77: Walk With God

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Season 1, episode 77. Today we are continuing our conversation inspired by Advent and the Incarnation.

Hello, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello Daughter. It’s good to be back doing this.

[00:35] Stephanie: Always. We were just laughing about some funny memes. It was great.

[00:39] Marcus: Yes, we both have the rare privilege of having taken at least four years of Latin.

[00:47] Stephanie: They were very nerdy memes, but I’m going to pull us into a happy little icebreaker here. When you think of celebrating Christmas, what stands out more to you, Christmas Eve or Christmas Day?

[01:02] Marcus: Oh, the day. Yeah, Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is usually spent in a panic at last minute preparation. We have to wrap everything. Yeah, definitely Christmas Day.

[01:14] Stephanie: Yes, Christmas Day. I feel like they have their own places in my mind because I think about all the wrapping and stuff. I feel like I usually am up past everybody wrapping. But I’m like, oh, I’ll just put on a happy devotional or Christmas music or something, and just try to enjoy it. It’s fun and I’m Santa Claus. But most years we’ve been going to a lovely family’s house for Christmas Eve who goes to our church. They provide a nice little fellowship time and that has really stuck out to me as an adult. Christmas Eve didn’t used to be a thing, Christmas Day was definitely the thing. But something about being able to fellowship with people on Christmas Eve has been very lovely.

[02:05] Marcus: That is true. Being with friends on Christmas Eve, eating food, chatting, and singing carols with a violinist, it’s all cool.

[02:16] Stephanie: Yes, very good. Christmas Day I very much look forward to the day itself and being with you and the family. All right, well, we are in our Advent series right now, Advent and Incarnation. We’ve talked about forming and filling and high priest theology. I’m loving it. So today let’s continue the conversation with a topic that is dear to our ministry, walking with God.

[02:47] Marcus: Imagine that.

[02:48] Stephanie: Imagine that. Our name is our mission.We often talk about what it looks like for us to walk with God, but he walks with us too. And I want to make sure we kind of cover both grounds today. Genesis, all the way through the Hebrew Scriptures, we see God’s incarnational presence until we come to the ultimate incarnation of Christ, when the Gospels depict his human birth. And I think it’s really important to note how much he has cared to walk with us.

So first, I think you’ve done a great job of talking about the Incarnation in a way that people would understand in the prior two episodes. But I realized we didn’t address the word itself. It might be one of those churchy words that people are like, you keep using this word, I do not understand. So could you give a quick explanation for what it is? Incarnation.

[03:42] Marcus: So when I hear incarnation, honestly, my first thought is Carne Asada. It’s  like carne because it’s the Latin word for meat or flesh or body. God who is spirit, came in carne, flesh. And so the Incarnation is this mysterious thing. How can the infinite, all knowing, all wise, all powerful God, have limited himself in such a way that he could become a baby? And go through the nine month process of being in a woman’s womb to go through the birth canal.

And it leads to all kinds of speculation and questions, like, at what point did he have self awareness? At what point did he remember eternity? At what point did he learn all this? Was he born knowing he was still being the one who held all things together? How did this work? There are so many questions.

[04:59] Stephanie: That’s a deep theological pool.

[05:02] Marcus: Yeah. Well, but this is the kind of thing that Christians used to meditate on.

[05:08] Stephanie: Exactly.

[05:09] Marcus: In terms of how does one worship? Because worshipping God and meditating on the profoundness of what he has done, is one of the ways that we worship. And so the simple answer of the God becoming flesh. Now we look at not just how did that happen? And how does that even work? And then the question of, why did he do it? And so we’ve sort of been camping out on why he did it, but it is one of those things that’s worth pondering, and thinking through how that all happened. Because it shows the humility of God. Your grandfather, my father, used to say that part of God’s greatness is his ability to limit himself.

He’s like, if God couldn’t limit himself, he would in some ways be a robot who just had to do whatever the maximum thing was that he could do. But his ability to limit himself and to not force everything to happen, to not be fatalistic and not cause everything that happens to happen. To limit himself in the incarnation is actually part of the greatness of God. He is so limitless that he can limit himself, if that makes sense. So it really is a marvel. And obviously, we could spend quite a bit of time just dwelling on that.

[06:43] Stephanie: Oh, sure.

[06:45] Stephanie: Yeah. Just like the church fathers and mothers did. So I would also just add to that in very practical terms that incarnation has to do with embodiment. And you can even hear the word in perhaps a more commonly culturally used term, reincarnation.

[07:06] Marcus: Reincarnation means let’s get incarnate again.

[07:11] Stephanie: Right. Embodied again, but that’s a different topic. But in terms of placing it in people’s minds on what it means. All right, well, let’s continue on with this understanding of incarnation. I want to know what is your practical understanding for incarnation in terms of God with us?

[07:39] Marcus: Yeah, we’ve been kind of focusing on this idea of “with”. That God wants to walk with us. I remember one of the first talks I ever gave at a Deeper Walk conference. It was 2008 and one of the very first ones was from Genesis 5 genealogy. If you only get one shot at talking to people, always preach from a genealogy.

[08:11] Marcus: The Genesis 59 genealogy is actually packed with all kinds of interesting things that it would be easy to gloss over. But one of them is that each generation, there’s ten generations there, they each end with the terms, and then he died. Except one person, the 7th from Adam. Enoch doesn’t end with, and he died. And so it immediately draws your attention to Enoch and go, okay, so what’s different about this guy? It focuses your attention very dramatically.

And not only that, but everybody else is living 7, 8, 900 years, and he’s gone in 365. He doesn’t die. What’s the key? And twice we read about him, that he walked with God. And that gives us a very clear indication in a literary sort of way, of what it is that God’s looking for from us. He wants us to walk with him. That was the key. And so when it summed up what it was about Enoch that brought him eternal life, if you will, that brought him all this, it was that he walked with God.

And then later we see the same phrase, walking with God, used of Noah to describe what made him special. We see it used of Abram and Abraham that he walked with God and even of Adam and Eve. What they were doing in the garden is a term described as walking. God was walking in the cool of the evening. So one of the reasons for that is the Hebrew doesn’t actually have a word for relationship. There’s not a Hebrew word that we would translate, God wants to have a relationship with you. So walking is a metaphor for relationship. Someone said, the person walked with God. What they’re saying is he had a relationship with God.

They were intimate and they had conversations. When we look at what it looks like to have a walk with God, one of the other things that jumps out at us from the Book of Genesis is how much God speaks. He speaks to create the world, but then he appears to Abraham and talks to him. He appears to other people and talks to them. He talks to Noah.

And you begin to realize it’s like he’s communicating on a regular basis with his people. So something about walking with God involves being in a listening, conversational connection with him. And then it is characterized by trust. And the way you know you trust God is you actually do what says. When he told Adam and Eve don’t eat this fruit we know that they didn’t trust him because they ate the fruit. And when we say that Abraham trusted God we know that he did.

He was so sure that Isaac was the chosen seed that he was willing to put him to death, believing he would be raised from the dead as Hebrews tells us. And so you look at all this and the connection between walking with God and between that trust that leads to obedience. Part of how we know what to trust is through what God communicates to us. And so he communicates to us in a variety of ways and ultimately through Scripture. But primarily the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit is even the author of Scripture. So all of God’s communication to us is through Spirit.

And you think about it also then that the Incarnation is the logos, or the word becoming flesh. And in a sense, it’s also an effort of God to communicate with us. That’s why again, the book of Hebrews can open with, in the past he spoke to us through prophets, but in these last days he’s spoken to us through his Son. So you can’t separate this idea of communication from relationship and walking. Hopefully, you’re not walking in silence, but you’re walking in conversation.

You’re also then walking and growing in your trust that is leading you to greater obedience and quick obedience. And it’s one of the things that amazed me about Abraham, was not only when he was told to take Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice, but it says he did it the next morning. It’s like he got up and he obeyed quickly. And I think that that’s one of the other signs of faith, is that the more our faith grows, the quicker we are to do what God is asking us to do.

[13:04] Stephanie: Yeah.

[13:05] Stephanie: In saying that, if I remember correctly in the Hebrew, I had to translate that as a project in school. And I’m pretty sure it was not just the morning, but the early crack of dawn. It strikes me that when you talked about Adam and Eve and the walking, it was also God walking in the cool. It’s not just about us having to walk to where he is. He comes to us. 1st John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us”. He draws us, he comes to us. That’s part of the incarnational nature of him that he’s not just sitting on his mountain waiting for us to climb up to him, he’s coming down to us. He is walking with us and he is seeking us and then we seek him in turn.

[14:03] Marcus: And what happens when we walk with God, in a sense the incarnation expands because Christ now wants to incarnate himself in us. The Holy Spirit now living in me has a chance to live through my flesh. And Galatians 2:20 says this very clearly. In fact, let me get it up here so that I get it correct. All right, I won’t read in Greek. What I found interesting about this is it says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live”. So most of us are familiar with this verse. If not, we’re familiar with the Philip Craig and Dean song. So I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

My life is now becoming an extension of Christ’s life and so he is now incarnate in me. And it says, the life I now live in the flesh. And the Greek word there actually isn’t so’ma, which is the word for body. It’s the word sa’rka, which is the word for flesh. And so it’s interesting that it uses the language of incarnation. The Latin word for sa’rka would be carne. It actually might be a different ending.

The point here is not the Latin word, but that Christ wants to reproduce his life in us. And that’s why Paul ends with the life I live. I’m not living anymore, but Christ is living in me. And ultimately that’s what our walk with God is all about, wanting Christ’s life to be incarnate within us. And that requires something on our part, right? That’s what we call the crucified life. Because I have been crucified with Christ I now need to live a crucified life in which I am fully surrendered to Christ. Now, none of us does this perfectly. We’ve already talked about our weaknesses and the high priest and all that. I think it still lays out that our best life, if you will, is a crucified life. And it is one in which we are trusting God, obeying him quickly, and through the Holy Spirit living within us, we’re developing that conversational walk with God.

[16:34] Stephanie: So, good. Can you draw that into the Christmas season, into Advent?

[16:42] Marcus: Well, yes. One of the things that we’re doing at Advent is we are preparing our hearts for a connection with God. And you think about, what does it look like to prepare your heart? And it means first of all, that you stop. You slow down and give yourself some space to meditate, some space to think. One of the things we think about is, God, what is getting in the way of my walk with you? What is hindering me from being closer to you, from having Christ more incarnate within me? What’s getting in the way?

One of the things we teach at a Deeper Walk is there’s three main things that do this. One, there is something we need to repent of that is keeping us from that kind of the walk we’re looking for with God. Two, there’s somebody we need to forgive. And sometimes we need to forgive ourselves. Sometimes we need to forgive God and sometimes we need to forgive somebody else. And thirdly, it’s often that we are in bondage to lies that we’re believing. Often because of pain in our past and wounds from our past. We are believing lies that keep us from trusting him and keep us from pressing in. And so you look at all that preparation and Advent has to do with this.

So Advent season traditionally has started with a time of repentance. But largely, when you think about repentance it’s not just repentance from actions, but you can kind of bring repentance from false beliefs into that. And even repentance from the bitterness that we’ve held onto instead of forgiveness. And all of that is part of how Advent connects to preparing ourselves for that deeper walk with God.

[18:25] Stephanie: Thank you. You’re very impressive, Father.

[18:30] Marcus: That’s my goal.

[18:33] Stephanie: I didn’t really prepare you for that question, and that was a great answer. All right, let me pull in a note from one of our listeners. She writes, “I just wanted to say I really appreciate that you all are going over what authority we have in Christ regarding spiritual warfare. This has been a relevant subject in my life currently, and I have been seeking God in prayer about this topic. It has been a huge blessing to me to hear your episodes where you all have been discussing this topic. Thank you so much.” Thank you for listening and thank you for that feedback. All right, Father, end of this episode. Any closing thoughts?

[19:17] Marcus: The Galatians 2:20 idea of the crucified life and walking with God. The story that always comes to my mind is the classic, My heart- Christ’s Home, it’s been around for a couple generations now. I think it was written by a Presbyterian minister. And it starts off with the idea of inviting Jesus to come into your life, and he moves in and immediately some things change. Just his presence in your life brings life and something has changed. And he lights the fire in the fireplace and there’s a new warmth. He brings music to the home and all these things.

And there’s just this notable change that takes place because he’s moved in. And then along the way, you begin to realize that I have different rooms in my life. I have a study, I have a rec room, I have a closet. I have other rooms. And I need to start bringing Jesus into those rooms as well. And eventually at the end of the story he says, you know what? Here’s the deed to the house, you just take ownership. And I like the story because it is a model of that movement from salvation to Lordship that we all go through. But I also look at it as like an emotional healing kind of story. All of us have rooms in our lives that perhaps Christ is not as incarnate in. He has moved into and is in control of certain rooms in our heart, but there are others where he is not.

And often he’s not in control of those rooms because that’s where our trauma is and where our pain is, and it’s where we don’t trust him. And so not only do we sometimes deny him access to rooms in our heart because of pride or rebellion, but we sometimes do it just out of distrust that has come from the pain in our past. That’s why we connect emotional healing to the idea of how do I have a deeper walk? How do I connect with God at a deeper level? It involves needing to go to those places in my heart that are not only  not fully surrendered to him, but there’s no connection with him yet at that point in that particular place. It doesn’t mean I’m not saved, it just means that there’s a connection that he wants to have that hasn’t yet happened.

So I just want to encourage people that we’re all on a journey. Most of us probably still have some rooms in there where we need to invite Christ. And the holiday season is actually a great time to take some time to meditate on this. And ask God, is there a room in my heart that has been off limits to you that you really want to get into, and that I’d be better off if you were there?

[22:08] Stephanie: Beautiful. Thank you. All right, everyone, thank you so much for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk exists to make heart focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more. And if you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On the Trail podcast, leave a review, and share with your friends. Thanks again.

We’ll see you back next weekend.