One evening a couple weeks into our marriage, Peggy and I had just finished cleaning up the dinner dishes when she said, “Let’s sit on the couch.” “Ok,” I replied, and so we sat. “What do we do now?” I asked. “We talk,” she replied. “Oh. About what?” echoed my response from a chasm of cluelessness. “Anything. Our days, maybe,” she said. And so we did. We’ve since come to call this “couch dynamics” — purposefully carving out time to share and hear what’s on our minds. We can, and often do, accomplish the same on our walks together; either way, we regularly and intentionally take time to relate to our “other half.”
Believers are fond of saying, “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.” Actually, it is both. Have you ever noticed, though, that even as we tout “relationship” with God theologically, we too often feel distant from Him experientially? We wonder why, yet the answer is close at hand, for when asked about daily time in prayer and the Word, we mumble our confession, “Not so much.” But if Christianity is a relationship, doesn’t it follow that we regularly and intentionally relate with Him who has made us one with Himself? Then how?
We purposefully carve out time with God to share and hear what’s on each other’s minds. Think of it as celestial “couch dynamics.” Then to hear Him, where better to go than to His Word? It is life itself,1 and it is truth.2 The Word is “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that [we] may be complete, equipped for every good work.”3 His Word is “alive and powerful. . . .It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires”4 when we cannot understand them ourselves. It is “a lamp to [our] feet and a light to [our] path.”5 Yes, God speaks.
Yet the Father also listens; we are heard. Through Jeremiah He promises, “You will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.”6 John, too, assures us, “this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.”7 No wonder Jesus himself “would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.”8 He was relational, intentional; He still is. Then let us likewise take time to relate with Him.
You know, like couch dynamics.
Father, grace me to “[store] up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”9 And “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice!”10 Amen.
1 Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3
2 John 17:17
3 2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV
4 Hebrews 4:12 NLT
5 Psalm 119:105
6 Jeremiah 29:12 ESV
7 1 John 5:14 ESV
8 Luke 5:16 NASB
9 Psalm 119:11 ESV
10 Psalm 141:2 ESV
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Paul Nordman—Author 