Rev. Adam Hamilton - The Walk: Five Essential Practices of the Christian Life

THE WALK

THE WALK

FIVE ESSENTIAL PRACTICES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

The Walk: Five Essential Practices of the Christian Life

978-1-5018-9118-2 Hardcover with jacket

978-1-5018-9119-9 eBook

978-1-501-89120-5 Large Print

The Walk: DVD

978-1-5018-9123-6

The Walk: Leader Guide

978-1-5018-9121-2

978-1-5018-9122-9 eBook

The Walk: Youth Study

978-1-5018-9130-4

978-1-5018-9131-1 eBook

The Walk: Childrens Leader Guide

978-1-5018-9132-8

Also by Adam Hamilton

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Christianity and World Religions

Christianitys Family Tree

Confronting the Controversies

Creed

Enough

Faithful

Final Words from the Cross

Forgiveness

Half Truths

John

Leading Beyond the Walls

Love to Stay

Making Sense of the Bible

Moses

Not a Silent Night

Revival

Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White

Selling Swimsuits in the Arctic

Simon Peter

Speaking Well

The Call

The Journey

The Way

Unafraid

Unleashing the Word

When Christians Get It Wrong

Why?

For more information, visit www.AdamHamilton.org

ADAM HAMILTON

Author of Creed: What Christians Believe and Why

FIVE ESSENTIAL PRACTICES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

THE WALK:

FIVE ESSENTIAL PRACTICES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Copyright 2019 Abingdon Press

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Library of Congress Control Number:2019951460

978-1-5018-9118-2

Scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the Common English Bible., copyright 2011 Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org/.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scripture quotations noted (KJV) are taken from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crowns patentee, Cambridge University Press.

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During that days cool evening breeze, they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God in the middle of the gardens trees. The LORD God called to the man and said to him, Where are you?

Genesis 3:8-9

A year before his untimely death in a car accident in 2003, Mike Yaconelli wrote a book called, Messy Spirituality: Gods Annoying Love for Imperfect People. The book deeply resonated with me. Yaconelli was honest and frank about his own journey with Christ, and how after more than forty years of being a Christian, his faith was still... messy. And not only his. He told story after story about people, both those in the Bible and people he had personally known, who found grace through Jesus despite the messiness of their lives.

I wrote this book to be a simple guide for the Christian life written for ordinary people whose faith is sometimes messy. It is written for those who wish to follow Jesus, to experience more of God in their lives, and to grow to become the people God wants them to be. Its based upon four decades of reading, study, practice, and striving to live the Christian life, by a person whose faith is sometimes still messy. In it well consider five simple practices that Jesus followers have always pursued as they sought to walk with him. Jesus himself modeled these practices for us. These five are not an exhaustive list of spiritual disciplines. There are an infinite number of ways we might grow in our walk with God. But these five are foundational, and I would say, essential for most of us. If you make these practices a part of the daily rhythm of your life, youll find that they will play a key role in helping you grow in your faith and, in turn, that they will become an expression and fruit of your increasing faith.

In Matthew 4, Jesus walked along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. He came to Simon Peter and Andrew and gave them this simple invitation: Come, follow me. A few steps later he called James and John to do the same. Sometime later he saw a tax collector named Matthew and said to him, Follow me. These followers became known as disciplesones who follow, learn from, and emulate their master. And to follow in Greek is akoloutheo, which means to accompany on a journey or to walk with someone down a road.

It is this idea of walking with Jesus that we will lean most heavily upon in this book. It is a simple way of thinking about our Christian life. We are followers of Jesus. We are seeking to learn from him, to emulate him, to go where he wants us to go, to do what he wants us to do, and to walk on the journey of life with him.

The image of walking with God or God walking with us is found throughout the Bible as a metaphor for the life of faith. As the biblical story begins, God is described as walking in the garden of Eden, searching for his children as they hid from him. To be sure, this is an anthropomorphismascribing human attributes to Godyet the imagery is beautiful and compelling: God walks in our midst, searches for us, and beckons us to walk with him.

When my daughters were small, we would take walks together and they would hold my hand. I loved these walks. Now Ive got a five-year-old granddaughter who likes to take my hand and walk with me. There is something about holding her little hand as we walk together that captures how I see my relationship with God.

I picture God loving me as I love my granddaughter, and reaching out his hand toward me, waiting for me to place my hand in his. There is safety and peace and joy in walking with my hand in his hand. This is what Thomas Dorsey wrote of in his much-loved gospel hymn, Precious Lord, Take My Hand.

Walking is often used in Scripture as a way of speaking about our life with God. God asked Abram and Sarai to load up their things and walk with God to the Promised Land. This one act of faith and obedience led to Abrahams and Sarahs greatest adventures and richest blessings. At age ninety-nine, God spoke to Abram once again saying, I am El Shaddai.