Explore & Discover: Sacred Pathways + interview with Gary Thomas

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Gary Thomas is interviewed by host, Shelley Leith, and they discuss exploring and discovering our primary pathway to connection with God. We don’t all have to be locked into one particular way of praying or having “quiet time.” God made each of us unique, and we connect best with God out of our spiritual temperament which is drawn to pathways of wonder, contemplation, or action. 

 

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Creators & Guests

Guest

Gary Thomas

Christian author seeking to bring people closer to Christ and closer to others. Lover of God, student of the Christian classics. https://t.co/rnD4bb7UDL

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Study Gateway's First Listens: Find your next Bible study! Join host Shelley Leith as she curates first sessions of Bible studies on various themes each season, taught by some of the world’s most influential Christian authors, teachers, and pastors. To learn more, visit https://StudyGateway.com.

First Listens Season 6: Episode 2
Sacred Pathways, by Gary Thomas
Plus interview with Gary Thomas

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: Welcome to Study Gateway's First Listens, where you get first listens to the first sessions on Study Gateway so that you can find your next video Bible study. Hi there, I'm your host Shelley Leith and today I have the joy of introducing you to Gary Thomas. Welcome Gary!
GARY: Hi Shelley, thanks for having me.
SHELLEY: You're welcome. Now, before we get started, I want everyone to be aware that by just listening to this podcast, you can get a 15% discount on any subscription plan at Study Gateway for the life of your subscription, using the code PODCAST15. That code works on any type of plan, personal, small group, or church. So go ahead and write that down, PODCAST15, and thank you for being a First Listens listener. So, Gary. We are in season six of First Listens, which we're calling Explore and Discover. And we're featuring different studies that either take us to an interesting location or help us explore and discover something about the Bible that we never knew before. Now the reason that I chose Sacred Pathways for this season is because in it, you help us explore and discover new ways to connect with God, including getting outside and experiencing nature, right?
GARY: Absolutely.
SHELLEY: Okay, so now you might be interested to know that I looked you up on Wikipedia, and I found out that you graduated from seminary in 1988, and then 12 years later you published the book that you're perhaps best known for, which is Sacred Marriage, in which you famously ask the question, what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? And then I was surprised to learn that it was in that same year that your book, Sacred Pathways was released, which is the one that we're talking about today.
SHELLEY: Okay, so then talk to me about Sacred Marriage, Sacred Pathways. Is there any, like, why all the sacred? What was going on in your life to kind of have that be the theme of a lot of what you've written?
GARY: Well, I'd written three books on spiritual formation, Sacred Pathways, I don't know who came up with that title. To be honest, Shelley, it was so long ago. It's almost never me. Rarely do my titles get chosen. And I think because Zondervan really liked Sacred Pathways, the book, and they were bringing out Sacred Marriage. It's just kind of the way publishers think that, well, maybe we can sort of make this build on each other, that the success of one will help the other. And I didn't come up with the title, Sacred Marriage, that again was Zondervan. And I really owe somebody at Zondervan because that subtitle you quoted, What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy, that has sold more copies than I could count. I had a really boring subtitle. They pulled that from the copy of the book put it on the cover, it was a great marketing decision. And I think the connection is I did see Sacred Marriage as sort of a spiritual formation book. That's why it was different. I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a licensed counselor. I was looking at how God uses marriage to shape us spiritually. And so it was really out of my limitations that I wrote that book. I couldn't compete with at the time, Dr. Dobson or the psychologists who were writing marriage books, it was just I noticed God was challenging me to grow and inviting me to grow through my marriage as much as he did through the classical disciplines of fasting and meditation and solitude. I hadn't seen anybody address that. And so I think that's what helped Sacred Marriage take off. It was just a different look.
SHELLEY: Now you talk about nine spiritual temperaments. How did you arrive at those? Are they like aligned with the nine human temperament traits or the nine enneagram types or where did these come from?
GARY: I'm not familiar with that first one you said, the nine temperament traits, that's new to me. And the Enneagram, I had vaguely heard of it, but keep in mind, I wrote it in 1996. Hardly anybody was talking about the Enneagram. I mean, just a few very small things. And though there's some correlation, it's a happy coincidence, it just sort of happened that way. It was really the biggest thing for me. I've loved reading the Christian classics my entire life. And I was gravitating at that time towards some of the classics that would be along the lines of a spiritual director, John of the Cross and some others. And they clued me in to find a spiritual director who has a different temperament than you and whatnot. And I started to think. Huh, what do they mean by that? So I was focusing on Christian classics that had spiritual direction. Then I began to look through Scripture and I noticed how so many different characters from Scripture had completely different relationships with God, David and Moses and Abraham and Mary. And it was just like there wasn't one particular quiet time that I was beholden to. I was a legalistic discipler in college. I'm the least likely person to produce a book like this, frankly, because it was easy to teach how to have a quiet time. This is what you do, when you do it, how you do it, you should do it, I'll hold you accountable. God have mercy on those poor college students.
I hope I didn't chase them away. And yet God just kind of got through with me. I say in the book about marrying a woman with a very different temperament and having kids and seeing that. Um, so it was really the, the Christian classics. It was looking at different personalities in Scripture. It was looking at different movements of church history. And I think you can really tie a lot of the temperaments, the pathways into denominations. The Presbyterians, old school Presbyterians are the classical intellectuals. where you have one hymn, a 45-minute sermon, the offering and a hymn, and you're good to go. The adoration style of a contemplative reminds me of Vineyard worship. Enthusiasts, of course, you go to the charismatics and whatnot. The sensates, Eastern Orthodox worship, if you've ever been to an Eastern Orthodox service, it is classic sensate. So that was sort of afterwards though that I noticed the connection that was more... just affirming. I did refer a little bit to Myers-Briggs, but of course that's just four. And again, I keep going back, I just felt like I was an architect. And I felt pretty good because through the 25 years people have interacted with it and talked about it. And I think the nine pretty much captures all of us. Some might have a different emphasis or flavor, but it held up well. I rewrote it, what, five or six years ago. Maybe more recently than that just because things like in the 90s mentioning cassette tapes or a personality that nobody would know today. But I didn't really change that much because the concepts I believe have held up pretty well. And I hadn't heard anybody that said, no, this isn't a temperament or you're missing a temperament.
SHELLEY: Yeah. Now how about you? What pathways are you drawn to?
GARY: I think throughout my life the intellectual has been a big bent. I love to read. Most people are too young to remember the movie Short Circuit where the robot said, more data, more data, more data. But that's kind of how I am. Give me new insights. And so every morning I'm reading from Scripture first, reading from the Christian classics, reading a contemporary book. Throughout my day I'm studying other books. And that's served me well because I can do that in a hotel room, I can do it on a plane. I was in Houston for 12 years. When I was in Washington state, I really called myself a naturalist as well. Because there were beautiful hikes. And then when I was in Northern Virginia, I would go out on these long walks on battlefields left alone and beautiful. It's hard to be a naturalist in Houston. I'm not nothing, Texas. I love the people of Texas. There's much I love about the state of Texas. But when you live in cement city, it's just, and so that was kind of dormant. We just moved back to Colorado last year. I shouldn't say back. We moved to Colorado last year. And the mountains, and I look out over the old dry creek trail and a creek below, and I'm right back to being a naturalist.
And then there's always been a little bit of the traditionalist in me as well. But I think those are the three main temperaments, naturalist and intellectual, really at the top where I just, I can't get enough. Uh, but the traditionalists, the Christian calendar. and just old prayers and traditionalist moods. I'm a person of ritual. I'm actually a person of symbols. I have symbols in my office and whatnot. So all three of those impact who I am.
SHELLEY: Yeah. So what do you think is the most oft asked questions that you get about the nine pathways?
GARY: The first one is, do I have to have just one? Now, I just expressed to you three. And I do think it's good to know your primary pathways, because if you're spiritually hungry, if you really need to hear from the Lord, it's just helpful to know this is a way I'm gonna hear from the Lord most likely. But even though you may like Italian food a whole lot, sometimes it's fun to go out for Thai or Mediterranean or Mexican on the side or whatnot. And so I think it's helpful to know all nine and to try all nine, but I don't think you should put yourself in one box. Like I said, I have at least three strong ones. I do experience the other ones, but my prescription, the spiritual prescription I write for myself would be those three. So no, I don't believe you have to have one. I don't want to take people from the quiet time box that I taught. in college ministry and put them into a sacred pathways box. And then another one, somebody asked me, you may know Frederica Matthews Green, and I was talking to her early on. She moved from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. And she talked about how she shifted and grew throughout her life. Of course, it would be natural to go into being a Sun Saint when you go into Eastern Orthodox worship. So I do think you can develop. And I kind of implied that when I said being in Houston. It's hard to express being a naturalist. Coming back to Colorado. boom, it's right back there, which is a wonderful freedom that God can meet us in so many different ways. So if you move or if you're in a time of life, look, if you're an ascetic who likes to get away and have time alone, and you're a mom of a baby and a toddler, good luck, you know? That's not gonna be your best way for a while unless you have an extremely understanding and helpful husband. It’s gonna be hard for you to get away. So I think you can fit them to your station in life. I think it's natural to assume that as you mature, if we see all nine of them in Jesus and three or four in David, I think we can expect that we'll just grow in our ability to perceive the presence of God, to meet with the Lord and to be just united with him.
SHELLEY: That's really freeing. Okay, so let's just wrap up and look back over the 25 years since you wrote this book. What has been some of the impact that you have seen that it has on people?
GARY: I’ve been so excited as churches have gone through this. There's been funny stories. One pastor, they did a whole series on it and he was doing about the traditionalist people that are involved in ritual and he would join some and he changed the seating pattern of the church because there are some people that that's where they sit and their seat didn't exist. And it was funny seeing the, the Shelley real distress. I mean, serious distress. What do you mean? I mean, and it made his point. But, um, so funny stories like that, but the inspiring stories are just for people to say, this gives me so much freedom. I always felt like I had to be like this person or that person, understanding that God made me to be who I am. I could love him this way. I don't have to have the relationship that others have. I don't need to pray the way they do. I don't need to worship the way they do. I might even take the word in in a different way, whether it's in a group, small group study, whether I'm reading a psalm by the river, whether I've got my commentaries and concordances and I'm alone in my desk, whether I'm listening to scripture going into work. gives people more joy and freedom and I love that.
The second thing I hear behind freedom is when pastors and small group leaders say, it creates so much understanding and appreciation for each other. Now small group leaders get why somebody wants to say, why don't we bother with this worship? Let's just sing a song so that lay people get here and let's spend the whole hour in the word. And others say, maybe we don't need to do Bible study. Maybe we should just do 60 minutes of singing songs. And they're like, I mean, how can this be? And what I try to do and what I think the book helps, I hope, is that people understand that when God built the church, he's brilliant in giving us different temperaments.
Let's make a quick example of that. The activists feel closest to God when they're stopping evil, when they're confronting injustice, when they're pushing forward a program. So they want to stop systemic evil. They feel closest to God when they're trying to confront systemic evil. caregivers feel like the exact opposite. They care for the victims of evil, the victims who have been hurt, whether it's their health or their marginalized in society. And I said, doesn't it make sense that the church needs people who will try to stop evil at the spigot? And yet have people who feel closest to God by caring for those when evil has still gotten through and hurt them. I mean, it just, it gives me such an appreciation for the church. So I want to say to caregivers, you don't have to be an activist. And I want to say to activists, don't despise the caregivers because you haven't succeeded in your program. We still need people who feel so close to God when they're caring for that. And I could go through every temperament that way. God needs to be celebrated. But we need the ascetics to remind us of our times to be quiet. We need the traditionalists to say, hey, while the enthusiasts love the new things that God is doing, remember the past, celebrate the past, learn from the past, use the past to worship God. There are so many that seem like they're on the opposite end of each other. but are really just the other side of the coin of what it means to be people enjoying God, loving God, devoted to God. Because we worship such an amazing, glorious, beautiful God, so powerful, who yet wants to be intimate with us. It's just we're so blessed to be His people.
SHELLEY: Oh my goodness, Gary, you have gotten us so excited to now get introduced to this study. And so we're going to go ahead and play that. But I want to just first thank you for writing this book and for coming here to talk about it with me today. Thank you.
GARY: Thank you, Shelly. It's just a great joy to know people will learn how to get closer to God. Nothing gives me a higher joy than that.
SHELLEY: I love that. Well, I am now excited to present session one of Sacred Pathways called The Journey of the Soul.
[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY: Earlier this year, we had a new addition to our family, a Cavalier King Charles puppy named Quincy. One of the sweetest animals I've ever known but also one of the most emotionally needy, he has to be with his people all the time. Since I'm the early riser in our home, I would get up first to let him out and then try to feed him breakfast, and I found something that was a little bit funny to me.
I was first trying to feed him in our pantry. I would just put his food in his bowl, and the problem was if I then walked out, Quincy would follow me. He had to have me in his sight at all times. Even though he was hungry from not eating overnight, it was more important to him to be close to me than it was to have his hunger needs met. So, the only way I could get him to eat was to literally stand over him as he ate, and it was funny. I even took a video of it to show others. He would take a bite, and then he would look up over his shoulder to make sure I'm still there with him, and then he would take another bite putting his head down and then look again.
And his passion to be with me, even over his natural physical hunger, reminded me of David who said in Psalm 63:1 that he longed for God, that he thirsted for God in a dry and weary land where there is no water, in the middle of a desert where you would naturally find yourself to be very thirsty and very hungry. David says his greatest need is still spiritual—to connect with the almighty God, and it makes sense when we're invited and we find our greatest needs met in relationship to such a wonderful, glorious, affirming God.
We were created to find our highest, truest, and most intense delight in God. So why is it that we often consider quiet times, or devotional times to be disciplines and burdens instead of a delight? I don't believe it's the "who." We were created to know God. We were designed to find our highest desire in him, who he is in his wonder, his grace, his majesty, his love, his affirmation. It can't be the "who," which got me to think maybe it's the "how." Maybe the reason we have difficulty setting time alone to be with the Lord is because of how, the way that we're taught to do it.
I thought of this one time when I was working on a project, and the person actually had a reservation to meet with Billy and Ruth Graham for dinner and suggested maybe I should just bring you along. Now, the problem with that is I already had a plane ticket set to leave, and I'd have to postpone that. And you know how it goes with airlines, they're like, sure, we'll send you here for $300. And if you change your ticket last minute, it's only another $1,000.
But you know what, I didn't care. I'm going to whip out the credit card on that one. The chance to meet with Billy and Ruth Graham, I mean, two enormous influences in 20th century Christianity. It didn't matter to me what it cost. This was a one-time opportunity.
The other problem is I had already appointments with other people, and those would have to be canceled if I came home late. But you know what, again, I thought, you know what, I could go to any one of my friends and say, it was Billy Graham or you. I chose Billy Graham, and I think any one of my friends would say, Gary, I think you chose wisely.
Now, as it turned out, I didn't get to have that private dinner. Some other things came in and made it impossible. But I was so convicted going home from that trip, as God showed me that I didn't care how much it cost to meet Billy Graham, financially. I didn't care what appointments I had to jettison. I didn't care who I might disappoint. I felt like the chance to meet Billy Graham was worth that, and yet every day, one so much more glorious than Billy Graham, such that Billy Graham would be all but invisible in his light, one so much more knowledgeable and wise and in every way wants to meet with me, wants to meet with you.
And the opportunity to have that, why do we look for excuses to get out of that meeting? Again, I believe it goes back to the "how." I believe it's because we've developed a one-size-fits-all prescription for quiet times. In fact, even calling it a quiet time defines it in a way that might be harmful to some people in their pursuit of God. They're best not pursuing God in the quiet, and the problem with the one-size-fits-all quiet time is that God doesn't make cookie-cutter Christians. We're made very differently. God is a much more creative creator than that.
In one of my favorite Christian classics, the author talks about how everything in creation is but a shadow of the fullness of God. All of creation has its own little limitations. A couple examples he uses is this. While the blackbird has an incredibly beautiful voice, they're not much to look at. And the peacock, perhaps the most beautiful bird in the world, has a voice that, when you hear that screech, you want to cover your ears. It's painful.
Or you could look at something like trees. Fruit trees are wonderful if you're hungry, but you can't build a house with fruit trees. Then you go to the trees of the forest. You're not going to find anything to eat, but they're perfect for building a building. In the same way, every person has their strengths and their weaknesses. God is a master creator and gardener, which means there's not one kind of person or even one kind of soul any more than every human has the same color of hair or the same color of eyes, or the fact that some people even have hair and some people don't.
When it comes to tending the garden of our soul, we could look at it like this. God treats us like individual flowers. Some flowers need lots of water to flourish. Others, the same amount of water would drown them and could ruin them. Some souls need lots of sun. Others do better in the shade. They're better to be house plants.
So, if we want to learn how to tend the garden of our soul, we have to recognize it as an individual enterprise. That's not to discount the communal nature of our faith that it's so essential that we meet together. But when we're talking about those individual times of meeting with God, it's helpful to know that what feeds your garden could drown another. What nurtures your soul could be a distraction to someone else's, which means how we devote ourselves to God, the way we relate to him on a daily basis will be very different.
Over the past 25 years that Sacred Pathways has been out, many people, including myself have found tremendous freedom in our own pursuit of God, released not to measure up to someone else's prayer life for study life or worship life but set free to do it in our own way. The other thing I've noticed is that there's been an increased understanding for others. When small groups have gone through this, they invariably tell me, now I understand why he always wants to do this or why she's always suggesting that.
I didn't come to this diverse notion of how we relate to God so differently very easily. In fact, God frankly, he had to break me down. He did it in some creative ways. It began when I fell in love with a wonderful woman who had a great relationship with the Lord—I wouldn't have been interested in her if she didn't—but who related to God very differently than I did. Even back in college, I was a morning person, and I still like to get up early. And the woman that eventually became my wife, Lisa, was very much not a morning person.
I would get up and have my quiet time first thing. I thought God is a busy God. He's off running the world. If you get sleep in past 7:00, he might be solving a crisis in China or Russia or something like that. But Lisa was the kind of student who would basically roll out of bed just in time to get to her first class, go to her classes. Then she would come back to the dorms. She loved to go up onto the roof of the dorms where she could get some sunshine, lay in the sun, and she would call that a quiet time.
And in the flirty way that college students do, we weren't yet a couple, I would say, oh, come on, Lisa. Get serious. Who goes up onto the roof at noon, sits in the sun with their Bible, and calls that a quiet time? Well, she couldn't say anything. She didn't know how to answer until two weeks went by.
I was in my dorm room when I heard this knock on the door, and I opened up, and Lisa just smiles, walks to my desk, opens up my Bible to Acts chapter 10 verse 9 and reads this verse. "About noon the following day, Peter went up on the roof to pray." There's no way that could be in there. But it was my Bible. She didn't plant it in there, and it was just sort of a funny way of realizing that different people have related to God in different ways with different exercises.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY: I have to admit, I love it when Gary tells stories where his wife was right. We’re listening to the first session of Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas, and as a bonus for our listeners we have unlocked this session on Study Gateway, so you can go there and watch the entire first session for free! Sacred Pathways is published by HarperChristian Resources and it streams on Study Gateway. For our First Listens listeners, when you use the promo code PODCAST15 at studygateway.com, you’ll get any size of plan – for yourself, your small group or your whole church, at a 15% savings for life! And, for a complete experience with Sacred Pathways, take advantage of our publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide designed to be used with the videos. This study guide gives you the discussion questions for your group and the personal exercises to dig deeper into the scriptures on your own between sessions. Get all the details at Studygateway.com.
And now, let’s return to Gary Thomas.

[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY: That opened it up just a wedge, but it blew open when I became a father. I have three children. And all of them have such different personalities. My oldest daughter, Allie, is a classic introvert. We would spend time, she'd love to listen to programs where people were solving relational issues, or we'd sit in a Starbucks, and she'd just imagine what people we're talking about. My son, Graham, as he was growing up, he was very competitive. We'd love to play sports together. We would watch sporting events. My youngest daughter, Kelsey, was the classic extrovert, and we would do fun things and were often laughing.
And here's the thing I realized as a dad: I loved having a different relationship with each one of my kids. I liked doing different things. And nothing would have hurt me more or grieve me more than if my extroverted daughter, Kelsey, thought she had to be like my introverted daughter, Alison, for me to enjoy spending time with her; or if my extroverted son, Graham, thought we had to cut out all the competitive stuff because he saw me doing entirely different things with his sisters. I loved having a distinct and different relationship with each one of my kids even to this day.
Now, I had to receive my kids’ personalities because God created them. Imagine our Heavenly Father who gave our kids those personalities, who gave us our personalities. And when we learned to worship him according to the way he created us, we're actually acknowledging his good work as a creator. And so the moments of marriage and parenting were sort of my aha moment, but it's not only free. It is good. It is a delight to God, that we learn to relate to him according to the way he made us, according to the way he made me.
I didn't have to measure up to my older brother who's a committed believer, my boyhood pastor, who led me to the Lord, who baptized me, my campus pastor, whom I looked up to so much. They had their own ways of connecting to God, and I could learn from them. But I realized that I would have an individual, unique pathway of relating with God. And the same thing is true of you.
And I don't want you to base this on experience. We shouldn't base the Christian life simply on anybody's experience, certainly not mine. But what happened is that personal experience opened up my eyes to the truth of Scripture, that the standardized quiet time that I held people accountable to in college and taught them how to do it and when to do it and even where to do it, it really had no basis in Scripture. In fact, once my eyes were opened, I was willing to admit how every major character in Scripture seemed to have particular ways of connecting with God.
There's Abraham. Whenever he would meet with God, had a significant meeting with God, he would often just set up an altar and then go somewhere else. You don't see the building of these altars commanded. You don't see very many others doing it. It was sort of Abraham's thing. He commemorated a significant meeting with God by building an altar.
And then there was David. He fought God's battles. He was a warrior, and at the time, God needed a warrior. But at the end of David's life, he wanted to worship God by building a temple. And God came to him and said, no, David, you were my warrior. Nothing wrong with being a warrior. I needed a warrior at this point in time. But your son, Solomon, will build the temple.
And what struck me reading this was that God was telling a father, your son will have a very different way of relating to me. He'll worship me differently. He'll serve me differently.
Then you jump forward into the New Testament, and you see Mary sitting quietly at Jesus's feet, soaking up his wisdom, just wanting to stay in his presence. Can you even imagine Jesus looking at Mary and saying, Mary, would you just quit staring at me with those doe eyes? It's kind of creeping me out. I mean, look, if you really love me, why don't you build one of the altars that Abraham built? Those were really cool, or why don't you go fight the battles like David did or at least offer the sacrifices that Solomon offered?
No, Jesus commended her form of worship, sort of a contemplative style. Throughout scripture, different people worship the same God in different ways. And one of the shocking things about New Testament worship is that as important as it is, as important as relating to God individually is, there's almost nothing in the Scriptures about the "how," how we should do it. Individual worship, it's all about the "why," why we should worship God, and who we're worshipping. That's so very different from the Old Testament.
There were elaborate rituals in the Old Testament, very specific instructions. In the New Testament, there's a few things about corporate worship, when Paul is writing to the Corinthians, but almost none about how individual believers set aside time each day to relate to God. So the question arises, if from the very beginning of the Church age, God saw fit to not mandate the "how" of individual worship, why should we?
It doesn't mean the "how" is unimportant, just that we can explore the "how" with tremendous freedom and delight. And for me, one of the big things that Sacred Pathways did in my own life is to unleash the power of desire and teach me to learn to ride the wave of delight. The reality is most of us do what we like to do. And so if we want to devote ourselves to the Lord, where we're doing something daily, regularly, it just helps if we enjoy doing it.
I'm all for discipline. I think it's impossible to be a faithful believer without discipline. But I realize that desire is just important. It's like exercise. If you really want to be faithful to exercise, find something you enjoy doing, whether it's playing volleyball, whether it's going for a run, whether it's playing basketball, going for a walk. If you find a form of exercise that you look forward to, you're more likely to do it certainly more often.
The same thing is true of individual worship. If you're having a hard time connecting with God, rather than say maybe I'm just not into God, say, well, I'm just not into the way I'm trying to connect with God. And thankfully, there are many various ways that we can do that.
So in this study, we're going to look at nine different pathways, sacred pathways. You could also call them spiritual temperaments. Now let me stress at the start, the nine pathways isn't about finding a new box to put you in. I don't want to take you from the quiet time box and put you in a sacred pathway box. I believe we can be blends, and I've talked with many believers who have said, well, in earlier my faith, I feel like this was the pathway I most preferred, and then I kind of grew into this, and then I grew up into that. There's tremendous freedom in exploring the pathways.
But here's the purpose. When we know where we best connect with God, and we find ourselves empty spiritually, particularly hungry, when we just really need to meet with him, it's helpful to know this is the window through which I often see God most clearly. Another thing I want to say in this first session is that some people might say, well, this sounds like a lot of self-absorption, and isn't the faith about loving others and serving God? And I understand that.
But see, this is what helps us love others and serve God because I believe there's two realities that we have to address that are so clear. The best kind of ministry, the ministry that honors God, that advances his kingdom, it flows out of friendship with God. "We love because he first loved us," 1 John 4:19. And just as ministry flows out of friendship with God, sin flows out of alienation from God.
The pathways are really the foundation to keep us focused on others, instead of ourselves because good ministry flows out of relationship with God, and sin flows out of alienation from God. I have a therapist friend. He's got a line I just love. He said this. "If you're not worshipping God, you're addicted to something." It might be people pleasing. It might be food. It might be adrenaline. It might be spending money that you don't have. In the end, you're using people instead of loving them, and you're trying to replace that passion for God with a passion for something that's created.
So another way of putting this, if you're not walking in your worship pathway, you're very likely falling into sin. And so Scripture gives us a great invitation. In fact, this might be the best invitation you will ever receive. James 4 says this, "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."
If you look at it in context—and I encourage you to do that—James isn't talking to nonbelievers. He's talking to Christians, those who already believe. And he's just saying to them, look at what Jesus has made available. If we will just draw nearer to God, he will draw nearer to us. He wants to be a big part of our life. He wants to empower us. He wants to comfort us. He wants to encourage us. He wants to love on you.
And as James pleas, just draw near to him and watch him draw nearer to you. The Sacred Pathways are simply nine tools, nine windows, nine ways that you can begin to draw near to God and receive from him. We know from this, God isn't reluctant to be a huge presence in your life. He tells us in his Word, just take a step. Draw a little bit near to me and watch how I cover you.
The rest of this series, the Sacred Pathways, will simply be your invitation to do just that, to gain new delight as you relate to this marvelous God, to experience new freedom that you can love God according to the way he designed you to love him, and new respect for others as you understand that everybody has a different way of best connecting with God, and we can learn from each other instead of judging each other, that we can enlarge our own experience with God by welcoming the ways other people experience God.
We're going to break the pathways up into three groups. We're going to discuss the pathways of wonder in Session Two, the pathways of contemplation in Session Three, and the pathways of action in Session Four, all designed to help you understand where you take that first step to draw near to God.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY: I hope you enjoyed this session from Sacred Pathways, a video Bible study by Gary Thomas, published by HarperChristian Resources and streaming on Study Gateway. And, if you go to StudyGateway.com, you’ll find this first session of Sacred Pathways is unlocked, and accessible to you to watch, in its entirety, for free!
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