Four Results of Walking with God

What It Is to Walk with God?

First of all, I think I may safely say that for some of us that question needs no answer. God Himself has answered it to us in blessed, unspeakably blessed, experience. But for others of us--yes, many of us--it does need an answer.  This question receives a very plain and simple answer:

To walk with God means to live one’s life in the consciousness of God’s presence and in conscious communion with Him, to have the thought constantly before us, “God is beside me,” and every now and then to be speaking to Him, and, still more, listening for Him to speak to us.

In a word, to walk with God is to live in the real, constant, conscious companionship of God.

We read that Enoch walked with God, not on a few rare occasions of spiritual exaltation, such perhaps as most of us have known, but for three hundred consecutive years after the birth of Methuselah (Genesis 6:22).

It is possible for us to have this consciousness of the nearness and fellowship of God in our daily life, to talk with Him as we talk with an earthly friend; yes, as we talk with no earthly friend, and to have Him talk to us, and to commune with Him in a silence that is far more meaningful than any words could be.

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There are results when you walk with God and remain in constant fellowship with Him.

1.      The first result of walking with God will be eminent usefulness.

Our lives may be quiet and even obscure; it may be impossible to point to what men call great achievement, but the highest usefulness lies not in such things but in the silent, almost unnoticed but potent and pervasive influence of a holy life, whose light illumines, whose beauty compliments, and whose nobility elevates all who come in contact with it.

Enoch has produced immeasurably more good for man than Nebuchadnezzar, who built the marvelous structures of Babylon, than the Egyptian monarchs who built the pyramids to amaze and mystify the world for thousands of years to come; and today the man or woman, no matter how humble or obscure, who walks with God is accomplishing more for God and man than Morse with his telegraph, Stevenson with his locomotive, Cyrus Field with his Atlantic cable, Marconi with his wireless telegraphy and telephony, Edison and Tesla with their electric and electrifying discoveries, or any of the renowned political reformers of the day, with all their futile schemes for turning this world into a terrestrial paradise. Friends, if you wish to be really, permanently, eternally useful, walk with God.

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2.      The second result of walking with God is closely akin to this, Beauty of Character.

We become like those with whom we habitually associate. How like their parents children become. How many mothers and fathers have been startled by seeing their own imperfections and follies mirrored in their children. Husband and wife grow strangely like one another, thus also the one who associates with God becomes like God. If we walk with God, more and more will His beauty illumine and reflect itself in our lives.

Moses’ very face shone as he came down from the forty days and forty nights of conversation with God. So will our whole life soon shine with a heavenly glow and glory if we habitually walk with God. “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

3.      The third result of walking with God is purity of heart and life.

Nothing else is so cleansing as the consciousness of God’s presence. Things that we have long tolerated become intolerable when we bring them into the white light of the presence of the Holy One. How many things we do in the darkness of the night, yes, even in the broad light of day, that we could not for a moment think of doing if we realized God was right there by our side looking. Many deeds we now do would be left undone if we realized this. 

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Many words we now speak would be left unspoken, many thoughts and fancies we now cherish would be speedily banished. There are certain things that we do in the absence of certain holy friends that we would not for a moment do in their presence, but God is always present, whether we know it or not, and if we walk in the consciousness of His presence, if we walk with God, our lives and hearts will speedily whiten.

The consciousness of the presence of God will keep us from doing all the things that we would not dream of doing in His presence. Herein lies the secret of a holy life.

4.      The fourth result of walking with God is spiritual enlightenment.

Communion with God rather than scholarship opens to us the mind and thought of God. There is no hint that Enoch was a man of science or letters. I am very sure he was not a higher critic, and yet this plain man by walking with God and talking with God got such an insight into the purposes of God as no other man of his time had. In the Epistle of Jude, the 14th and 15th verses, we learn that even in that far-away day, a thousand years before the flood, Enoch got hold of the great truth of the second coming of Christ.

So today some old washerwoman, or some humble cobbler, who walks with God may know more of the mind of God than many an eminent college professor, or even a professor in a theological seminary. 

The important question concerning points in dispute in religion and spiritual life is not, what do the scholars say, but what do the men and women who walk with God say.If one is considering going to some one for spiritual instruction, the first question is not how much of a scholar he is, not how much does he know of philosophy and psychology, but does he walk with God? This is the great condition of spiritual insight, wisdom, and understanding.