Walking with God

John Eldredge is a needed voice. He writes about something that might seem obvious — how to walk with God daily. But lately, listening to others, I’ve realized that this is something many people don’t know how to do. They know how to have a “conversion experience.” They know how to go to church, how to sign up for activities there, and how to talk the talk. But how to listen to God’s voice in their everyday lives? Not so much.

That’s where John Eldredge comes in with Walking with God. He takes us through a year of his spiritual journal, essentially. He demonstrates what it means to seek God through the Bible, and through prayer, and through being willing to stop and listen at moments that we might be tempted to blow right by — moments of heartache, or heaviness, or decision in comparatively small matters.

I have to stop here for a moment, because it’s so easy to judge what “small matters” are. I remember a Bible prof speaking on God’s will once when I was in college. He wanted to make the point that it’s okay to use common sense about some things, and at one point he leaned into the mic and said emphatically, “God doesn’t care what color tie you wear!”

Point taken — sort of. The same issue came up recently in our parenting class at church, where some of us questioned whether the author of the book we were reading was over-spiritualizing when he stopped the family and suggested asking God whether they should go to Disney World.

But really, couldn’t everything we struggle with here in our mundane lives be considered trivial to the eternal mind? The truth is, I’ve prayed for some embarrassingly trivial things, and when God has answered it has communicated his love and involvement very compellingly. In other more “important” matters, he remains silent. So who am I to judge what’s important and what’s not important to God? He has his own scale of values, his own plan that he’s unfolding. And more to the point, who am I to judge what’s “trivial” for someone else? Walking with God brought me back to this issue and reminded me that seemingly small, quiet moments can be the most significant of all in determining the course of our lives.

I struggle, though, with Eldredge’s warfare emphasis. Many times he comes back to the need to pray against demonic activity. Scripture teaches that there are demons, and they are active in the world. But reading this, the dark spirits come off sounding more powerful than God. If Jesus has already won the war, why would we have to re-fight every day by praying the incredibly specific prayers Eldredge gives here — prayers that imply that Jesus will not protect us unless we give him specific instructions as to how and against what.

In II Peter, we’re told that “his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness, according to our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” The battle is already won for those of us who are in Christ, and here Peter is telling us how to walk in that victory: through our knowledge of the truth. This is one of the things I loved about Spiritual Depression — its emphasis on the importance of knowing, and structuring our lives according to, Scripture. It’s not about going out and vanquishing demons by naming them and giving God instructions on how to fight them off. He’s already done that.

So much for my reservation about Walking with God (a reservation I also feel when I read Waking the Dead, another Eldredge book). But the basic model Eldredge provides is very useful and truthful. Eldredge has a realness, a grittiness, that carries a lot of credibility. He doesn’t sound churchy, or use evangelical-speak. He writes about real things that real people struggle with: runaway thought life, heart desires that we bury rather than trusting God with, the impulse to do life on our own. Dallas Willard writes that prayer is “talking to God about what we are doing together,” but it’s Eldredge who shows us what this looks like in an accessible way.