Building a Divinely Personal Relationship with God – Paul S. Waugh

In a recent Lighthouse Global meeting, Lighthouse Associate Sukh Singh asked Paul S. Waugh a question about Sukh’s relationship with God.

In his own words as to why Sukh asked the question:

“I know that many people —Christian and non-Christian— will say they believe in God. But their lives may not reflect belief in the true, living God, Yahweh. So rather than actually believing in and praying to Him, they create a caricature of Him in their minds that suits their lifestyle. That caricature can be one of simplism, i.e. a very shallow, juvenile idea of a Santa Claus figure in the sky where they just want an easy life without any responsibility, for example. I know in my own journey, I have so much more to grow up into maturity. So I wanted to understand, how do I know that I’m genuinely building a relationship with who God really is, as opposed to a concept in my mind?”

Here is Paul’s answer to this question…

Full transcript

Sukh: What is the biggest difference between a genuine, growing, divine, personal relationship with God and, basically, a caricature, a simulation of him? My answer is that, at a very surface level, the one is growing in complexity and in depth—body, heart, mind, spirit—and the other one is just simplism. It’s very one-dimensional. But yeah, I’d really value understanding your take on that, please.

Paul: So you’re asking me, how would you go beyond simplism?

Sukh: Yeah, and like, how do I know the difference between a genuine relationship, at that divine personal relationship, and one that’s just a caricature?

Paul: It’s complex. Okay, so you’re asking how do you know the difference between being superficial and not? It is a complex answer, but I will give you the simplest answer I can give you. Okay, because it is complex, and it’s vast. I promise I can give you 20 hours on this. Promise.

Sukh: Okay.

Paul: Let me ask you a question first for effect, okay? Do you know what it means to mean something? To really mean it? To really mean what you’re saying?

So you go to someone for dinner, and you have a meal, you go, “Oh, thank you, this is lovely.” You don’t mean it, but what you do mean is to show some gratitude. So you thought, “It’ll be best to lie, because I can’t show gratitude truthfully, so I will just add a little white lie to it. It’s okay if I lie like this because guess what? It is meaningful. It’s nice. It’s a white lie, but it’s a nice white lie.”

Do you know the difference between sitting down and having a very simple bowl of bean soup, and you’ve got this beautifully made at home, and the smell of the baking of the bread is still hanging in the air? And you can see the woman there, she’s all flushed. And she’s just so beautiful in her domestic-ness. And she’s standing next to her beloved Aga, that her mother cooked with. And you’re just in her world. And you’re in her love. And you’re in her bosom. And there she is. And an ample bosom, indeed. And there’s just something gorgeously motherly about it, even though you just met this woman. And she’s invited you in for a lovely meal as a weary traveller. So now you sat there, and you’ve got this beautiful, steaming, crusty loaf, and she comes along, and her little plump fingers with her bread, now she slices a piece of bread like she’s done it a million times. And she looks at you, and she smiles at you and goes, “Have a bit of this. Get some hot duff in you, my love.” Okay?

And she puts a nice piece of this beautiful bread, and she puts this butter, she goes, “This is from Daisy, our cow outside. There she is. Isn’t she beautiful? Look at her through the window. There we go.” And she gives you the bread, and you taste this bean soup, and you just can’t believe the love in the soup. It is just something beyond flavour that is in the soup because it’s made with such spirit, such prayer, such love. And you just feel, oh my god, it’s like being in a womb I’ve never been in. This is God’s kitchen. This is God’s daughter. And she’s cooking God’s creation as God’s creation for me. Okay, and you sat there, and you’re eating this, and you are loved up. And she goes, “How is it?”

And you can’t get the words out. You well up. You well up. And she looks back at you, and she smiles, comes along, gives you a hug, a little one-arm hug and goes, “Oy,” kisses you on your head, and goes, “I know the answer. Thank you. I know what you’re feeling. It’s hit the spot, hasn’t it, honey? Good one.” And she goes back. And she gets another hot loaf out of the oven. And she gives the bean soup another stir. And she goes, “Praise God.”

That’s what it means to be—I can tell that story because I understand meaning. And I understand simple things. That you don’t have to lie to this woman, you can’t even get the words out. Your whole body is praising this God, and praising her, and praising the creative gorgeousness of it all, and the beauty of it all, the love in it all, the wonder of it. And you know you’ve missed it all your life, and you well up. And you can barely just nod your head in affirmation—but it’s a meaningful nod. You can’t get the words out. You are that moved by it all. That’s the difference. That’s the difference between a caricature, a mentalised, one-dimensional construct, and living it in your soul, BHMS, living it in your soul. That’s the difference.

And then you have that equal and opposite revulsion to the exact equal and opposite of that somewhere else. You know, like they don’t offer you a meal, they don’t offer you some love. You’re a weary traveller, while some little girl’s been raped in a room upstairs. Yeah. What are they doing with you?

Sukh: Oh my gosh, Paulie, I literally was welling up pretty much throughout you explaining and sharing all of that.

Paul: Me too. Me too. And it’s not a fiction. It’s allegory. It’s true. That’s what allegory is. Allegory is something where the story itself isn’t true, but it is more true than most stories. You’re wanting some one-dimensional story to fire up some one-dimensional living. You can’t. That’s not living. Now, there’s living. Your heart’s got to be—that’s what God means by a heart of flesh. That’s a heart of flesh. By going into a kitchen where a heart of flesh is at full flow. And your heart fills with that. Fills with that. You’re feeding on more than bread and bean soup. You’re feeding on God’s spirit in the essence of this beautiful setup—this beautiful kitchen, this beautiful woman. You’re being nurtured by what should be an everyday experience. And it isn’t, and you know it, so you well up. That’s what it is. And when you experience that in a blossom, in a flower, in a tree, when you experience that in a child, that’s when you know you’re moving into Christ. And the fact that you’re asking these questions means you’re moving into Christ, too. Inside that kitchen with that bean soup, and with that lovely bread, and with her heart, her soul, and her being, she was putting love and prayer into this meal.

She isn’t doing it as some hot, flushed, angry woman who’s just trying to get done and get you the hell out of the kitchen so she can have her life back. That’s a very different experience. Still bean soup, still bread, but she’s slamming around the place. You know what I’m trying to say? Definitely not the story here. The answer is, how is it real living? I tell you when it’s real living: when it’s real. What makes it real then? That’s the answer. But what is it? It is that inside this woman was God’s constitution. She was constituted in her Lord and in the spirit of our God. Of our Lord, of our King, of our Redeemer, of our Dad. She was well-constituted in the spirit of our Lord. Real living is divinely constituted. Anything else is the satanic fakery. The satanic counterfeit version of it. In God’s constitution, when he says love your neighbour, when he says love your enemy, what he’s saying is that if you are truly loving, you can’t decide who not to love because you are loving. If there is a tree, you’ll love it. Okay? If there is something awful and terrible happening, you will find a way to love the person who’s on the wrong end of that. You’ll find a way to love the person who’s on the perpetrating end of that—the predatory version of it. But you will do so sometimes with firmness and aggression, even, but you will love. Because once you are a truly loving person in Christ, whether you’re baking bread or making bean soup on your mother’s Aga, in your country kitchen, or in some high-rise building for that matter, in New York, with your mother’s Aga, whatever it may be, the bottom line is this woman could not not love you, and you could not be loved, no matter who you were. If you were a serial killer, you could not walk into that kitchen, sit down and not be loved. You are in the womb of God’s love. That woman, the kitchen, and the food is constituted in real love. And real love loves. It doesn’t not love because that person’s a bad person, because that person’s your enemy.

And that’s what he means by love your enemy. He means be constituted in love. Therefore, when you love God with all your heart, and he loves you back, you have this divine, natural symbiosis that leads to God’s constitutional love. And that is just a building, wherever you go.

Related articles:

The Most Powerful Hour Of My Life: A Spiritual Morning Routine – By Paul S. Waugh Paul S. Waugh Prayer – The Help Principle – 18th May 2026 The Strategic Wind-Up: Understanding Value, Control, and the Kingdom of God, 22nd Nov 2025 Humanity’s Problem with Problems by Paul S. Waugh