Cam McVey

God wants rela­tion­ship with us. This is not new inform­a­tion – we’ve been hear­ing of the call to intim­acy build and build recently. How­ever, for me the focus of that mes­sage has always been about fall­ing in Love with our Father and our Saviour. This is so import­ant and is fun­da­mental to our growth, our anoint­ing and our gift­ings, but God had been speak­ing to me recently about a prac­tical side-effect of this intimacy.

How can we be most effect­ive? How can God make best use of our will­ing­ness to serve?

Pro­verbs 16:9 says, “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determ­ines his steps.”

We have set our sights on doing God’s will, but it is Father God that guides where our feet must go and what our actions must be. For those of us who have decided to make the growth of His King­dom our primary con­cern, this fact is abso­lutely key to our suc­cess. We know we want to serve Him and to do His will, and we pos­i­tion ourselves for this, but we must learn to rely on His con­tinual guid­ance through each day of our lives if we are to have the greatest impact possible.

In the Old Test­a­ment, for a prophet to hear God’s voice was a big event and some­times we are wait­ing for the big unmis­tak­able voice of God to rever­ber­ate through our heads, dic­tat­ing our next big move. How­ever, we are under the new cov­en­ant there­fore we have an on-going rela­tion­ship with the Holy Spirit where we can hear His voice through the day, every day and, like Brother Lawrence, I think we need to pur­sue “The Prac­tice of the Pres­ence of God” to hear that still small voice, to know and under­stand His ways.

God doesn’t play by the rules. So much of Jesus’ min­istry was shock­ing both theo­lo­gic­ally and cul­tur­ally. The Father sent Him into the com­pany of people rep­res­ent­ing the untouch­ables of Jew­ish soci­ety. I think Jesus must have been in very close com­mu­nic­a­tion with Father to be so determ­ined, to have the guts to revolu­tion­ise society’s concept of who was accept­able. He must have been aware of Father God dir­ect­ing his steps so pre­cisely, allow­ing His day to be dir­ec­ted so com­pletely. So for us to go bey­ond our own bar­ri­ers of what we per­ceive to be ‘right’, we will need that pre­cise guid­ance too.

I saw this as I was read­ing the story of Zac­chaeus [Luke 19: 1–10]:

1 Jesus was passing through Jericho. 2 A man named Zac­chaeus was there. He was the dir­ector of tax col­lect­ors, and he was rich. 3 He tried to see who Jesus was. But Zac­chaeus was a small man, and he couldn’t see Jesus because of the crowd. 4 So Zac­chaeus ran ahead and climbed a fig tree to see Jesus, who was com­ing that way.

5 When Jesus came to the tree, he looked up and said, “Zac­chaeus, come down! I must stay at your house today.”

6 Zac­chaeus came down and was glad to wel­come Jesus into his home. 7 But the people who saw this began to express dis­ap­proval. They said, “He went to be the guest of a sinner.”

8 Later, at din­ner, Zac­chaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Lord, I’ll give half of my prop­erty to the poor. I’ll pay four times as much as I owe to those I have cheated in any way.”

9 Then Jesus said to Zac­chaeus, “You and your fam­ily have been saved today. You’ve shown that you, too, are one of Abraham’s descendants.

10 Indeed, the Son of Man has come to seek and to save people who are lost.”

Look at verse 5. Jesus is in Jericho, not His homet­own, so it’s a good bet that he doesn’t actu­ally know of Zac­chaeus either by name or by sight. But He speaks dir­ectly to Him, call­ing him by name, as if they are good friends. He is being dir­ec­ted by Father God to a man that is ready to hear. Zac­chaeus’ response is telling: he was glad to wel­come him and, fur­ther down, his life is so trans­formed that he gives up half of all his wealth and wants to repay fourfold to any­one he has cheated.

The crowd did not approve of who Jesus wanted to hang out with, but the fruit of the encounter was a whole fam­ily turned around: saved, healed & delivered. And the funny thing is that this scorn­ful crowd will be treated more fairly by the trans­form­a­tion of this reformed Tax Collector!

I believe Zac­chaeus was ripe for the pick­ing. I believe Father God dir­ec­ted Jesus to encounter him at just the right time and place and in just the right way to unlock that wee man’s heart.

Think about the heav­ily afflic­ted man liv­ing in tombs on the shore of Galilee. It says in Mark 5 that Jesus got into the boat to cross the lake. When they got there, the man that lived there came out to meet Him and, once Jesus had sent all the demons into the herd of pigs, He said His farewells and got back into the boat and crossed the lake again. The only reason for the trip was to set this man free. He knew why and where He was going. Father God was dir­ect­ing His steps and that is why no storm on a lake stopped Him.

Think about the woman at the well in John 4. We know the story well: a woman liv­ing a sin­ful life meets Jesus who speaks to her of her sin. She changes the sub­ject, not want­ing to speak about her past, and Jesus chooses this sup­posedly unclean woman to reveal His true iden­tity. As we know, the well was in a town called Sychar, in Samaria. The nor­mal route for Jews between Judea and Galilee was the long way around, avoid­ing Samaria as there was a lot of hatred between the Jews and the Samar­it­ans. It seems the only reason He went this way was to have a meet­ing with a thirsty woman who needed someone to cross the racial divide to bring her a never-ending drink of life.

And that is how He wants to move through us. He wants us to be in close, intim­ate rela­tion­ship with Him so He can dir­ect us in the moment-by-moment of our days. He wants us to so know His voice that we have a surety to our actions that will allow us to press through the storms the enemy would bring. He’s look­ing for a people that know His heart and that are will­ing to be changed by tak­ing on His com­pas­sion for the untouch­ables of soci­ety. He wants to take that will­ing heart we have and guide our steps to reach a des­per­ate and needy world, unlock­ing hearts one-by-one, each in the right time and place, in just the right way.