Moments. What are moments? We are surrounded by them. Good moments, bad moments, moments of weakness and moments of strength. These are moments of time that pass all too quickly yet feel like forever. They are times when you wish you had more time, or they can be times where you wish time would pass a little faster. These moments are pictures of who we are in the moment and they are stepping stones to where we are going. I used to believe that a relationship with God was developed through a series of spoken words, actions and blind faith. Now if God really did require that of me, I like to think I would still give those things to my dying breath. But God has shown me something a little different than that. God does require faith, for without faith it is impossible to please God. God does require spoken words, for it’s through the profession of our faith that we are saved. God does require action, for faith without works is dead. These are truths and they are definitely part of our walk with God, but there’s more. These are things that God requires of us, but I can tell you from personal experience, it’s never been blind. God is a God that exists before, during and after time. He is completely timeless and yet he meets us where we are at. It’s in moments where our relationships are tested and we either grow or fall. We are going to look at three different stages you see surrounding moments and what that could look like today.
- Training Stage
- Running the race
- Consequences
Let’s start off in the training stage. Every great moment in our lives, especially the ones where we encounter God, start off in the training stage. Think back to your first memories and consider some of your most impactful memories. They are moments in time where something big affected you. It may not necessarily be big for others around you, but for you, it was big. These moments can have positive or negative effects on your life. The training stages of our first moments are incredibly important because they set the stage for how we deal with future training moments. These training moments can look different but they are in every part of our lives. They can be the first time there is a consequence to not asking nicely for the cookie. They can be moments of joy where you receive the gift you’ve always wanted, or they can be moments of pain where something you care deeply about is ripped from your life. The reason these fit into the training stage and not the running the race stage is because the majority of your memories that form your identity early on are ones that you have no control over. They are simply things that happen to you. They are circumstances in your life that cause you feel an extreme emotional response. They are considered the training stage because it’s here you start to develop how you are going to handle these kinds of situations in the future.
The training stage is one you will never be finished with if you truly want to walk with God. The reality about God is that there is so much to know that you’ll never stop learning. It’s important to recognize these stages in our lives. Another word for this stage is trials. The Bible talks about trials and how they are to be huge parts of our lives. Trials produce perseverance, and perseverance produces good character and… yeah you know the bible verse I’m talking about. If not, it’s found in Romans 5: 3-5. The difficulty with training stages is that we often don’t succeed on our first time going through something. Fail enough times and you start to believe that this is who you are when in reality, it’s just a place you’re stuck at. See, God wants to take you from the training stage to the running your race stage but to do that, you need to get through some trials and grow a little. There have been too many people who get to big too quickly and before you know it, they’ve lost everything because they let their gifting take them somewhere their character couldn’t sustain them.
The best way to get through the training stage is simply to identify and acknowledge that this is where you are at. Often, this is difficult to do on your own. Thankfully, God created a body of believers and not just one person. You can ask those around you for help and let them be part of your journey. As you grow up both in years and in Christ you’re going to constantly be running into new trails and areas where you will need to rely on Him to get you through. The beautiful thing about the training stage is that God will never let you take on more than you can handle. See 1 Corinthians 10:13.
As you start to progress and learn some things, you’re going to have the opportunity to start running your race. What does that mean? It means that instead of everything happening to you and you needing to react, learn and grow, you can start applying what you’ve learned pro-actively. You can start teaching others what you’ve learned and continue to learn. You start to re-produce what God has produced through you in others. The beautiful thing about this is that the more you learn, the more you can impart. This is called discipleship. The further you are able to run, the more you are able to learn in your training stages of life, these will affect how much you can impart.
The ‘running the race moments’ are more often than not ones of your choosing. I have for as long as I can remember, always had some form of responsibility when it comes to my walk with God. Whether it was helping in children’s ministry, manning the overhead projector or setting up chairs for the youth group I was serving. I was running the race. These were things I asked for because during my training stage, I learned that service is just something you do. It was a simple lesson with not much depth but at 8 years old there’s only so much depth you can comprehend. These moments aren’t always easy and they often end up leading to more training.
I call these moments because it takes but a moment to make a choice to be more than you were a moment ago. Whether it takes you days, weeks or years to make a decision, it all happens in a moment. There was a statistic a few years back that said 10% of a church made the ministry happen for the other 90%. This saddened me because if it’s true, it meant that only 10% of the church was actually being useful. The rest decided they wanted to sit in the training stage and not move forward. We aren’t actually supposed to be a people that are hearers only but doers as well. The hearing is the training part, the doing is the running the race part.
The last part of this is the consequences. Most people associate consequences in a negative connotation but the reality is, consequences are simply the result of action or inaction. For example, the consequence of studying for a test would be a better result than the consequences of not studying for a test. Consequence moments are some of the best moments I’ve had in my walk with God. They are moments where God has shown me both the negative and positive consequences of my actions. In both cases, I can learn something and get closer to him. These are moments where your obedience to God is rewarded and/or acknowledged. Not necessarily by man, but it can include that. There have been many times in the past few years where after I’ve done something out of obedience that made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, God reassured me and I saw the reward. Sometimes the reward is seeing someone come to Christ. Sometimes it’s watching someone who was unloved experience the love of Christ. Sometimes it’s giving someone who had no hope the tools and knowledge needed to have hope.
Moments come and go in life all the time, God is a not a God of time but of moments. It’s our pleasure to be ready, willing and able to move when one of these moments comes around.