routines without reflecting and inviting the Spirit to examine the condition of our heart, we will inevitably end up in the spiritual desert. Jesus said, “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). The Proverb writer said, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). An unguarded heart will never drift in a spiritually flourishing direction. A field left alone does not naturally move toward abundance; the law of entropy says the field will tend toward chaos. So it is with our souls. We need to take time before the Lord, and others, to live an examined life; we need to be sure we are doing the right things for the right reasons. This book will help you reflect on your life and help you root out any weedy entropy robbing you of spiritual fullness.

Years ago I went to a conference and the speaker called the pastors up front after the service. He and the other conference speakers laid hands on all the pastors who came forward. There were probably one hundred and fifty pastors standing across the front of the large auditorium. As these famous pastors went down the row and laid hands on the pastors, one by one, they all fell over. By the time they finished praying for everyone, I think I was the only one left standing. Now, please hear me: I wasn’t resistant to receiving whatever God had for me. In fact, the whole reason I came to the conference was because I was hungry for more of God. But I wasn’t going to fake an experience to please the people praying for me, or to fit in with the crowd, or to meet anyone’s expectations. I wanted an authentic experience with God; I didn’t want to act like I had had one. I wanted a real encounter with the living God—in any way He wanted to visit me. But I wasn’t willing to manufacture emotions or substitute a learned behavior. I felt God’s presence as I stood there, but my knees didn’t buckle. I didn’t sense God’s weighty presence in such a way that it caused me to fall to the ground. I have prayed for thousands of people who have had that experience, many of whom never experienced it before. I have read about this kind of thing, again and again, in the history of revival. It happens to John in the book of Revelation and to Ezekiel multiple times in his encounters with God’s glory. But I wasn’t willing to pretend, and I wasn’t longing for the manifestation—I was longing for God Himself.

Did every other person in line experience a powerful encounter with Jesus that caused them to fall over? Maybe. Were there some people who took a courtesy fall because they learned that was the expected behavior? (When a holy person prays for you, that’s what you’re supposed to do.) I don’t know. Is it possible God had something for all of them and not for me? Sure. But I do know that I just wanted God for Himself, not for any particular experience or manifestation. When we substitute learned behaviors for authentic encounters, we are in danger of spiritually drifting from the source of life. We begin to substitute something learned for something real, and the problem is, if we are not careful, we will convince ourselves we have the real when all we have is a learned behavior. I don’t want to find myself resisting God, nor do I want to find myself pretending to meet some expected spiritual standard. I just want the real; I want to know God Himself.

John Wesley was one of the great revivalists in history. Yet Wesley was most often rejected by the church of his day. He was unwelcomed by his own church, the Church of England. When Wesley entered a new town to preach the gospel in the open fields, there were often clergy and other people from the Anglican church who met him along the road with jeers and derision. There were even times they threw rocks at Wesley because they thought he was a heretic. These rock-throwing religious zealots who attacked the great preacher felt like they were doing a service to the church and to God, yet God was using Wesley to bring hundreds of thousands of people to know Jesus. Many Christians were revived under Wesley’s ministry; entire regions were transformed by the Spirit of God through Wesley’s work. Yet people resisted him and fought against him in the name of God. How did they miss what God was doing in their day?

I surely do not want to miss what God is doing in my day. Listen, here is the scary part: they thought they were right. They were convinced they were doing good. Like the Pharisees before them, they resisted this upstart movement in the name of God. They were passionate, zealous, and religious, but they were missing out on a real move of God. They had substituted the learned behaviors of religion for authentic experiences of transforming encounters with Jesus. And they didn’t even know it. God was visiting them in one of the greatest spiritual movements in the world, and they were missing it.

God help us. I desperately want to avoid that in my life. I want to love Jesus most of all, represent Jesus well to everyone I encounter, and follow Jesus with my whole heart. I want to know Jesus personally, and not just know about Him. I want to encounter Him, experience Him, and be transformed by His presence. I want to cooperate with God to foster fresh moves of the Spirit; I don’t want to find myself fighting against God. I want to avoid the pitfalls of religion and live an authentic Christian life, a life in touch with a fresh flow of the Spirit day by day. I want to be known more for Who I stand for rather than what I stand against.

I am a bit of a history buff; I love reading biographies of people who have made history. I have read over one hundred biographies of Abraham Lincoln, for example. But I don’t know Abraham Lincoln. I know about him. I never had a chance to know Lincoln because he died long before I was born, so I have never been able to interact with him personally, talk with him, share my life with him, or spend time with him alone in a personal encounter. But God isn’t like that, and my relationship with God can and should be much more personal than that. He doesn’t just record what He is like for us in a book so that we can know about Him like any other historical figure. He is alive. He speaks, He reveals Himself, and He makes Himself known to us personally. Jesus has risen and we can not only read about Him, we can encounter Him, experience Him, know Him, and hear from Him directly through the illumination of Scripture and through His direct communication. His risen presence can touch our souls, our bodies, awaken our hearts, and visit us intimately. We can actually draw near to Him, much like we can experience and know our living friends—not like we read about with a historic figure. Yes, He reveals Himself differently, but it is no less personal and no less real than a human interaction.

The problem is that it’s easy to fall into all the outer trappings of a religious life without experiencing the inner workings of God. The pages of history are replete with fakers and resistors. I want to avoid both traps. I want the authentic.

Why do so many people fall into this religious ditch along their spiritual pilgrimage? We are people of routine. Most of us have a set of routines we follow every day. When I come home after driving someplace, I follow the same routine every time: I put my wallet and my keys on my dresser in my bedroom. I follow the routine so I’ll know where these important items are. Doing this becomes rote, and these routines make our life easier to manage. They help us. But sometimes our routines can get us off course. For example, if I’m in a conversation with someone while driving and I’m not thinking about where I’m headed, I’ll start driving on autopilot and go in the direction I travel most often. As I start toward my most common destination, Jen will say to me, “Um, we aren’t going to work.” In that instance my routine no longer helps me; it leads me off course.

Every day, one of my routines is to spend time alone with God. It’s a great routine; it is a magnificent discipline to develop. I have benefited immensely from that routine, and I want to continue the habit of engaging in spiritual practices every day. That discipline has helped me know my Bible, meet with God regularly, and prepared me to encounter His presence and hear His voice. It’s been an integral part of growing up in Christ and getting to know Him more personally. I don’t want to lose my routine. But I do want to be aware of the dangers of this routine. I can easily put my time with God on autopilot and end up going someplace I wasn’t intending to go. When my routine becomes a rut, I become religious. If I’m not careful, I may find myself reading my Bible and praying, but not going deeper with God, not becoming more like Jesus, and not maturing in love for God and people. The real problem is I may measure my maturity based on my knowledge of the Bible and my participation in these spiritual practices and not realize I am headed far from my intended destination. If I’m not careful, I may end up settling for the outer workings of religion and miss out on transformation.

Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23; [Today’s New International Version, which will be the predominant version in this book unless otherwise stated). Jesus could have said that many will come on that day, saying, “Haven’t we read our Bible, preached many sermons, taught many Bible studies, served at church, prayed in tongues often, and engaged in a host of other good spiritual activities?” But if all these religious activities don’t lead us to love and obey God and now Him intimately, what good are they? The activities are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

How do we develop a deep, authentic Christian life without falling prey to the religious snares? That’s what I want to talk about in this book. I want to look at how we can tell when we are falling into the trap of religion. We will pay particularly close attention to the Pharisees in the gospels because they often exemplify what a religious life looks like—in all its worst aspects. They serve as a lesson and warning to us all. We will learn from them what religion looks like so we can avoid it and live a deep, intimate life with God.

We will also talk about how intimacy is developed—and not just with God but with others as well. What are the components of intimacy? What can we do to develop true intimacy with God and people so we can fulfill the first- and second-most important commandments: love God and love people? Why does our intimacy get stunted and stalled, and how can we get out of the ruts and back into the deep waters of authentic experience?

We will look at ten shifts we can make, attitudes and practices we can engage in so we can live with freshness in our relationship with God. These practices and attitudes can lead us to authentic encounters that result in deep life change and soul-satisfying intimacy. I will offer you some exercises along the way that can be helpful to developing an authentic Christian life.

We all fall prey to religion from time to time, and, periodically, every one of us needs renewal. That’s one of the great lessons of church history. Sadly, as I travel the world, visit churches, and talk to Christians, I see a lot of religion. For most of these believers, it isn’t that they will die and not go to Heaven. It’s more that they’re missing out on what could be on earth; they have settled for too little. I see a lot of religious people who need renewal. But all too often they don’t realize they are religious; they have taken a wrong turn and are driving on autopilot, but they don’t realize they are headed in the wrong direction. You can’t get out of the trap of religion if you don’t realize you are ensnared.

One of the traps of religion is that we learn all the right language. We know the right words to say, and we assume because we know the language and can speak the right words, we have the right experience. But that isn’t always true. In the movement I am part of, The Christian and Missionary Alliance, historically we talked and wrote about “the deeper life.” This was part of the old holiness movement and language of the deeper life. It communicated concepts of living a holy life that came out of an intimate relationship with Jesus and was empowered by the Holy Spirit. Over time people continued to speak the deeper life language, yet they missed the experiences of those who had gone before them. They talked about the deeper life, but they were living in the shallow, stagnant waters of religion. The problem is because we know the right words, and we can state the doctrines and quote the right verses to support those doctrines, sometimes we don’t know we are missing the authentic. We assume knowledge means mastery, but knowledge without revelatory experience that leads to obedience only results in religion. When our knowledge isn’t combined with the appropriate experiences with God, we fall into the ruts of religion. And too often we have substituted words for encounters and learned behaviors for true experiences.

Often for religious people to experience renewal, new language is going to be required. The new language creates an updated presentation of old concepts to make them new and fresh again. It helps us live an examined life. We begin to see where we are missing out, and we start to hunger for the real and authentic spiritual life. We begin to see how we have settled for less, and we begin to long for more. We need to stop, pause, evaluate our lives, and make changes that are necessary for renewal. We need to move past dusty old religion and into the deep waters of life in Christ.

One day one of our denominational leaders came to me and thanked me for writing on the deeper life. He said I had taken all the old concepts of the deeper life and put them into fresh language so a new generation could tap into the old wells of rich experience. Ultimately, my goal wasn’t really to create new language for the deeper life; my goal was to create authentic experiences that led to renewal, and that required fresh language. So often religious people need to hear old concepts again, as if for the first time, so they realize there is something more. That’s the nature of this journey. We have to update our language, revive our experiences, revisit our encounters, reawaken our hearts, and move from old, learned routines to fresh new experiences with the living God. That’s where I want to take us in this book—from the religious to the authentic.  

Edition details

• Publisher: Carpenter's Son Publishing
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1956370501
• ISBN 13: 9781956370508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216