The Secret Walk With God That Few Will Ever Take | Leonard Ravenhill

There is a walk with God so few will ever take that you could sit in church your entire life and never meet a single person who has walked it. You will meet the religious. You will meet the busy, the active, the respectable. You will meet thousands who attend, who believe, who can quote the verses and sing the songs. But the one who actually walks with God secretly daily in a closeness that has cost him everything, him you will almost never meet because that walk is taken by almost no one.

And here is what should arrest you tonight. It is not because the walk is closed. It is open to every believer who has ever lived. It is not because God is unwilling to walk closely with men. He has wanted that closeness since Eden. The walk is taken by so few for one reason only, because the road is narrow and the cost is high and the crowd, even the religious crowd, even the church crowd, will not pay it. They want the destination without the walk. They want heaven without the closeness, the title of Christian without the secret communion that the name implies. And so they live and die on the broad and crowded road of comfortable religion, never knowing there was a hidden path walked by a faithful few that led into a nearness to God the rest only sang about.

Tonight I am going to show you that path and by the end you will have to decide which road you are on. The broad and crowded one of those who have a name but no nearness or the narrow secret walk that few will ever take. But before we go any deeper, I want to find out who is out there because I believe that scattered across this crowded comfortable religious generation, there is a remnant. Men and women who are no longer content to have a name without a nearness, who would give anything to walk the secret walk that few will take. And I want to see you. So right now, before you go 1 second further, comment where you are watching from. Your city, your country. Type it in the comments below. Let the remnant make itself known so that across this dying world, we can see that there are still those willing to leave the crowd and take the narrow walk with God.

And now, a direct word from us, the ones who make these messages, because this matters more than usual tonight. The secret walk with God is taken daily in the place of private prayer. And here is the hard truth. Most believers who long for that walk never take it because they have no idea how to begin or how to keep going. They feel the longing, resolve to draw near last a few days, and drift back into the crowd because they have no plan, no path, no structure for the secret walk. That is the exact problem we built the War Room Manual to solve. It is not a book to admire. It is a 30-day path that takes you by the hand and leads you step by step into the secret walk, building the daily discipline of drawing near to God until the nearness becomes your way of life. It will never replace your Bible. The word is the road itself and the final authority and always will be. But the manual is the guide that keeps you walking when you would otherwise drift back to the crowd. If you are tired of longing for the walk and never taking it, the link is in the description and pinned to the top of the comments. Do not let another year pass on the crowded road.

And now, quiet your heart and let the preacher call you onto the secret walk that few will ever take.

"I want to talk to you about walking with God, and I want to begin by saying that this is the rarest thing on the face of the earth. We sing about it. We preach about it. We name it as the very thing the Christian life is supposed to be. And yet of all the multitudes who profess the name of Christ, the ones who actually walk with God, who live in the daily secret intimate nearness that the phrase describes, are so few that you could search a long time and not find one. We have produced in our generation millions of believers and almost no walkers. We have crowds in our buildings and emptiness in our secret places. We have people who know about God in numbers beyond counting and people who actually walk with him in numbers you could nearly count on your hands. And I want to ask you with all the urgency I have, which are you? Are you one of the crowd who has the name or one of the few who has the nearness? Because there is a walk with God that few will ever take. And the whole question of your life is whether you will be one of them.

Let me tell you what this walk is, for we have cheapened the phrase until it means almost nothing. To walk with God is not to attend a service once a week. It is not to believe the correct doctrines. It is not to be busy in religious activity, however much of it you do. To walk with God is to live in his company, to go through your days in a conscious continual intimate nearness to him, talking with him, listening to him, communing with him as a man walks and talks with his closest friend. It is what was said of Enoch that he walked with God and was not, for God took him. A man so near to God in his daily walk that one day the walk simply continued into eternity without a break. For he was already so close that death was hardly a transition. It is what was said of Noah that he walked with God in a generation so corrupt that he stood utterly alone. This is the walk, a life lived in the nearness of God, and it is the rarest life there is because the road to it is narrow and few are willing to walk it.

Let me dwell on Enoch for a moment for the scripture says almost nothing about him and yet says everything. It does not record a single sermon he preached, a single miracle he worked, a single great public deed. It records one thing about his life. He walked with God. That was his biography, the whole of it, the only thing heaven thought worth remembering, not what he built, not what he achieved, not what crowds he gathered, but that he walked with God. And I want you to feel the weight of that because it overturns everything our generation values. We measure a life by its visible achievements, its public impact, the size of what it built. Heaven measured Enoch's life by one thing alone. The nearness of his walk with God. And if heaven wrote your biography tonight in a single line, what would it say? Would it say he walked with God or would it have to say something else? He was busy. He was active. He was religious. He had the name. While the one thing heaven actually records was the one thing his life never contained. Enoch's whole greatness was his nearness and the same is true of every soul God has ever treasured. The walk is the life. Everything else is commentary.

And notice what became of Enoch's walk. He walked with God and was not for God took him. The walk simply continued without a break into eternity. He was so near to God in in daily life that the step from earth to heaven was hardly a step at all. He was already walking so close that God simply took him on home. And this tells you what the walk is preparing in you. The one who walks with God in secret here is not preparing for some distant and unfamiliar heaven. He is already living in measure the very life he will live forever, already near to the one he will be near to through all eternity. So that death, when it comes, is not a leap into the unknown, but the continuation of a walk already begun. The crowd on the broad road faces eternity as a stranger faces a strange country. The few who walked with God face it as a man comes home to a friend he has known and loved all his life. The walk you take in secret now is the walk you will take forever. Begin it here. And death loses its strangeness, for it becomes only the place where the walk you already know simply continues into the unbroken nearness of God.

Now I must tell you why so few take this walk, and I will not soften it, for the softening of this truth is exactly why the church is full of people who have never taken it. The walk is narrow. The Lord said it plainly, "Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Few." He said it himself. Not many. Few. The road that leads to life, to the real nearness, to the secret walk with God is narrow. And the narrowness is precisely what keeps the crowd off it. For a narrow road will not accommodate the baggage the crowd insists on carrying. It will not fit your idols. It will not fit your comfortable compromises, your secret sins, your divided heart, your love of the world held in one hand while you reach for God with the other. The broad road has room for all of that. That is why it is crowded. But, the narrow walk with God requires that you lay it down, all of it, and walk stripped of everything that the broad road lets you keep. And that is the cost the crowd will not pay. They would love the nearness if they could have it while keeping everything else, but you cannot. The walk is narrow, and you must come empty-handed, and few there be that will.

Let me press the cost upon you, for it is the heart of the matter. The secret walk with God will cost you the crowd. You cannot walk the narrow road and keep the approval of the broad one. The moment you step off the crowded path of comfortable religion onto the narrow walk of real nearness, you will find yourself increasingly alone, misunderstood even by religious people, perhaps especially by religious people, who will think you have gone too far, become too intense, taken this thing further than is reasonable. Noah walked with God and was thought a fool by an entire generation. The walk has always looked like madness to the crowd, and to take it, you must be willing to lose the crowd's approval, to be thought strange, to walk a road that almost no one around you understands or travels. The fear of being thought too extreme has kept more believers off the secret walk than perhaps any other single thing. They will go so far, but no further, because to go further would be to leave the crowd, and they cannot bear to leave the crowd. And so, they stay on the broad road with the name, but not the nearness, because the walk would have cost them the company of the many.

It will cost you your comfort, too. For the secret walk is taken on your knees in the hidden hours. In a discipline of seeking God that the comfortable will not maintain. The walk with God is not a feeling that descends on you while you do nothing. It is a discipline built daily in the secret place through the seeking and the communing that the flesh resists and the comfortable abandon. It will cost you the hours that the crowd spends on ease and entertainment. It will cost you the love of the world for you cannot walk closely with God and hold the world's hand at the same time. Friendship with the world, the scripture says, is enmity with God and the walk requires that you choose. It will cost you your self-will, your right to run your own life for to walk with God is to walk where he walks, at his pace, in his direction. And the man who must have his own way cannot walk with a God who will not follow him. The cost is high. It has always been high and it is the highness of the cost, not the unwillingness of God, that keeps the walk so rare.

I want you to understand that this walk is daily for the word itself tells you so. It is a walk, not a leap, not a single dramatic encounter, but a steady, continual, day-by-day going on with God. A man does not walk somewhere in one stride. He walks step after step, hour after hour, mile after mile, and so it is with the walk with God. It is not built in a single great experience, but in the daily, faithful, often unremarkable steps of communion sustained over years. Each step seeming small and all of them together carrying a man into a nearness he could never have reached in one bound. This is why the walk requires faithfulness more than intensity. Many believers have intense experiences, dramatic moments, mountain top encounters, and mistake these for the walk. But the walk is not the mountain top. It is the daily steady going on through valleys and plains and ordinary days. The unbroken continuation of communion that no single experience can substitute for. The crowd loves the dramatic moment and despises the daily faithfulness. And so it has its occasional experiences and never the walk. The few who walk have learned that the daily faithful step taken through every kind of day is the whole secret of the nearness. And they keep taking it year after year while the crowd waits for another mountain top and wonders why God seems far.

And the walk being daily must be guarded daily for it is easily broken and not so easily resumed. A walk interrupted is a nearness diminished. Let the daily communion lapse and the sense of God's nearness fades. The sensitivity dulls. The intimacy cools. And the walk that took so long to build can be lost in a season of neglect. This is why the walkers are jealous of their secret place. Guarding the daily communion as the most precious thing they have. Refusing to let the press of life crowd it out because they know that the nearness they treasure depends on the faithfulness they maintain. Do not imagine that once begun the walk continues by itself. It continues by the daily choice to keep walking. The daily guarding of the secret place. The daily refusal to let the crowd and its comforts pull you back onto the broad road. The walk is worth this vigilance a thousand times over but it requires it. And the soul that would walk with God must resolve not merely to begin the walk, but to guard it daily for the rest of his life.

A man who is intimate with God becomes a man who cannot be intimidated by anything else. For what is there to fear when you walk daily with the almighty? The crowd is ruled by fear, fear of man, fear of circumstances, fear of the future, fear of what people will think. And the fear keeps them on the broad road, conforming, compromising, doing what the crowd does because they dare not stand alone. But the man who walks with God has been set free from that fear. Not by working up courage, but by the simple fact of the nearness. For a man who walks beside the king of kings does not tremble before the opinions of men. Noah stood alone against an entire generation and built his ark through the laughter of the world. And he could do it because he walked with God and therefore did not need the approval of men. This is the strange freedom of the narrow walk. It costs you the crowd's approval, and in losing it you are set free from needing it. And the man who has stopped needing the crowd's approval is the freest man alive. The walk strips away the fear of man that enslaves the crowd and gives in its place the holy fearlessness of one who walks with God.

And the walk produces holiness, not as a strained effort, but as the natural fruit of the nearness. You cannot walk daily in the company of a holy God and remain unchanged. His holiness, by the sheer fact of nearness, burns away what is unholy in you, refines you, conforms you to himself. This is why the few who truly walk with God are marked by a purity the crowd never attains. Not because they tried harder to be good, but because they walked nearer to God. And the nearness did in them what effort never could. The crowd struggles against its sins on the broad road and never overcomes them because it fights them at a distance from God. The walker finds those same sins falling away almost without a fight, burned off by the nearness of the holy one he walks beside. Holiness is not the price of the walk, it is the fruit of it. You do not become holy in order to walk with God, you walk with God and the walking makes you holy. And this is why the pursuit of holiness apart from the pursuit of nearness always fails while the pursuit of nearness produces a holiness that the mere pursuit of holiness never could.

But now hear me. For I would not lay out the cost without laying out the worth, and the worth is beyond all telling. The few who have taken this walk have found something that all the comfort and approval and ease of the broad road could never give. They have found God himself, known not from a distance, but in the nearness of daily communion, walked with as a friend, enjoyed, loved, and known. And there is nothing on earth or in heaven to compare with it. The crowd on the broad road has its comfort, its approval, its ease, and it does not have God, not in any nearness, not in any reality, and all its possessions are dust beside the one thing it lacks. But the few on the narrow walk have God. And having him, they have everything, and they would not trade one hour of the secret walk for all the comfort of the crowded road. Ask any of them. Ask the rare souls who have actually walked with God whether the cost was worth it, and you will hear the same answer every time. There is no comparison. The walk is worth everything it cost and infinitely more, and the only regret is the years wasted on the broad road before they found the narrow one.

I want to confront the religion that imitates the walk without taking it, for it is the great deception of our day. There is a whole Christianity built around having the name without the nearness, the form of the walk without its reality. It attends. It sings about walking with God. It uses all the language of intimacy and nearness. And it has never taken a single step on the actual narrow road, for it has never paid the cost, never left the crowd, never laid down the baggage the narrow walk will not admit. It is a Christianity of the broad road wearing the language of the narrow one, and it is everywhere and it is deadly because it persuades millions that they are walking with God when they have never taken the walk at all. Do not be deceived by it, and do not be content with it. The language of the walk is not the walk. The name is not the nearness. You can sing about walking with God every Sunday of your life and never once have taken a step on the narrow road. And the tragedy is that the singing can persuade you that you have. Test yourself not by the language you use, but by the walk you have actually taken. Do you live in the daily secret nearness of God, or do you only have the name and the language while the nearness itself remains a stranger to you?

And understand that this walk is not something you must persuade a reluctant God to allow. It is the very thing he has wanted since the beginning. In the garden before sin broke everything, God walked with man in the cool of the day. That was the original design, the thing we were made for, a daily walk with God in unbroken nearness. Sin shattered that walk, drove man out, broke the nearness, and ever since the whole story of redemption has been God working to restore the walk that sin destroyed. When Christ died and the veil was torn, the way back into the nearness was opened, the walk made possible again at the cost of his blood. So, when you hesitate to take the walk, imagining perhaps that God is distant or unwilling, understand how completely you have it backward. God has wanted this walk since Eden. He made you for it. He gave his son to restore it. The reluctance has never been on his side. It is entirely on ours. He stands ready, eager, waiting to walk with any soul who will come. And the only thing that has kept you from the walk all this time is not his unwillingness, but your own unwillingness to pay its cost and leave the crowd. The door is open. The God who walked with man in Eden is waiting to walk with you. He has wanted it far longer and far more than you have.

And think of what you forfeit by staying on the broad road. Not merely a better spiritual life, but the very thing you were created for. You were made to walk with God. It is the deepest purpose of your existence, the thing your soul was fashioned for, and no substitute will ever satisfy the hunger that only the walk can fill. This is why the crowd, for all its comfort, is so restless and empty. It was made for the walk and has settled for the broad road. And the soul made for nearness to God cannot be satisfied with anything less, however much comfort and approval it piles up. The emptiness you may have felt even in the midst of religious activity is the ache of a soul made for the walk and not taking it. And that ache will never be silenced by more activity, more comfort, more of anything the broad road offers. It can be silenced only one way, by taking the walk you were made for, and finding in the nearness of God the very thing your soul has been aching for all along.

I want to ask you a question that has searched my own soul for years, and I ask it now of you. Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for? Look at the life you have built on the broad road, the comfort you are protecting, the approval you are chasing, the things that fill your days and crowd out the secret walk, and ask yourself honestly whether those things are worth the blood of the Son of God. For he did not die to purchase you a comfortable religious life on the broad road. He died to bring you near, to open the way into the very nearness of God, to make possible the secret walk that the crowd will not take. The veil was torn, the way was opened, the nearness was bought at the price of his blood, and we have taken that blood-bought access and traded it for a comfortable seat on the broad road, content with the name when he died to give us the nearness. Does that not grieve you? It grieves me that Christ should die to open the way into the holiest, into the very presence and nearness of God, and that we should be content to stand outside it with the crowd, having the name he purchased, but never the nearness he died to give. The walk was bought with blood. To neglect it is to despise the price that was paid to open it.

And I tell you, the measure of a man is not how he appears in the crowd, but how he is in secret, alone with God or alone without him. What are you when no one is watching? That is what you are. The crowd sees the public man, the religious man, the man with the name, but God sees the secret man, and the secret man is the real one. And the secret walk with God is precisely the cultivation of that secret man, the bringing of the hidden life into the nearness of God, so that what you are in secret becomes something glorious rather than something empty. Most men are afraid of the secret place precisely because it exposes the secret man, strips away the public performance, and shows them what they actually are when the crowd is gone. But that exposure is the beginning of the walk, for only when you have seen the emptiness of the secret man can you bring him to God to be filled, changed, and drawn near. Do not fear the exposure. It is the doorway to the walk. The man who is willing to be seen by God as he truly is in secret is the man who can begin to be changed by God into what he was meant to be.

Let me tell you what the walk looks like in practice, for I would not leave it abstract. The one who walks with God has a secret history with him that no one sees, a daily hidden communion in the secret place where the nearness is cultivated and the friendship deepened. He talks with God through his ordinary days, not in formal prayers only, but in the continual conversation of a soul that has learned to live in God's company. He is sensitive to God, quick to feel his pleasure and his grief, attentive to his voice, responsive to his leading, because the walking has tuned him to the one he walks with. And he carries out of this hidden walk something the crowd does not have, a depth, a peace, a quiet authority, the unmistakable mark of one who lives near to God. You cannot fake it, and you cannot hide it. The man who truly walks with God betrays it in everything, as surely as the man who only has the name betrays his emptiness in everything. The walk shows. The nearness shows. And so, tragically, does the lack of it.

Let me tell you what the few who took this walk have done in the world, for it is staggering, and it shows you what hangs on this rare walk. Every great work God has ever done in history was done through someone who walked with him in secret, not through the crowd. The crowd has never changed anything, but through the rare individual who left the broad road and walked the narrow one into the nearness of God and came out carrying something the crowd did not have. The history of the church is not the history of its multitudes. It is the history of its walkers, the handful in each generation who knew God in the secret nearness, and through whom he shook the world. One man who walks with God is worth more to the kingdom than 10,000 who merely have the name, for the one carries the presence and the power that the nearness produces, and the 10,000 carry only the empty form. The world has never been moved by crowds of nominal believers. It has been moved, again and again, by the rare soul who walked with God so closely that something of God came through him into a dark world. And the reason we see so little of God's power in our generation is not a shortage of believers. We have never had more, but a shortage of walkers, of the rare few who take the narrow road into the nearness from which all true power flows.

And you could be one of them. Do not think this walk is reserved for some spiritual elite, some special class of saints unlike yourself. Everyone who ever walked it was an ordinary soul who made an extraordinary choice to leave the crowd and take the narrow road. Enoch was a man like you. Noah was a man like you. The rare walkers of every generation began exactly where you are, on the broad road with everyone else, until the day they chose to step off it onto the narrow walk. The walk is not closed to you by any lacking you. It is open to any soul willing to pay its cost, and the only thing standing between you and the secret walk with God is the choice you have not yet made. The few who walk are simply the few who chose. And you may join them this very night by making the choice they made to leave the crowd, take the narrow road, and walk with God whatever it costs. And do not wait, for the broad road is comfortable, and its comfort is a current that carries you further from the narrow walk with every day you delay. The longer you stay on the crowded road, the more its comfort grips you, the more natural it feels, the harder the narrow walk becomes to take. The best time to have begun the walk was years ago. The second best time is tonight, while the longing is awake and the truth is searching you. Every day you remain on the broad road is a day you are shaped further into a man of the crowd, and a day harder to leave it. Do not give the years to the broad road. The walk that few will ever take is open to you right now, and the choice that begins it can be made tonight.

So, I bring you to the great question, and only you can answer it. Will you take the walk? Will you leave the broad and crowded road of those who have the name without the nearness and step onto the narrow secret walk that few will ever take. Will you pay the cost, the crowd, the comfort, the world, the self-will, to gain the one thing worth more than all of it, the nearness of God himself? Because the walk is open to you this very night, on the same terms it has always been open to anyone. Lay down the baggage, leave the crowd, take the narrow road, and begin to walk with God in the daily secret nearness that few have ever known. It will cost you. It has cost every soul that ever took it. But it is worth everything, and the few who have taken it have never once regretted it, and you will not regret it either, except to wish you had begun sooner.

Do not let this be one more message that stirs you and changes nothing. For that, I must warn you, is the very essence of the broad road. The broad road is full of people who have been stirred a thousand times by messages about the walk, who have felt the longing, agreed with every word, and then gone right back to the crowd, having felt something and taken nothing. The stirring without the walking is itself the great deception, for it persuades you that you are a seeker after God, while you remain firmly planted on the broad road. Do not be content to feel the longing for the walk. Take the walk. Let the stirring you feel right now drive you off the crowded road to night, and onto the narrow one, into the secret place, to begin the walk that few will ever take.

So, go. Go and leave the crowd. Step off the broad road of those who have the name, but not the nearness, and onto the narrow secret walk with God. Lay down the baggage the narrow road will not admit, the idols, the compromises, the love of the world, the self-will, and come empty-handed onto the road that leads to the nearness of God. Go into the secret place and begin the daily hidden communion out of which the walk is built, and do not take it for a day only, but make it the road of your life, walking with God in secret through all your days as Enoch walked, as Noah walked, as the rare few in every generation have walked. The walk is narrow and few will ever take it, but it is open to you tonight. Leave the crowd, take the road, and walk with God in the secret nearness that is worth more than everything it costs. In Jesus' name, take the walk that few will ever take, and do not turn back to the crowd again."