HIS PRESENCE

I listened to Graham Cooke a couple of weeks ago, and he said something that really made me think and challenged me to think differently.

He said that often we can spend so much time praying for God’s presence to come, and it sounds so good and even very spiritual because it's all about hungering for more of God. That’s good, isn’t it? That’s what I do, but then he burst my bubble by saying Has God's presence run away from you, so where has He gone. See, God's word says the opposite. Even in the garden of Eden, after Adan and Eve sinned and hid from God, and God came pursuing them Where are you, Adam. The last thing God told His disciples was Go I’m with you until the end of the age. They went knowing God was with them. God is always running to us, not from us. Actually, it says when sin abounds, God's grace abounds even more. It would be far better to come and say you are here. Open my eyes to see and be aware of your presence that’s always here. In actual fact, He lives in us, we are the temple of His Holy Spirit and presence. How does He run away from us? We often use David as an example when we read the psalms, where we see David crying out for God's presence in a dry and weary place, but we have to put it in context. In the OT, the spirit of God wasn’t in people. God came upon people to perform certain tasks. In the Old Testament, God's presence and glory literally rested on the ark of the covenant. When David cried out for God's presence, he was talking about coming before the ark of God’s presence, but he couldn’t get there because he was hiding and running from King Saul. Remember when David became King, the first thing he did was go and get the ark of the covenant, and he brought it to Jerusalem and set it up on Mount Zion under a makeshift tent. The temple wasn’t even built then. When they came into the promised land, it was kept in the Tabernacle of Moses in Shiloh and later Bethel. It was stolen by the Philistines for a short time, and when they got it back, they kept it at the house of Abinadab for a number of years until David came and got it. Then it was placed in the temple that Solomon built. To encounter His presence, you had to come to the tabernacle to worship.

But now we are God's temple. He lives in us. So maybe we need to change our prayers. Lord, you are always here. Open the eyes of my heart to be more aware. You haven’t gone anywhere.