Communion with God is not a scheduled event but an ongoing, intermittent experience throughout the day, involving prayer, thanksgiving, confession, and worship. The sermon uses the analogy of a child struggling with a shape-sorter toy to illustrate the frustration of trying to force spiritual practices into rigid, pre-defined schedules, which is not how God designed them. Instead, these elements of communion arise naturally and spontaneously as needs, answers, sins, or moments of awe occur, emphasizing a constant, conscious dependence on God rather than compartmentalized devotional times. The message encourages believers to embrace this dynamic, unscheduled approach to fellowship with God, mirroring the way life's events unfold.
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John and I have a common problem. We both have big heads, and I was wondering if this was going to fit over. And it has, John. We're in good shape. I remember when I was a little boy coming home from school, my mom would say to me, I would say to my mom, I'll call me big head at school, and she's, that's all right, son. Is that about the right place, Johnny? Is this about the right place? Which one? It's good to be with you this morning and we look forward to the time we'll have together in the Word of God throughout the coming days.
This past year, just about a year ago now, as a matter of fact, we were involved in one of those experiences of life that should never be repeated called moving and made our way from the Chicagoland area to the great state of Iowa. And we have enjoyed our first year as genuine Iowans, look forward to a whole lot more. In the process, we had to move all of our belongings, both of the school and our personal belongings. And some interesting things happened in the whole process. When I was a little boy, I used to, on rainy Saturdays, be given the assignment to go down into what we call the cellar.
basement now, you know, that we're civilized, but into the cellar to clean up things. And I'm a thrower, my father's a saver. And I'd get all this stuff that I thought was pure junk to throw away, and he'd come down and save it. And the funny thing is that after all those years, they came to move with us, and some of that stuff that I had purposed to throw away, I moved for the fiftieth time, I think. Well, in that whole thing, we were going through some of the children's toys. And all of our kids are relatively grown up now, the youngest is a junior in high school. And I wanted to get rid of some of those Fisher-Price toys.
And my wife said, no, your grandchildren will want to play with that. I said, no, by the time our grandchildren come along, they'll be having little things that they fly around two feet off the ground. They won't be a bit interested in Fisher-Price toys. But we have a closet in the family room of Fisher-Price toys for the little kids to play with when they come over. One of them's a mailbox. Have any of you ever seen that Fisher-Price mailbox? It's about so big, it's red, white, and blue. And it's got three slots in the top of it. One's in the shape of a triangle. One's in the shape of a circle. The other's in the shape of a square. Have you ever seen that one? Sure. We all have that one. It came over on the Mayflower, I think. Now, have you watched children play with that?
It's an interesting thing. Little kids will get there. They can just barely sit up and hear their learning hand-eye coordination. And they'll pick up that cylinder and try to put it through the square. And those Fisher-Price people are nasty people. They make it so that the cylinder won't fit through the square. and that the triangular piece won't fit through the circle and so on. And the kid picks it up and they go back and forth and finally drop it in and it clumps and five days later somebody will get it in some other part of the country. That's the way it works out. And they keep doing those kind of things. But periodically something happens. Have you ever seen this happen? A kid gets that cylinder and is bound and determined to get it in the square hole.
And eventually you'll see him like, have you ever seen that happen? How many of you have seen that? Trying to put the round page in the square hole. A little later on in life, they'll come to a mass Bible college. Same kid, probably. And they're thinking about the future. What is the future going to hold for me? What am I going to do with my life? And we have all sorts of helps. We'll have teachers that will teach them a word. And we'll have counselors that will sit down and counsel with them. And... We even have some folk who are trained in administering various career opportunity type tests to find out what kind of personality the person has and what skills they have, what abilities they have, so that their life is in a succession of trying to get a square peg in a round hole.
Trying to match up a person's personality. natural gifts, spiritual gifts, abilities with what in fact is out there in the world to be their vocation or occupation. We come to Christian life and very frequently in the area of Christian living we try to force square page into round holes. Make everything fit the way we want it to fit no matter what.
We are very interested in what is the form dimension of Christian living. To bring all of what is the Christian life into a pattern, into a form. into a procedure that is our idea of what the Christian life is all about. I find that particularly true in a number of areas that I'd like to address this weekend with you, foremost of which is the area of our communion with God and His communion with us.
That's been termed a number of different things, most generally, our devotional life or quiet time. In this area, I think each of us, if we would be honest with ourselves, have some distinct struggles. Some of us are still struggling. Others have given up the struggle. What I would like to do is consider this whole question of what is our communion life with God. What is that all about? Putting down a time I should stop.
What is that all about? There are some certain ingredients to our communion with God. Five of them in total. I don't think there are any other than these five. Now we may have some debate over that, but I don't think there are any other than these five. We pray. We worship, we give thanks, we confess sins, and we hear God speak through His Word. Five areas of communion with God. Prayer, confession of sin, worship, giving of thanks, communion in the Word. Four of those originate with us, us to God.
The last one, the Word of God, His speaking to us, originates with Him. These are these five areas, then, of what makes up personal communion. Now, I'm talking always about personal communion, not corporate gathering in the church, but the personal communion we have with God, and they are made up of these five ingredients. Now I'd like you to turn in your Bibles to the fourth chapter of Philippians because in this section you have one of the most concentrated statements of these various elements of our private communion life with the Lord and with the Father.
Philippians four, verse four, Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice, let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your request be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Our brother last evening mentioned that we hear a lot of preaching. and we do very little changing in our life.
If we could just take one thing away from this conference that produces a change, each one of us taking some different item away that would produce a change, how beneficial this weekend together would be. And that is so true. We as Christians are so slow to change. One of the areas that is worthy of consideration in the area of changing Our approach is, in fact, in the area of communion with our God. We have been frustrated over that, just like that little child trying to make it fit. We each one of us, I would think, if we would speak honestly to this point, have been frustrated with our communion life, our fellowship with our God and with our Savior.
And if I'd ask a simple question now, like, are you happy with your devotional life? Most of us would ring our hands a little bit and say, no, I'm really unhappy with that. It's a frustration to me. One of the reasons is that we have been trying to make spiritually square pegs fit into round holes. I'd like to look at the ingredients of our communion life. Those five things. How do we approach them? Most normally we approach them by saying these are the ingredients of our quiet time, of our devotions.
And there is a period of time in a given day that is that time when I will pray, when I will give thanks to God. When I will worship. When I will confess sin. When I will study the word. And there have been numerous booklets written to that extent. The quiet time. We give one out rather regularly to our students who come to school. Helps in the quiet time. And there are certain rules and procedures that this person will put down. Another would put down. There are well-meaning preachers like myself who go around and say, this is the way it should be done.
You have a little motto on your refrigerator. No Bible, no breakfast. Okay? And if you have that one, I haven't had breakfast in years, but no Bible, no breakfast. Okay? Some people say the very first thought I must have every morning is a thought of God. And I must turn to the Word. I find that an exceptionally difficult pattern to follow. I'm not going to tell you what I think about first thing in the morning. But if somebody's in the bathroom, they're going to hear about it. Okay? I'm a night kind of a person. I can stay up forever. Last evening, I stayed up reading Jean Millet's accounts of his time in the Second World War over and after that.
I like history anyhow, and I don't know what time it was that finally went to bed. It's good reading. Any of you haven't read it. commend that if you're a historian type person. And I could have done that for a long, long time, but I figured I'd better stop or I wouldn't be here this morning. And that's a good time for me. Night's wonderful. The morning's terrible. Yes, my wife. If you call me in the morning, don't expect much. The morning's terrible. No Bible, no breakfast. Doesn't fit me. But there's some people who say that's the rule of life. Now, I didn't exercise one time, and I wanted to look up quiet time in the Bible, so I took my concordance and looked under Q and T.
Couldn't find a thing. It's not there. And I say that jokingly. But do you know there's no place in the Bible that gives you the inspired way of going about your communion life with God? Does that say something to you right now? There is no pattern. Now, some people will say a great while before a day, the Lord Jesus Christ went, alone to a quiet place to pray. Yes, he did. And on another occasion, he stayed up all night praying. And on another occasion, you see him in the middle of the day praying. Now, if you put all those together, you're in deep trouble. And you can't take an isolated event out of the Lord's life or Daniel's life or anybody else's life and say, that is the pattern for the quiet time.
There is no pattern. Then how do we do it? Well, let's look at these various ingredients. First of all, prayer. The word for prayer simply means to ask. Praying is always asking in Scripture. Maybe a couple exceptions. Praying is always asking. You can substitute the word ask for prayer. And you have a good biblical definition of what it's all about. Ask God. Now there are subsets to prayer.
There are supplications which are intense kind of prayers. Petitions which are the kinds of prayers in which a number of us are involved. There's intercession where I'm praying for someone else. But it's always asking. Now how do you pray? How do you ask? I would suggest that the normal way of asking for things for people is when there is that need brought to your attention one way or another. Last evening I was driving down and I was in mortal pain because my son was playing his first varsity football game and I was driving here.
Oh, that hurts. So just about six thirty I'm praying. I'm praying. Lord, give John some calmness as he's getting ready to play, because I knew he was nervous. He was almost sick yesterday over. I said, give him some calmness. Let him think of which play that number stands for. In the scrimmage, they call the thirty-nine. And the thirty-nine was a sweep around the left end, and he plays left tackle. And instead of blocking the guy to the right, he blocked him to the left. He just made a simple mistake for blocking right into the sweep. They lost ten, fifteen yards. I don't want that to happen.
So I pray the Lord would give him calmness and ability to remember. And on behalf of his mother, I pray that he not get injured. And all that good kind of stuff. Why did I do it then? You see, that was a very natural thing to do at that moment. Because that was the moment he was having that particular need. They lost twelve nothing. Played a good game, though. Offensive tackles don't get credit one way or another, so what difference does it make? They played a good game. Wasn't injured except for bruises. Well, that's good. I prayed at that moment. I asked when there was the need that came to my mind.
Very rarely he told me the story on one occasion of driving home from a conference like this, and he was tired, and he had his car on automatic cruise and he was driving along, finding himself riding up the shoulder of a road. Now you can't pray for that at seven o'clock in the morning. You don't even know that's going to happen at seven o'clock in the morning. At that moment, the need was there. He prayed at that moment, came back on the road and kept driving. Never went back to sleep. You know, you're awake the whole rest of the time. He prayed at the time of the need. He asked God at that time of need. Now I want to suggest to you that our needs do not come neatly packaged at fifteen minute intervals in the beginning of a day or at the end of a day or at noon or at any other given time.
They come at us all day long and we are to be praying all day long. Not the long prayers, not those great, great God of the universe, maker of heaven and earth, Lord of time and space. If Ray would have prayed that, he'd have been with the Lord of time and space. That kind of thing. All day long. The pray without ceasing that we hear about so frequently in Scripture is that kind of prayer. Not that we get into a closet and pray all day long, but intermittently throughout the day we pray to God. Now we don't have trouble with that, do we?
That really is the way most of us pray anyhow, isn't it? Throughout the course of the day. And it may be that that, and I think it is, that is the primary emphasis of Scripture in relationship to our prayer life. Intermittent prayer throughout the normal course of life as these different needs are flying at us as we're making our way through life. Now, some things are standing prayer requests for our families. for the missionaries that we know, for those various concerns that are semi-permanent concerns.
I thought I got away from the telephone. For those prevailing concerns that are always there, they come at us on a regular basis, and it's perfectly legitimate, let us not be extreme in what we're saying. It's perfectly legitimate to have those so organized that we do that systematically. But what I am concerned about is the primary emphasis of prayer in that it is not a structured, organized, time-limited kind of an approach to ask God, but it's when it happens. We ask for help.
And that's always available, one of the great truths. Now, as far as I'm concerned, I find that I do that rather naturally in my Christian experience. And I am suggesting to you this, let's not take the round hole of prayer asking, the round peg of prayer asking, it comes out as like this, and try to package that and say, that's my prayer life. I've already prayed today. Prayer life. More than being a neat little package, is an intermittent asking of God, a communion with God in which we recognize our minute-by-minute dependence on Him spread throughout the whole course of a day.
And if I had a choice, I would rather be a Christian who prays intermittently throughout the day than the one who has the fifteen minutes and is done with it. Now they're not necessarily competitive. You understand that. But the emphasis is, as it happens, as the day's events which we don't know about, come at us. Pray to God. Pray to God. Pray to God. Ask, ask, ask. And our communion with God becomes a genuine, all day long kind of experience. Rather than a compartmentalized life where I say there, is my quiet time.
There is the time I spent with the Lord. Now I'm on my own in a day-by-day experience. Now closely associated with prayer is thanksgiving. In Philippians Paul says, let your request be made known unto God with thanksgiving. Now look, this is not a little trick we're playing on ourselves. in which we're thanking God for the answers to the prayers that we're offering. Now, sometimes we do that. We try to be super-spiritual and say, thank you, Lord, for the prayer I've just offered and the request that you're going to fulfill. We're sort of thanking him ahead of time.
That's not what is involved in Thanksgiving. When we come to God in prayer, it is a normal custom to be encouraged in asking because of God's past performance. The psalmist do this all the time. When they are discouraged, when David is discouraged, he comes to God and says, God, why have you forsaken me? Our fathers trusted, they trusted, you delivered them. You're not delivering me. I'm a worm and no man. And David goes on in that great lament psalm and comes to the middle section and says this in trying to encourage himself our fathers trusted they trusted he says but you're the one who gave me hope when I was upon my mother's breast and what David is doing there is looking back in his history and seeing how God has already worked and thanking him for that the thanksgiving to prayer It's thanksgiving for answered prayer.
It's a great encouragement when we come to God in prayer, praying for somebody who is now sick, to be reminded that God had worked in somebody else's life before and we thank Him for that. It's an encouragement. Now when do we thank God? One of the things we always do with our children in training them is when we... give them a piece of candy we say what do you say and what are we trying to train them to say what do you say please hello hello what do we say thank you that's it thank you brother that's thank you for saying that i could wait for twenty years and say thank you but and that's what we do you see we ask god he gives the answer We say thank you.
The appropriate time to say thank you is as close to the answer as possible. Isn't that what we always train our children? Somebody gives you something to say thank you for. Somebody opens the door. You don't wait until the next morning and call them up at age fifteen. Say, look, I want to tell you something. I'm giving thanks right now. I'm going to thank you for opening the door for me yesterday. That's ridiculous. We do thanks at the moment the request is granted. And it's prayer. is an intermittent kind of thing that comes at us, that arises in our lives as we are experiencing those things for which we pray. When the answer comes, it's going to be that way too.
It's not going to be in a pattern. It's not going to be in a little box. And we say then, when God delivers from the road, or when God works in a person's life, and we hear about it, When my son is through the game safe, I'll say thank you to God. Then, when I hear about it, when it becomes a fact in my life, when he gives me what I have asked for, when he grants others what they have asked for, and I learn about that, then we say thank you. Giving of thanks. That likewise. is a component part of our communion with God that is unschedulable.
You can't put that in the neat little packages. It's intermittent throughout the day as well. The prayers that we offer up are at the time of need. The thanksgiving that we give to God for his response to prayer. our asking is intermittent as well. And it's spread throughout the day. I see a student gain a victory over a difficulty. I can thank God at that moment. It's not structured into a little box that I call a quiet time period of devotion. Let's spread that thing out throughout the day.
And we go through life. If we do that, not only with an attitude of dependence on God, prayer throughout the whole course of the day. but also Thanksgiving throughout the whole course of the day. And do you see how communion is starting to really be? Communion? I'm walking with God when these things are happening. And I'm recognizing that throughout the course of the day. Now that is abundantly clear in the area of confession of sin. It is clearer there than any place. In First John, we read, First John one, if any sin, we have an advocate with the Father.
First John two, Jesus Christ, the righteous. First John one, we read, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. What is confession of sin to take place in our lives? In First Corinthians we read in First Corinthians eleven of that examining of ourselves in relationship to the Lord's Supper. Our brother made reference to this last evening. I would suggest to you that what you have in First Corinthians eleven was normative for the Corinthian church but shouldn't be normative for Christians.
The Corinthian church really needed to examine itself. as they came to the Lord's Supper. Why not? There was drunkenness at the Lord's Supper. There was immorality at the Lord's Supper. There was doctrinal heresy at the Lord's Supper. There was jealousy and strife and division at the Lord's Supper. There was improper order and relationship to the ladies at the Lord's Supper and all this was going on. The Corinthian church needed to examine itself lest they eat the Lord's Supper unworthy. But look, Saturday night's not supposed to be an examination session for us. We don't wait till Saturday evening to take care of our sins, do we? We shouldn't. If I sin against a brother, I'm not supposed to let that go and go and go and go.
If there's discord, I'm not supposed to let that go on and on and on and on, am I supposed to let that go forever? If there's disharmony, am I supposed to let that go forever? The Lord tells us, look, if there's something against a brother, sister, and the Lord... You can't worship properly. Talking to the then people, he says, leave your sacrifice at the altar and go and get it reconciled with your brother and sister. And come back and worship properly. And that's true for us. There's no concept in the Bible of continuing hard feelings between brothers and sisters in the Lord.
There's no concept in the Bible of perpetual separation from the fellowship that we have with God or with the brothers. The whole emphasis is if there's a problem, get it taken care of. How soon? As soon as possible. And get it over with. Deon and I were talking about the judgment of Jesus Christ. That's not going to be a Sunday school picnic, isn't it? It's going to be a tough time for most of us. But you know, the Lord is right. Oh, thank God. Isn't it nice I can say that? The Lord is right in doing it that way. Get it all over with right up front in heaven. Heaven would be miserable if we had to take a number and wait and wait and wait to get our Christian life cleared up with God.
He does it right up first thing. Let's have instant replay of your life. There it all is. And I don't think many of us are going to be thrilled with that. But the Lord has to get it over with right up front. Because the fellowship wouldn't be too neat. It wasn't taken care of right up front. And that's the way we're to take care of sin. If I have a sin of thought, which I do, it is my purpose to confess that sin to God as soon as it's there. Get it over with. Confess it immediately, right? Get it out of our system. Get fellowship reestablished with God. If I have something against a brother, sister, and the Lord are they against me?
Get it over with. Let's not perpetuate it. The confession of sin should be as close to the sin as possible. That's simple. Confess the sin and God forgives us. And we put that behind us and go on living our Christian life in communion with them. That part of our devotional life can't be packaged. I don't sin on schedule. Do you? Hence I can't confess on schedule either. When that evil thought comes in, let's call it what it is, confess it to God. When I have stated what I thought to someone and offended that person, let's get rid of that, go to the person, get a fellowship reestablished, confess the sins of the person and the God and get going with it.
If I have sinned against the church in a public sin... Let's clear it up in the church and get on with Christian living. As soon as possible. Get it over with. Confess the sin. God is faithful to forgive us. We should forgive one another consequence. That is an unschedulable thing. And to say, I'm going to fit all confession of sin into a Saturday night or into my quiet time is to take something that's not scheduled and force it into a schedule. What about worship? That's another little problem. Individual worship I'm talking about. When I praise and worship God, I recently have been involved in building a house for my family and seems like everybody else live in too.
And that's part of the design. And I was up on the second floor and there was no roof in yet. And I was just sweeping up the shavings. And I noticed something then that I have noticed many times since that I have thoroughly enjoyed. The golden hawks of Iowa. Aren't they beautiful? Do you like them, dude? I sat with Lou Clarkson on the deck one evening and we watched two hawks soaring around for about an hour. He said, you know, I grew up in this state and I've never done that in my whole life. It's been beautiful. And I looked up and it was a beautiful, clear blue sky. And here was this hawk just playing. Soaring around. Have you seen that? All of you seen it? Just soaring around, not breaking its wing at all, up and down, just coasting around.
God's great creation. Beautiful scene. I said to myself, boy, I can't wait for my quiet time tomorrow morning to praise God for that. No, that's not the way we worship God privately. Went through the woods and forest blades, I wonder, and the songwriter and how great there are goes on to describe God's great grandeur round about us. The verse is slipping me. Johnny, do you know that verse? Went through the woods and forest blades, oh. And here the bird sings sweetly in the tree. When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur, what's next?
And see the broken, feel the gentle breeze. What's the next word? Then things might soar might save your God to thee. How great thou art. And that's right. Then spontaneous worship. You can't schedule that. You'll hear good news from some brother or sister and you'll praise God. Don't wait until tomorrow to do it. Do it right then. You can't package worship. You can't package any of these elements. of our communion with God. Prayer comes at us like this, intermittent.
Giving thanks consequently comes at us like that, because God answers the prayer on his schedule, not in a passage. And sin comes at us like that, and sometimes we fall prey to that temptation. Confession, consequently, is intermittent throughout the day, throughout the week. Private worship is the same. As I see God at work, and I see him in my life, and I see him in his creation, I praise him. As I think about him throughout the course of a day, I praise him. And those ingredients of our quiet time are by their very nature.
Do you hear that? By their very nature, intermittent. By their very nature, they are unschedulable. And so many of us, throughout all of our Christian experience try to take these things that are by their very nature unschedulable, intermittent, that come at us in the course of a day and we try to force them into a little quiet heart and we get frustrated and we bang on that mailbox and say this isn't working. You know why it's not working? Because God never designed it to be that way. That's why. You never see that pattern in Scripture. You never see a pattern in Scripture.
Because every one of us is as different as we can be from one another. And there is no way that says this is the way to do it. And communion with God is not an isolated, mystical, separated experience of a given schedule. It is walk with God in conscious dependence on him as I pray throughout a day. And as I thank him, as he works in so many ways that I give thanks, in that there are those times of worship when I cry out, spontaneously praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
And sin, those events of sin in my life likewise are intermittent. There's one area we haven't talked of, and it's a little different. How he talks to me in his word. And we'll come on that in our next session. Let's pray together. Father God, we pray that we may, above all things, submit ourselves to the authority of your word and pattern our lives after it. We pray that in these important dimensions of communion with you, that it may in fact be a daily Throughout the day, walk as we pray, as we give thanks, as we worship, as we confess our sins.
We pray this for your glory and for our benefit and our communion with you in your son's name. Amen. And let's stand and sing all three verses of number forty-one, Blessed Assurance.