Building a Relationship With God – Part II

Welcome to part 2 of our series “Building a Relationship With God.”

In part I, I spoke about three main elements that we need to develop in order to build a relationship with God: talking to God, hearing God talk to us, and learning God’s word.

I am not sure if there is any real order of how we should approach these three areas – I would think that if we asked three different people we might get three different answers.  However, whether learning God’s word first, learning to listen for God, or learning to talk to God should come first is really not too important as long as we start somewhere and then work on putting all three together.

When I first learned to hit a golf ball, I was told to swing as hard as I could and just connect with the ball.  Those first few swings might not have been great and the ball might not have landed right on target but I had to start somewhere – I had to just swing hard, connect with the ball, and then work on making it better.

Let’s take the same approach here to learning how to have a relationship with God: let’s just start swinging and work on connecting with God.  Once we do, we can build out relationship from there.

We know that God is trying to talk to us all of the time.  We have His word that He has given us; we have his signs all around us that we need to learn to recognize.  But these are elements that we will explore in future articles.  Right now we only need to accept that He is trying to connect with us.

There is an old Chinese saying “Every journey begins with the first step”. So let’s take the first step and to start our journey towards a better relationship with God: let’s start by learning to talk to God.

Building a relationship with God is not much different than building a relationship with another person. The most important element of any relationship is communication.

Much is the same in a relationship with God.

Communication is the exchange of information between two parties. In the case of people, the most common form of communication is verbal (talking).

For communication to be effective, both parties must contribute to the exchange.

Have you ever tried to have a one-sided conversation? Usually, it ends pretty quickly when the side trying to communicate gets frustrated and gives up. And we, as humans, don’t have much patience and we tend to get frustrated and give up very easily.

Harder yet than trying to have a one-sided conversation, have you ever tried to start a conversation hoping to have a relationship with someone and they don’t communicate back? The relationship will never have a chance at getting started let alone growing into a healthy one.

The good news is God wants to communicate with you and have a relationship with you. Unlike a person, God is very patient and not willing to give up on you when he doesn’t hear from you in a while.

In order to have a relationship with God, you need to begin to open the lines of communication.

This may take some practice because for some of us, the lines of communication have been down for so long; we need to take time to first reestablish those lines.

Take some time each day to think about God.

Think about what you would want to say to God if you were to meet Him.  Now just say it to Him.   Keep working on this.  Just keep talking to God about what you would want to talk to Him about.

Don’t just talk to God when you are desperate or you want something.  Talk to God in the good times too.  Talk to God when you don’t have much to say.

You can talk to God anytime and everywhere. Talk to God when you are driving your car. Talk to God when you are taking a shower. Talk to God when you are mowing the lawn, washing dishes, or taking a break at work. There are no rules or limits on where you need to be to talk to God or when you can talk to God – just start talking.

The more you practice talking to God the easier it will come to you.

Talk to god – He’s waiting to hear from you.