Your Calling to Intimacy With God

Do you believe your primary calling as a Christ-follower is your intimacy with God?  

I’ve appreciated a renewed perspective over the last couple of years that my first calling is to be intimate with the triune God. How I view and relate to God permeates every aspect of my life and leadership. Like Paul, my aim as a Christ-follower is “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death” (Phil 3:10). 

Sustaining spiritual vitality is a leader's top priority!  Michael Reeves says, “For what we think God is like must shape our godliness, and what we think godliness is reveals what we think of God.” Extrapolating further, my view of God then shapes my service to others. How you and I think of God is vital to our daily relationship with God and how we live out God’s calling on our lives. Reeves says, “no wonder the two greatest commands are ‘Love the Lord your God’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ For that is being like this God—sharing the love the Father and the Son have for each other, and then, like them, overflowing with that love to the world.”

So, your (and my!) top priority must be deepening and maturing your relationship with God. A leader’s relationship with God impacts every aspect of their life, especially in leadership and influencing others. Skye Jethani, in his book With, exposes what happens when one puts work for God ahead of one’s relationship with Him, saying, “This is the first failure of LIFE FOR GOD—it puts God’s mission ahead of God himself. Paul, the most celebrated missionary in history, did not make this mistake. He understood that his calling (to be a messenger to the Gentiles) was not the same as his treasure (to be united with Christ). His communion with Christ rooted and preceded his work for him.” 

Our constant challenge is to keep our relationship with God first because the ministry's needs are constantly clamoring for priority attention. Prioritizing our relationship with God means attuning to Him, giving out of the overflow from Him, and keeping in step (Gal 5:25) on mission with this God of all the nations of the earth. We must carve out time and space to do this!

Your ongoing abiding connectedness to God, fueled by regular times of renewal and refreshment, enables you to influence your teams, organizations, and contexts for God’s glory, not your own. Ask God to stir in you a more profound desire for intimacy with Him. Ask Him to put others in your life to help you go deeper so that you might know how “the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled to all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:18-19).

Here’s a song by my friend Tyler Dodds called Forgiven / Chosen to encourage you today.