Staying Close to God with Beth Moore
Beth Moore has been a spiritual mother to so much of our generation, and I got to sit down with her and talk about what her walk with Jesus looks like, her new book, and much more. This was just a snippet of our conversation, but you can find the full length version here.
What does your time with Jesus look like?
“Well, I have to begin by saying that everybody gets to have their own thing going with Him. The only reason I’m ever reluctant to give specifics of what my time looks like is because I’m so intrigued by what another person’s pursuit of him looks like. We get so many ideas from each other and I love that. Nobody needs to put this on themselves and think that’s what their pursuit of God needs to look like. I’m an early riser naturally, but also because I truly do want the very first words I hear spoken to be scripture. I set the alarm pretty early and I go real quietly into my living area and take my things. I sit it down on my kitchen counter, but I use a tiny little lamp. I want everything else dark. I can’t even see anything else. It is me and Jesus and it is nothing else. I love devotional books and have done a million of them. I love going through somebody’s curriculum. I love all of that. If we’re with Jesus, there’s not a terrible way to be with Jesus. For me, my normal practice is reading through a book of the Bible at a time. My favorite thing is to slow it down. I just take a chapter at a time, and when I finish, I go to another book of the Bible. I’ve always got my journal open, and there’s certain things I’ll pray for daily. I’ll always pray for my family - always. But a lot of what I’m praying, I’m taking the prompting from what I’m reading in the scripture. I like to picture my time with Jesus as a dialogue. I feel like God is speaking to me through His word, and I’m talking back. In my Bible reading, I don’t read it as a reader, I read it as a conversationalist. Sometimes I’ll do it out loud, sometimes I’ll do it with a pen, but everything is dialogue. All the way through the reading I’m talking back to him. I’ll stop for a moment, underline a passage and just sit with him on it. I like to ask people, do you really believe he’s there? When I’m feeling dry and dull, sometimes I’ll turn my chair out from my counter and talk as if he was standing right in front of me. I believe strongly in a really active intercessory prayer life, and the reason why is it helps my world stay larger and gets me out of that narcissism and self-interest and reminds me that there’s a lot of people out there. To me abundant life is where there is a lot of Jesus in it. I don’t mean that I always feel his presence, but it’s active and we’re doing the thing together.
There’s a sense of needing to be fed constantly. It’s not enough to just sit down and study my Bible. By the time I get to noon, I have some anxiety or worry, and I need people fighting for me. It’s helped me to view it as war and that these anxieties I feel are deeper than the surface. That anxiety is taking away my peace that’s supposed to be an overflow.
What the enemy knows when he sees me have any type of anxiety is I am having a breakdown in trust. I want to control that situation so badly, and I’m not God so I can’t, but I’m still scrambling for it. We never outgrow spiritual disciplines. This is one of the things that every generation has to pass down to the next: the basics of a prayer life, consistent time in the scriptures, and some kind of fasting here and there. These things don’t go out of style. There’s no way around them. I have kept journals and I have one from when I was a newlywed. It’s so precious that it makes me cry everytime I read it, because it’s so simple. Over and over in my journal, I ask him to please give me a better disposition. Looking back, I just needed a nap in the worst way. The simplicity of it is so beautiful. One of the things we talk about in Chasing Vines is that God enjoys watching things grow. It’s a huge principle in the book.
Yes! I underlined that. He’s not looking for a store-bought tomato. He wants the real thing, raised by his real hands, hard-won and as it is. I loved that. Picturing his sleeves pushed him and tilling and tending.
God thought those prayers and journal entries and time spent with him, even if it was just 15 minutes, was precious. I want somebody to understand that. Don’t despise the growth process. He loves watching us trying to find our way. Which of your children would you have wanted to bring home from the hospital as young adults? Not one of them! When they were just laying on you and couldn’t do anything, you just thought, you’re the most marvelous. I love that about him.
Where did you get the idea of this book?
We are both in a ministry that causes us to travel quite consistently. For any of us that have had this calling that were also moms, there’s been the process of having to say goodbye to these kids when I leave to go speak. I used to have complete meltdowns if my flight got delayed and I couldn’t get home. I’ve cried to the guy at the ticket counter many times. One of my dreams was to stack up enough frequent flier miles to take my two girls on a dream trip one day. It was important to me, even though I could have swung it financially, to be on my points. I wanted it connected to the cause. For all the times, even today, I have to leave. I just wanted it to count. We decided on Italy and that it had to be places we had never been. We started in Florence, and in the course of about 10 days, we went to 5 of the major places. A travel agent planned the trip for us, so I didn’t know what we were going to do everyday. As long as I could have uninterrupted conversation with my girls. We ended up staying three nights in Tuscany. We were right in the middle of a vineyard, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. We could not have planned it this way. We came at the tail end of the grape harvest, so it was late September. Here’s what got me: I got up one morning and watched the sunrise over the hill. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. We drove down from our hotel and we’re right next to a vineyard where the harvesters are coming through and picking the grapes. I’m nearly crawled out the window watching them and the process. Then our taxi driver said, “I will tell you something about vineyards you may not know. The grapes love the rocky soil.” It was done for me. When I knew that Jesus had made that comparison of vines and vineyards, and then I come to find out that grapes don’t even grow well under good conditions. If you don’t stress the vine, it just produces leaves and no grapes. The only reason a grape vine will ever produce grapes is because it thinks it’s dying, and it’s reproducing. Its soil isn’t great, its conditions aren’t great, and it has to be put under stress or it never will produce. My life has never felt smooth. Everything has been rocky! I was sold. So it stuck.
It changed the way I view that relationship with God. That idea that he places us, he completes it, and he’s got a plan. That was another thing I loved - this isn’t by accident. Nothing is on accident. You’re placed in a specific soil with specific circumstances and that fruit will come. You may not in your lifetime.
But you know it’s gonna happen.
