While it's true that God is with us always, it is also true that each of us needs to make time for Him individually. In order to receive soul nourishment, we need to meet with God. So that we are better able to love, we must make time to intentionally go before the throne of grace and sit at the feet of Love.
In the spirit of a child, we need to sit at His feet and say 'Teach me God. Teach me to love. Teach me to be Jesus'.
It's pretty near impossible to describe, what it means to spend time in the Presence of the Lord. Maybe that's the point: that God cannot be contained by mere human linguistics. Somehow it has to do with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I think it somehow has to do with all things good. It has to do with intentionally acknowledging the richness of God's Presence, because even though God is with us all the time, hardly do we always acknowledge that He is with us.
This morning I met with God.
Even as I will attempt to relay the interaction to you my words will not fully envelope the experience, because firstly, they are only words and God goes beyond them. Secondly, it is my experience. You are meant to have your own.
[So go ahead and engage God; He's always down for some friend time].
Sunday mornings are some of my favorite times in my life right now because I don't have to go to work, I don't have to get up for class, and I don't have church as my congregation meets on Sunday evenings. My Sunday mornings are restful and open, free for me to spend them as I desire or often however I need. Some mornings I sleep in while others I clean my mess of an apartment.
Some mornings, however, I engage God.
Like today.
Quiet time. Meditation. Encountering. Solitude.
Whichever word you'd like to reduce it down to, it looked like this:
I stumbled into my kitchen very aware of the snot dripping down my nose (welcome, allergy season!) and the tugging of my heartstrings that told me I needed to be with God. Life's been busy, and God's been somewhat in the back of my mind lately. There, but not really embraced. Sort of like a mental safety net just in case I needed Him, which is ridiculous of me to think that a moment would ever come in which I would not need Him.
We always need Him, every moment of every day.
So anyway I stumbled into my kitchen to brew a cup of the best damn coffee ever in existence (Caribou Arabica blend, medium roast, from Colorado) to wake me up and settled into the comfy living room chair with three of my favorite books currently: Anything by Jennie Allen, My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, and ye good 'ol Bible.
Some days I meet with God on my knees, facedown in confession or sweet surrender. Other days I find Him among the trees, a top a mountain, in the middle of a field. Some days it's lakeside looking skyward and other days it's laying in bed, peaceful and content.
It's doesn't matter where we are-God meets us where we're at.
For a few minutes I just sort of sat there, sipping my coffee and thinking on the things of life, events that have recently transpired both in my own life and in the lives of others among other happenings. Then I began to pray, because for whatever reason I am made for this. The need flows from me.
I'm made to praise God with my words, speaking out His grandeur and beauty. Not that my words add onto His magnificence or that my praise makes Him praiseworthy, but that He already is, and me speaking it out brings an awareness of His majesty to my being.
In praising Him, I begin to comprehend just how incomprehensible He truly is.
And wow, how humbling.
So then I prayed for others, because this transforms me too and suddenly I become aware of the power within words. There's power in praying aloud a name.
And then in speaking the name of Jesus over that person.
There's power in the name of Jesus.
When we pray for others, our hearts begin to succumb to the molding and sculpting of God. In praying for other people, a desire to serve said people began to grow. Love began to move inside me.
Somewhere along the way my words began to speak of the nation that gripped my heart last summer, and I found myself pouring out so much for the men, women, and children of Haiti. I'm not sure when or how, but God wants to use me to love Haiti. Right now it's through prayer and support of Mission of Hope, a ministry doing kingdom things (check them out if you feel so led).
I hadn't poured out for Haiti in awhile, and I needed to. Something about that place reminds me why I'm a Jesus-follower at all. Haiti breathes to life the words of Isaiah 61 for me, in which the author speaks of being sent to proclaim freedom for the captives, releasing the prisoners from darkness to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (v1-2).
Because in a place that seems so dark, the Lord has His hand on that nation. There is hope for Haiti as there is hope for us all, and the author of Isaiah wasn't the only one sent to proclaim freedom.
This is the call of the Jesus-follower.
We are called to proclaim freedom- over the nations, over our own homes, over the homes and lives of others. Over the collective us.
God has asked us to 'preach good news to the poor' (v 1), and this is all of us.
Jesus is the good news, and we all need Jesus.
So then I read some empowering words from author Jennie Allen and was reminded of my need for grace, because we are all broken people living messy lives and then there's Jesus.
And in that time, I can't really put into words how I experienced God. It's more than simply encountering peace or experiencing joy. It goes beyond receiving freedom or engaging grace.
I just know it has something to do with intentionally taking the time to dwell on the source of all of these good things. It's about acknowledging the Father and being empowered by the Holy Spirit so that through the happening of heaven colliding with earth I am able to grow in my knowledge of Jesus Christ.
And when I begin to learn more about Jesus, my life begins to look more like Him.
It's like that overused yet accurate metaphor of the cup: He fills it up so that it overflows. I cannot love, cannot pour out anything good onto others, without Him-the source of love and goodness.
It doesn't look the same for all people. God meets with us in unique ways, yet somehow a common bond that unifies us is His character, His very essence that yearns to collide with ours. His Presence that wraps around us, His incomprehensible Spirit that whispers to us, His Son that spent His life for us.
How overwhelming that God, in all of His splendor and goodness, longs to meet with us, desires to collide His flawless, rich, sweet nature with our messy, broken, imperfect ones.
Messy, sinful, prideful, broken, with or without snot dripping down our noses: God extends His hand and asks us to not simply know about Him but rather He invites us to know Him, deeply, richly, fully.
In knowing Him, we receive love and are then better able to go out into the world to spread that love. When divine love is lived out, a dead world comes alive.
This is what He does: He makes us come alive.
