Walking with God: Talk to Him. Hear from Him. Really. [Hardcover]

John Eldredge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2008

“This is a series of stories of what it looks like to walk with God, over the course of about a year.”

So begins a remarkable narrative of one man’s journey learning to hear the voice of God. In Walking wtih God by John Eldredge, the details are intimate and personal. The invitation is for us all. What if we could hear from God . . . often? What difference would it make?

All day long we are making choices. It adds up to an enormous amount of decisions in a lifetime. How do we know what to do?

We have two options.

We can trudge through on our own, doing our best to figure it all out.

Or, we can walk with God. As in, learn to hear his voice. Really. We can live life with God. He offers to speak to us and guide us. Every day. It is an incredible offer. To accept that offer is to enter into an adventure filled with joy and risk, transformation and breakthrough. And more clarity than we ever thought possible.

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For bestselling evangelical author Eldredge (Wild at Heart), Christians are meant to inherit the kind of intimacy that Adam and Eve had with God in the Garden of Eden, but the belief that God only speaks through the Bible hinders a Christian's ability to experience that intimacy. Drawing from a year's worth of journaling about his walk with God, Eldredge models how talking to God is as easy as checking daily to ask, What are you saying, Lord? Sometimes when Eldredge queries God, God's response confounds him. For example, when God responds repeatedly with two words, My love, it takes an accident and a personal epiphany for Eldredge to understand that God wants him to rebuild [his] personality based on [God's] love. Through everyday life lessons, personal anecdotes and a lot of scripture, Eldredge shows how Christians can get into direct conversation with God, encouraging readers to ask for answers about anything and everything. Eldredge's story (as opposed to chapter) format is supposed to better help readers to pause along the way at those points where God is speaking to you, but it results in a lack of real organization and may make it difficult for readers to uncover an overarching theme in the course of a section. (Apr. 15)
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About the Author

John Eldredge is the director of Ransomed Heart™ Ministries in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a fellowship devoted to helping people discover the heart of God. John is the author of numerous books, including Walking with God, Fathered by God, Waking the Dead, Desire, and Love & War (with his wife Stasi).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 218 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson; 1 edition (April 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0785206965
• ISBN-13: 978-0785206965
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.7 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #298,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Eldredge is an author (you probably figured that out), a counselor, and teacher. He is also president of Ransomed Heart, a ministry devoted to helping people discover the heart of God, recover their own heart in his love, and learn to live in his Kingdom. John grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles (which he hated), and spent his boyhood summers on his grandfather's cattle ranch in eastern Oregon (which he loved). John met his wife Stasi in high school (in drama class). But their romance did not begin until they each came to faith in Christ, after high school. John earned his undergraduate degree in Theater at Cal Poly, and directed a theater company in Los Angeles for several years before moving to Colorado with Focus on the Family, where he taught at the Focus on the Family Institute.

John earned his master's degree in Counseling from Colorado Christian University, under the direction of Larry Crabb and Dan Allender. He worked as a counselor in private practice before launching Ransomed Heart in 2000. John and Stasi live in Colorado Springs with their three sons (Samuel, Blaine and Luke), their golden retriever (Oban), and two horses (Whistle and Kokolo). While all of this is factually true, it somehow misses describing an actual person. He loves the outdoors passionately, and all beauty, Shakespeare, bow hunting, a good cigar, anything having to do with adventure, poetry, March Madness, working in the shop, fly fishing, classic rock, the Tetons, fish tacos, George MacDonald, green tea, buffalo steaks, dark chocolate, wild and open places, horses running, and too much more to name. He also uses the expression "far out" way too much.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#46 in Books > Religion & Spirituality

#92 in Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality

#46 in Books > Religion & Spirituality

#92 in Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 152 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Profoundly Challenging March 22, 2008

By James John Hollandsworth, M.D. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"It is our deepest need, as human beings, to learn to live intimately with God."

John Eldredge has been writing about walking with God for over ten years, since the publication of The Sacred Romance in 1997. His latest book, Walking with God, is his most deeply personal & may become his most controversial as well.

Walking with God is not structured as a typical book at all: instead, it is a written retelling and explanation of his own walk with God over the course of a year. It has no specific goal or direction; it is simply his life day by day, and how he saw God guiding and teaching him.

Interspersed with these personal experiences are explanations of his own worldview and approach to walking with God. Two core issues he spends a lot of time with are spiritual warfare and conversational intimacy with God.

Eldredge's view of spiritual warfare is that demonic attacks, both in the form of physical ailments and mental and spiritual clouding, are very real and very common, almost an everyday occurrence, and that it takes concentrated, specific prayer to overcome them. Eldredge's view of "conversational intimacy" is that God really can speak to us, to enlighten and guide us, and that we can learn to listen to His voice.

These paradigms are very foreign and even antithetical to most evangelical Christians. Eldredge fully realizes this, but does not try to build an elaborate structured case for his theology. After all, Eldredge is not a theologian at heart, but a storyteller. Consequently, I think he realized that he could be most effective in teaching his way of walking with God by telling stories, and not by trying to write a theological tome.

I actually am both theologian and storyteller. The theologian in me has always bristled at some aspects of Eldredge's theology, and yet the storyteller in me sees much truth and much goodness in it as well. Did I agree with all the theology in this book? No, I did not. Did I take page after page of detailed notes, being struck again and again by his honesty and insight? Yes I did.

Walking with God is a profoundly challenging book, one that I will re-read, meditate and pray over. I believe John wanted to create a book that would make people take a hard look at their definition of what it means to truly walk with God, and then show them a path to a richer and fuller life.

He succeeded.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding truth and healing thru Walking with God May 26, 2008

By Wholehearted

Format:Hardcover

I've just spent the better part of two days reading this book after picking it up on a whim. I have not read any of John Eldredge's other books.

John is a good story teller, and he caught my interest. As I read, my thoughts were parallel to many of the reviewers here: How does John know these one word answers are indeed the voice of God, along with How can I know this? (I suspect the answer lies in "the sheep knowing the voice of the Shephard")and How come everything is a spiritual battle, what about me just being a stupidasshumanbeing causing the problems in my life? And isn't my mood my choice anyway?

But when I read the entry on Unfullfilled Longings, God used it to heal my heart of some angst I have been living with for 9 months. I am so happy to be free and to gain the understanding about how when we exile the wounded, broken pieces of our hearts, (locking the door on our pain and throwing away the key as a method of coping), our whole heart cannot be given to God to fully heal. The idea that the stirrings of the unfullfilled longing are to motivate us to "seek a new life" or to submit it to God's healing, falls in beautifully with what I was needing to learn from my experience.

So yesterday, as s I sat outside reading, weeping cathartic tears and praying about the holes in my wholeheartedness, I was thankful for John's writing that gave words to explain it all to me.

Now, I am thinking that "whim" might just have been the voice of the Lord saying "Choose this one"! John explains it so much better, so get the book if you need freedom and understanding about the unfulfilled longings in your heart. I hope it helps you as much as it is helping me...

52 of 63 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Insight Into One Man's Walk With God April 29, 2008

By Jim V. Butcher II

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've enjoyed several of John Eldredge's previous books, so I was looking forward to jumping into this one.

The good: he gives you a behind-the-scenes look at his conversations with God over a year's time. It's usually interesting to see what people are talking to God about and that's true here. There are multiple moments when his comments will remind you of things you've also gone through.

The bad: I felt he goes overboard in a couple areas. The first is that everything for him is a spiritual battle. I do believe in spiritual warfare, but that doesn't mean every little problem you encounter is demonic. The second is that he seems to be constantly finding that things bring up all these deep problems from his childhood or early adult life. Again, I know that's sometimes true, but is everything ultimately about why I had low self-esteem in junior high or similar issues?

Ultimately, he doesn't fulfill the book's subtitle. It's interesting, but not filled with the insights I was hoping for.