THE WONDER OF GOD'S PRESENCE

THE WONDER OF GOD'S PRESENCE

"The world is perishing for the lack of the knowledge of God and the
church is famishing for want of His presence. The instant cure of most
religious ills would be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience,
to become suddenly aware that we are in God and God is in us. This would
lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be
enlarged. This would burn away the impurities from our lives as the bugs
and fungi were burned away by the fire that dwelt in the bush.

What a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in is this God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is ETERNAL. He antedates time and is
wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it
He pays no tribute and from it He suffers no change.

He is IMMUTABLE. He has never changed and can never change in any
smallest measure. To change He would need to go from better to worse or
from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being perfect He cannot
become more perfect, and if He were to become more perfect, and if He
were to become less perfect He would be less than God.

He is OMNISCIENT. He knows in on free and effortless act all matter, all
spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no
future. He IS, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms are used of
creatures can apply to Him.

LOVE and MERCY and RIGHTEOUSNESS are His, and HOLINESS is so ineffable
that no comparisons or figures will avail to express it. Only fire can
give even a remote conception of it. In fire He appeared at the burning
bush; in the pillar of fire He dwelt through all the long wilderness
journey. The fire that glowed between the wings of the cherubim in the
holy place was called the Shekinah, the Presence, through the years of
Israel's glory, and when the Old had give place to the New, He came at
Pentecost as a fiery flame and rested on each disciple.

Spinoza wrote of the intellectual love of God, and he had a measure of
truth there. But the highest love of God is not intellectual, it is
spiritual. God is spirit and only the spirit of a man can know Him
really. In the deep spirit of a man the fire must glow or his love is
not the true love of God. The great of the kingdom have been those who
loved God more than others did. We all know who they have been and
gladly pay tribute to the depth and sincerity of their devotion. We have
but to pause for a moment and their names come trooping past us,
smelling of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.

Frederick Faber was one of those whose soul panted after God as the deer
pants after the water brook, and the measure in which God revealed
Himself to his seeking heart set the good man's whole life afire with a
burning adoration rivaling that of the seraphim before the throne. His
love for God extended to the three Persons of the Godhead equally, yet
he seemed to feel for each One a special kind of love reserved for Him
alone." From The Pursuit of God - by A. W. Tozer

How about you this morning? Are you in love with Him? Are you in awe
with the wonder of God's presence? Think about it on this beautiful
Lord's Day!

Great quote: "I have no home until I am in the realized presence of God.
This holy presence is my inward home, and until I experience it, I am a
homeless wanderer, a straying sheep in a waste howling wilderness."
Anonymous, 1841