Ministry or Friendship
The subject today is ministry or friendship. It’s a very interesting, complicated, and complex subject, and I believe God has some really good things for us today. This has been in my heart for a while, and obviously, the best person to talk about friendship with God would be Moses. Thank God he left us the Bible. He left us five books that he wrote, and the Holy Spirit speaks to us. I am speaking to you guys, but I believe and I pray that the Holy Spirit would speak directly to you, that some things I say would prompt you to think more and to pray more. As I speak, let God speak into your heart. Let him show things that are there so you would change for the better and become more like Christ.
I want to preface what I’m about to say by telling a story about a person. This person is not necessarily a single individual, but an illustration to paint a type of relationship that we have with God. I hope you will discover and see that you are partially in the description that I’m about to present, because the second part will be how to go to a different level. What I mean is, I named this talk “Ministry and Friendship,” which are the two different relationships we have with God. What I am about to say is not necessarily making this person an example of a bad relationship. No, it’s more like I’m using an illustration to show a type of relationship. I hope you listen to the end and hear what the solution is and how we can have a better relationship with God.
Prophecy. Success. Being essential in church. Loss of business. Crash.
So I was talking with a guy, let’s name him Arden. The conversation started because we were praying for people, and for some reason, he was avoiding it. He was avoiding being prophesied to, being prayed for, and so on. I was just curious why. He told me a story, and this story is a commonly repeated one, so again, I’m not singling out one guy. He told me that he went to a respectable church and a respectable ministry, and they prophesied over him. He made some decisions in his life based on the prophecy. Within six months or half a year, he understood that the direction he was going was not going to lead him to success. He blamed the prophecy and the ministry that prophesied to him—the ones that spoke God’s word, as he thought.
I’m not here to decide if that was a word from God or not. My point is that he decided that the prophecy, or a decision he made based on a prophecy—or something God told him through a person—put him in the wrong direction. That is important. I am going to record a full video about prophecy and my experience. About 20 or 25 years ago, I had this period of my life where pretty much anywhere I went, God would prophesy something to me. For about four or five years, there was prophecy after prophecy, and they were all saying similar things. I want to record an episode on how that changed my life, how I was working with prophecy, the disappointments, the problems, the interesting things that happened, and my view on prophecy, my experience, what the Bible says, and so on. I will record a podcast on that at some point.
Coming back to Arden, the prophecy he heard in his view put him on the wrong path, and he always wanted to do something good. He wanted to be involved in church and be active. We kept talking, and then he mentioned that he went through bankruptcy. I wanted to dig deeper to understand what happened. This person had a business, and this happens to a lot of people. He had an online business. Everything is driven by reviews and so on. He had great traffic on his website, thousands and tens of thousands of people who were buying his product. Everything was going well. Things were expanding, and he started using that money to finance other ventures and ideas. He had employees and everything.
Because he was a Christian, he was a good person. He sought God and wanted to serve, so he was very active in church with the youth and supporting different things. He became very busy with life and with ministry. He was respected in church. It was like a dream. Then something happened. In the virtual world, rules often change, algorithms change, and some updates come. I know one guy who had 100,000 subscribers about 10 or 15 years ago, which was hard to reach back then, and even now. Then, all of a sudden, the algorithm changed, and he lost so many views—about 80 to 90%.
The same thing happened to Arden. Some rule changed, and all of a sudden, instead of having 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000 visits to his website a month, it dropped to 3,000. His income shrunk to nothing. That caused a chain reaction. He had to let his employees go, and his ventures had to fold. He became busy with this, not having enough money to support ministry, and basically what it ended with was bankruptcy. Not just of his company, but a bankruptcy of him—his energy, his ministry, his everything. He went from having this dream to having basically nothing.
Ministry. Ministry. Ministry. Where is the relationship?
The interesting thing is that as he was describing this, the word he was always using was “ministry.” “I was in ministry,” he would say, “I was serving,” and all of this. Something clicked in my mind as he was talking. Two things we discovered. First, prophecy was perceived or, based on prophecy, he made some decisions, and he saw he was going in the wrong direction. So, he sort of discounted prophecy or pushed it away. The second thing was ministry. Success helped him create a ministry. I asked him, “Where was the relationship with God in ministry?”
Here’s what I mean. Imagine somebody working as an employee in a good company. He knows they make a good product that is needed and necessary. He could be in management, a salesperson, whatever. This person is in a company working for something that he knows is good. He believes that everything is working for good, and whatever he does at work is for the greater good. He believes that the company, the leadership, the president, and the owner have a really good goal and mission. When something goes wrong, when he notices something in the company, or notices bad publicity or whatever, he will think critically. He might start noticing these negative things and might start distancing himself. He might start doubting what’s going on.
Now, think another way. What if this person, this hypothetical employee, started a company with a friend? Or he was in some kind of management but knew the owner from childhood. They do family picnics, barbecues, go on vacation together, and hang out with their families. They are friends. They talk, and the boss or the friend-owner shares his heart. Imagine the two views of the person on the work itself and on the company. The one who doesn’t have this intimate relationship with the owner—and I’m not a big fan of that word because it’s so overused—believes in the company, but when something goes wrong or awry, doubt creeps in. A person starts thinking about a different company.
But if you know the friend very closely, you know their thinking and the problems he is going through. That does not matter. I’m just trying to show you the picture of the difference in the mindset of an employee versus a friend. I’m trying to show you the difference between the relationship with God and our work with God. If we don’t have a friendship with God, we tend to be suspicious. When things go wrong, we start noticing the wrong things, the bad things. We start distancing, judging, and criticizing. But if we have a friendship, I have some friends in business and ministry, and I hear people talking about them, describing their videos or thoughts they share, or things at meetings. I see the same thing in a different light because I am a friend with that minister or business owner. I correct or try to correct the people’s thinking when they say this or when they think this. Why? Because I’m a friend; because I know what the person goes through.
When we’re talking about friendship with God, we are talking about a friend who is flawless. He is perfect. He does not make mistakes. So we can fully trust him. This example can only go so far, but my goal is to show you the difference and how much better it is to be friends with God versus being an employee or having a ministry.
When Ministry Is Not Enough
This is possibly what Jesus says or means when he says, “Depart from me, I never knew you”. He says, “You used my name; in my name, you cast out demons, you healed,” and so on. “But depart from me. I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). Because you work for a company, you work for a ministry. It’s a job. It’s a nine-to-five, or if it’s a ministry, it could be seven to seven. If you’re very dedicated, it could be 24/7. You can be invested more than anyone else, but it could only be a job. There is no friendship with the owner, the one that runs things, the one that has the vision, which is God the Father.
The Holy Spirit, if I could put it this way, has his turn to work on the earth, because Jesus said, “I’ll go to my father, and I’ll ask to send you a comforter, a helper” (John 14:16). Somebody that we can work hand in hand with, shoulder to shoulder. That’s what we do right now with the Holy Spirit. We work with him. He has a certain mission that he’s trying to accomplish, which is to prepare the bride—to prepare our hearts, to find the ones that are God’s, to bring them to God, and to search the hearts of people. That is the whole mission of the Holy Spirit. He prays on our behalf and he works in us. He orchestrates meetings and amazing miracles. He orchestrates things that people say are just a coincidence.
Jesus did his work. He laid the groundwork, and now the Holy Spirit does the work here with us in our hearts and together with us, shoulder to shoulder. God the Father is God the Father. He’s done his Old Testament stuff, and he basically oversees everything, if I could put it this way, you know, the Trinity. So we are working with the Holy Spirit. He has these goals, these ideas, this mission, and we can be a part of this mission working for a ministry, or working because the Bible says so, or we could have a personal relationship, a friendship. We do the same thing, but it’s out of friendship. And when it’s out of friendship, we don’t question.
Moses and Aaron: Two Relationships
Let me give you an example. Moses and Aaron. They are two different people, very amazing examples of serving God or living with God. Moses is a friend. For 40 years, he was with Pharaoh, studying, learning things, and had a career. Then, something changed. At 40, he had a mid-life crisis. He goes back to his roots, to his family, to where he came from, because he knew and he saw that they were in the agony of slavery. He tried to do something about it. He killed an Egyptian and tried to help his brother, who told him, “Hey, we saw you kill him” (Exodus 2:14). He got afraid and he ran.
Then, for 40 more years, he was in the wilderness tending to sheep. It’s a very hard and involving and exhausting job to herd thousands of sheep, even if it’s not thousands. For 40 years, this prince was humbled. What do you do when you are by yourself a lot? You reflect and you think. We seek God because we know that we have this longing for him. Moses seeks God. People say, “Oh, and then he went deeper and then he found the bush.” I don’t know. I read the Bible a little more literally, I guess. I don’t subscribe to the idea that he saw deeper, and then we need to go deeper based on that example. But we still know we need to go deeper. People say that this time he went so far away and he saw the burning bush. The point is that he spent 40 years trying to find God, find meaning, find something. People search now, people searched back then.
I believe what he found is a friendship with God, because we see the next 40 years. From the burning bush and then leading Israel out, the relationship with God was so close. He was in the tent of meeting. God himself said that he is my friend. “To prophets, I speak in dreams and in secrets and mysteries, but to my friend Moses, I speak face to face” (Numbers 12:6-8). This is Moses. This is a friend. When he would go into the tent of meeting, which was a tent pitched outside the camp, he would spend time there with Caleb. People would watch when Moses would walk there. It doesn’t say that Aaron went there.
What was Moses doing? Probably writing the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. He was probably talking with God, receiving ideas on how to manage things, and asking God how to resolve the next issue with the people who were bringing him all these court cases. Sometimes he was probably just on his face, crying, or laughing, or just sitting there, being with God. Everybody’s experience and relationship with God is different, just like my relationship with my wife is different from someone else’s with his wife. We all have different relationships with God. So Moses was doing whatever he was doing, but it was a friendship because God clearly called it so.
But look at Aaron. Aaron was in slavery. Those 80 years that Moses spent in the palace and in the wilderness, Aaron was in slavery. Whatever he was doing—making bricks, managing something, I don’t know. Then Moses takes Aaron and says, “You’ll be my mouthpiece” (Exodus 4:16) because God said so. You’ll be speaking on my behalf. Then later, he puts Aaron as the priest. So Aaron was given a job based on the relationship that Moses had with God, based on this friendship. Aaron came into it as an employee, if you could put it this way.
Did he have a chance to talk with God face to face? I believe so, because there was a time when everybody, all the Israelites, came to them on Mount Sinai. God came down on it, and then he told everybody, “Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t be with your wives for three days” and so on (Exodus 19:15). God came down, and his idea was that he would develop this relationship with the people. But they were afraid. They said, “No, let God speak to Moses, and then Moses will tell us” (Exodus 20:19). So Aaron was one of those. There is a detail where God said, “Well, it’s better this way” (Deuteronomy 5:28). My understanding is that in their mindset, that was the better thing to do because they were not ready for a friendship with God. They couldn’t do it.
What I am trying to say is that Aaron had a chance to have a friendship, but he didn’t. He didn’t ask Moses to show him the secrets of friendship. That’s how Aaron’s life is different from Moses’s life. Aaron had doubts. Sometimes he was a very fervent, obedient servant ministering guy. He had the most important role in the Tabernacle and all that. But then when his sister Miriam brings up why Moses was chosen, Aaron goes to her side—to the doubting side—not to the Moses side, the friendship side. So he was slightly conflicted, I guess.
Another time when Moses was missing for 40 days and 40 nights, the pressure of the people got to Aaron to the point that he made a golden calf. If we do a little bit of a time calculation, it takes some time to make a calf, not 15 minutes. It probably took days, maybe even weeks. What I’m trying to say is that Moses was missing for 40 days, and Aaron gave up early or midway. He joined the doubting side again. He was prone to pressure from people. That’s another thing about people who don’t have friendship with God; they are prone to give in to people’s pressure.
Saul is a great example of that. Samuel told him, “Wait seven days; I’ll come, and we’ll do a sacrifice” (1 Samuel 10:8). People started leaving on the last day, and Saul didn’t wait long enough. The pressure got to him. He was never a friend. David was a friend. David waited for years. He was anointed, and then he was persecuted, but he wouldn’t raise his hand against the anointed king that was trying to kill him, even though David knew he was the next king. Why? Because he had a friendship with God. He would go to God, he would pray, he would sing songs, he would take his harp, or go shoot some birds or kill some bears. He was doing whatever he knew to do to spend time with God.
Moses was spending his time in a tabernacle. David had a different story. But they were spending time and developing a friendship with God in their own way. Moses wouldn’t kill a bear or a lion with his bare hands, but that was David’s way of working with God, living with God, and experiencing friendship with God.
God’s plans revealed.
Going back to Aaron and Moses, Aaron is the one who takes the whole thing as a ministry. He has doubts, and he is prone to pressure. I mean, he lost his son. It’s a harder life. I think the worst part for me is that you never know if you’re doing the right thing, because Aaron always went to his brother with questions and ideas. He was waiting for his brother, for Moses, to tell him what to do. That’s the difference between friendship and ministry.
I know some things I said may have been cryptic or hard to understand. I’m sorry; maybe for the sake of time, I’m not explaining every detail. But you see the summary of friendship and ministry, of working for a company versus being friends with the owner and understanding the vision. You’re still working for the company, but it’s such a different mindset, a different approach, a different life. You can trust, you see further. Just as a friend will share his vision ahead of time, God said, “I don’t do anything unless I reveal what I am about to do to my friends, the prophets” (Amos 3:7). It’s interesting that he calls them friends. It’s because they had the anointing, which in the Old Testament means that the Holy Spirit was with them. If we transfer that to the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is in us. We are baptized in the Holy Spirit. So in some sense, we have the same potential of being a prophet of the Old Testament. I don’t mean foretelling the future; I mean the relationship with God, the closeness, and the proximity. The Holy Spirit rested on them, and the Holy Spirit rests in us. He is in our spirit.
So I’m not saying that we are prophets of the Old Testament. I’m saying the relationship can be that. Jeremiah saw God, and he was in the temple, and then the angel took the coal and touched his lips (Jeremiah 1:9). Another prophet, they just had their own ways of doing this. I believe Amos was a shepherd, a businessman from Tekoa. People say he was very rich. He found God in his own way, and then God spoke through him to people. But they all had the Holy Spirit on them, so they developed different relationships with God in different ways. It’s the same with us. We develop them differently. But the point is that when we develop a relationship with God, how do we become friends? How do you become friends with other people?
I want to say a couple of more things. Just a couple of differences between people in ministry and people who are friends with God. I want to clarify that I’m not against ministry. I just called these two categories of people. One is ministry, and the other one is friendship with God, and working with God through friendship. So the first one is like you’re an employee, or you are a manager, or you could even be the CEO of a company, but you don’t have the relationship with the owner, the visionary. You are just a hired hand. By hired, I mean you want to do things for God maybe because you feel it fulfills your life, or maybe because you feel it’s wrong not to do it, or maybe because you’re just a good person. Or maybe you’re called to do it, or you know, it’s just to fill the hole in your heart or life, or because you want to do good, or because you love God in your way and you just want to please him and serve him. All of those motivations don’t have friendship.
Friendship is really the only way to do this. I was just talking with my sister. It seems to me that the most important thing we can do with God is to do what he asks us. The only valuable thing that matters is to do what he asks us. So we come to God, we spend time with him, we live our life, and then God says, “Go talk to that person,” or “Read this verse,” or “Write this,” or “Record this video,” or whatever he puts on your heart, “Start a business.” That is the valuable thing. That is what you have to do.
How to properly give $1,000 to someone! $200 gift that caused harm.
Yes, you want to do good. Sometimes you just want to go on a mission trip or donate some money, and it’s all good. But I think the most valuable thing is when you hear from God and you do it. I believe this is what I gather from the Bible and from life: when God tells you to give $1,000 versus you are moved by compassion to give $1,000, when God tells you to do it, it will bring a lot more good than when you are simply moved by compassion. The example for me is this: when God says it, he aligns things so that the person who will receive the money will know that God sent it to him. So the glory and the thankfulness will go to God. The recognition of God’s hands will be there. The person will thank you in a way that is tied together with God, tied together with how good God is. We will both be glad and happy that we helped each other because it’s like it all worked together, and it’s beautiful.
When you just want to give $1,000 because you’re compassionate, it is not always going to be for good. I’ll give you two examples. My aunt called me once and said, “Can I borrow a couple of hundred dollars for something?” She borrowed it, then gave it back. I had a thought. I was compassionate, and I was like, “What if I support them every month?” I wasn’t rich, but I had a little extra money, so I just thought I would support them with a couple of hundred dollars a month. I sent the $200 the first month. The weirdest thing that happened: she called me back and said, “Ban, don’t do this. There is no need. My husband just took them to Six Flags.” They just spent money that way. I was moved by compassion, and she called me and said, “Don’t do it.” That’s kind of strange, right? But that’s what happens when we are simply moved by compassion or goodness. I think God was teaching me a lesson in that.
Another example that is very big for me is to just look at the world and all these charities and all these people who do vile things but then send aid to Africa or do whatever. I’m not even going to name names, but sometimes the help turns into exploitation, corruption, and all this other stuff. That’s what happens when we just do things out of our own desire. Yes, some of it is good, but some of it is not. That’s why I put these two things together: when God tells you to do something, it is going to be marvelous and beautiful. When we decide to do it, when we just have this compassion or we see a need without consulting God and just do it in our human goodness, it does not always lead to good.
Again, this is friendship versus ministry. We can be employees of our good nature, where our motivation is that, versus being friends with God, where we hear from the Holy Spirit and we are guided. The Bible says, “Those are the sons of God who are led by the Spirit” (Romans 8:14). That’s the true sons of God. Jesus says, “Abide in me and you will be on the vine and you cannot produce anything of value unless you are on the vine” (John 15:4-5). That’s a pretty big statement. We can do good stuff, but it will not be of value for God’s kingdom.
Why do I think this is my opinion—why do I think God is so adamant about value in his way, about receiving glory and all of this? This is my observation and understanding: the Holy Spirit, as I said before, orchestrates things. He makes things happen to shape our character and to bring people to the knowledge of God. He uses us. For example, a long time ago, I had this example: if God—let’s say there is a grandma doing her gardening in a village somewhere—if God appeared to this grandma, she would be terrified. But when a nice, kind girl comes from America into a Russian or Ukrainian village, and meets this grandma in the market, she starts talking to her and says, “Hey, I’d like to help you. I came here for a month just to help people and tell them about God.” Then she helps, and she casually tells the grandma about God while doing good things. The grandma is a lot more likely to maybe pick up the Bible that she inherited from her grandma, which was dusty for 70 years, and she might pick it up and start reading the Gospel of John. But if God appeared in thunder and all that, the reaction may have been different. I know it’s an extreme example, but I’m just trying to understand why God uses us.
Why does God ask for all the glory?
Plus, we have this life. We get saved, and then we still have a life. We like doing good things. We feel ecstatic when we do it, and we know that God asked us to do it. So that’s another reason, because we participate and we take part with God. Then there is another reason that God gave us dominion over this earth, and then there is another reason there is free will. So there are multiple reasons why the Holy Spirit orchestrates things versus just making stuff happen. And that’s not the reason why Jesus came here.
So that’s why God orchestrates things. Why does God want the glory? I don’t think God needs our glory. He’s not one of those gods that we see in books, that just needs worship. If nobody worships him, he withers away and dies. No, our God, God the Father, Yahweh, is not that way at all. He created us. He is the source of all the energy, all the ideas, all the creativity, all the thoughts, all the beauty, all of everything. He’s the source. He’s an infinite source of everything, of creativity, of godliness, of righteousness. So he doesn’t need us to give it back to him so he doesn’t lose it all.
I understand that it’s because God wants to make his name known. In Ephesians 3:10, His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. So it’s like God needs to make it known to the authorities and to people. So when God says, “My name will be known to the ends of the earth,” it’s because they will know him and they will know the truth and they will turn to him. Then they become part of his family. So that’s why God does it—so his name is recognized.
So when he says, “I want the glory, and I’m not going to give it to somebody else” (Isaiah 42:8), it’s because when something good happens and we say, “Oh, I did it,” we become God to that person. We become the source to that person, not God, not the true source. So the person is deprived of the truth and deprived of God. That’s why God wants the glory. When the time comes, the Bible says he will share his glory with us (Romans 8:17–18, John 17:22). When that comes, we will wait for that, and we will be different then. We probably won’t take it on ourselves.
The whole world is going to be different because there is going to be no need to preach and all of that. But that’s why, first of all, the Holy Spirit orchestrates things and uses us and works with us and wants us to be partners, and we need to do certain things: pray on time, tell somebody about Jesus on time, help somebody. There are times because the Holy Spirit puts things together where this person is ready to hear the gospel right now.
The second thing is, God takes the glory because his name needs to be known so people know the truth. People know their actual source of everything so they don’t praise people. For example people thought that Barnabas was Zeus (Acts 14:12). He right away redirected them. He said, “No, I’m just a person, just like you. God is the source of everything” (Acts 14:15). That’s why when we pray for healing and somebody gets healed, we say, “Who healed you?” We don’t say we did. We say, “Jesus did.” We give the glory to God because this way the person worships God. The person seeks God, not us. He doesn’t seek the answer from us but from God.
God gave me a ministry, but I hijacked it. And then had to kill it..
I deviated a little bit. I think I’m just going to split this into two episodes. The first episode is going to be the difference between ministry and friendship, and the second is going to be how to become friends with God. Some things about ministry versus friendship: friendship is not set up to fail. It’s made in a way where it’s eternal. I know friendships do end, but when you become a friend, the hope is forever. That’s the setup, that’s the intent. When you get hired by a company, you hope to work there for a long time, but you understand that the company can go out of business. It’s not the same. One is eternal in intent, the other is not.
So there is the mindset. When you are ministering, when you are serving, you can move to a different church or to a different place. But when you are with God, it’s a friendship and it’s forever. No matter what you’re going to do, it’s forever with God. One thing that I notice about people that have a ministry instead of a friendship, is like, for example, going back to that story. When such a person had a failure of those proportions, this person still believes in God, still reads the Bible and all that, but there is a gap and it’s filled with the past.
Sometimes what happens with such a person is, for example, somebody gets sick or he needs an answer, and he says, “God, please answer me. I need help,” and God doesn’t answer. And then he says, “Okay, well, are you there? If you’re there, help me or answer me.” Because we don’t always receive an answer, we give an ultimatum to God. I will talk about how to approach God in the second episode, but if we give these ultimatums and God doesn’t respond on our terms for reasons that I will discuss later, we think that God failed us. No matter what, it just widens the gap. Then we pray automatically. We just have these beautiful words that we learned from a long time ago, and we just pray that. We don’t pray a relationship prayer anymore. We don’t have that relationship. It becomes defiant. Sometimes it turns into just giving up. So that’s what happens with the ministry approach to God.
I will even share something. You guys listen as long as you listen. I hope I’m saying things that are valuable to you. I want to share something where I had a ministry, not a friendship. When I first started Library of Lives, I think it was 2015 or 2017. It’s possible that 10 years passed. I wanted to do something for God. I sold my business, and I was receiving some money still, so I wasn’t suffering, but I wanted to do something. I did that because I wanted to be in ministry. I wanted to serve God based on the prophecies and all that. Again, I’ll tell the full story later. But I got so excited because I was going to this school. In this school, it was a three-day course where we were learning how to record interviews, how to do video editing, and how to make podcasts.
I was driving to the school one of the mornings, and God just visited me so heavily. I couldn’t drive. I cried because God was telling me that I should start this podcast and YouTube channel. I got so excited. I came home, and instead of asking God for the next step, I found a guy who knew sound, video, and lighting. I bought equipment, we made a studio, and I had access to a Bible school where there were teachers every week. I asked if I could interview them, and they agreed. I was not asking God what to do next. I just started doing what I knew. And that was a mistake. I think God was extending a hand of friendship to me. I needed to spend time and just ask him what the next step was. But I just got so excited about finally doing something that I turned it into a ministry.
Very quickly, I found that I was paying my sister to scour the internet to find questions that people ask so I could record the right videos. It sounds good. It sounds right because I am looking for what people need and giving it to them. But here’s the difference: I hijacked God’s child. God was offering me a task as something that I could do together with him, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. But what I did is I took it and I just started doing it on my own. If I take this “hijacked child” metaphor further, I basically adopted it. I now had to find a purpose for this child. I had to feed it. This ministry, this YouTube channel that I opened back then, I had to feed it. I had to find a purpose for it. Everything was sitting on me now. There was no friendship with God. It was just me expressing myself. It was me trying to find a platform. So I just killed it. I just stopped it. I wasn’t posting anything because I took God’s child and I adopted it or I hijacked it and I just made it my own. So it made no sense. It was a failure, if you could put it that way. Even though the conception wasn’t, I just needed to have a relationship with God first.
Back to Friendship
People do this. I see this in ministries. We become professionals. First, we seek God for every step of the way, and then we say, “Oh, I’ve done this. I know this. I can ask this guy.” It becomes from a relationship to professional. It looks better. There is no awkward moment where the staff is asking, “What do we do now?” and I just say, “I don’t know, I need to ask God.” We don’t have that when we are professional. We know everything we will do years ahead, but that is not friendship with God. That is not working with the Holy Spirit.
Don’t take me wrong. I’m not criticizing ministries. I’m looking at how I see things should be done. Maybe I am criticizing; it’s not the right word. It’s just pointing out that we need to come back to God. We don’t need professionalism. It’s not about being professional. Yes, good sound, good lighting, and good video make it easier to watch, but it’s not about a professional church or a professional ministry. It’s about God’s spirit moving. It’s about God doing things. Paul says, “I didn’t come to you in beautiful worldly wisdom or man’s wisdom. I came to you humble and as nothing, but in God’s power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). That’s what we need to be. We need to be in God’s power. We can’t be professional. We need to be friends. We need to do things out of that friendship.
When I say “professional,” I mean dry, beautifully looking but dry. That’s what Jesus was talking about. He was talking about Pharisees. They had everything down. They looked perfect. They had these beautiful robes and beautiful temples, and Jesus said, “I’ll destroy this temple in three days” (John 2:19). He did rebuild us, our temple, our imperfect temple. So it’s not about professional coming out of your experience and your desire to do things. That is not good. But when professional comes out of friendship with God, that’s a totally different thing. God will send you the professional, and you know what a professional is? It’s somebody that made a bunch of mistakes, and now he knows how to do it better, and people see it. When it comes from God, when it comes from the friendship, Moses was not professional leading the Israelites out of Egypt. It was the first time he had done something like that. There were issues, there were problems, but it was under God’s guidance. Later, when we have these tracks where everything is pre-decided, it’s good, but we just become a system, and it’s hard to find God in a system.
If I was to summarize this first part, the ministry approach to serving God, even to a relationship with God, is when we come to God and we say, “God, I have this to do today. Help me. Give me wisdom. Give me a sermon,” all of it is a ministry. It is good; it helps people. But I think we are risking Jesus telling us, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). That is a sobering thought.
When we have a relationship with God, no matter how imperfect it looks—it could be walks, it could be praying while fishing—it could be anything. It’s the secret room. It’s reading a book together with God. Whatever and however the relationship looks, as long as it’s authentic and as long as it’s biblical, that’s what we do. Out of that, a ministry might be born, a thought may be born, or helping something may be born. But we don’t build a ministry first. We do it out of the relationship.
I think I’m just going to end it here, and I’ll see you in part two, where we will talk about how to develop a relationship with God, some steps, some things that I’ve learned, and some things God has revealed to me. May God bless you. Thank you for staying with me this long. God bless you. Amen.