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Jul 03, 2011

The Presence: Who Gets It?

Passage: 2 Chronicles 14-15

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: God's Presence

Category: Christian Walk

Keywords: worship, god's presence, church, revival, renewal

Summary:

This message looks at who is a candidate for God's surprising manifest presence. Must we be a certain spirituality for God to meet us this way? Is there anything we can do to invite God's presence more and more?

Detail:

The Presence—WHO Does God Meet with His Manifest Presence?

July 3, 2011 

VIDEO Intro:  Session 4 of The Presence DVD; 0:00-1:43—testimonies of people about the presence of God. 

Those are some of our fellow Washingtonians talking about what their experience has been with the presence of God.  I’ve met most of them and sat in on some of their times of prayer and worship.  Believe me, they have been wonderful.  That is one reason why I am so passionate for us to experience God’s presence here in Spokane, here at Mosaic, right downtown where His presence is most needed in this city.

REVIEW: 

  • We’re in a new, short series:  Experiencing the Presence of God
  • The importance and impact of people’s presence
  • The effect other people have on us depends on
    • Their character
    • Their actions that flow from that
  • The presence of God is experienced on 3 levels:
    • Essential presence
    • Cultivated presence
    • Manifest presence

Each builds on the previous.

  • Exodus 33—Moses’ plea with God not to send them to the Promised Land without His manifest presence.  Ending of his prayer to God about that:  “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”  [Ex. 33:15-16]

Q:  Why is God’s evident or palpable presence so important for us today personally and as a church?  What won’t happen if we don’t experience his presence?  What will happen if we do?

[Hear from people.]

I’d like each of us to take a moment right now and write out on your sermon notes a response to a couple of questions that may help us understand how, where and when God is seeking to make his manifest presence known to us.

1.)    In the past, how have I sensed God’s presence in my life?

2.)    At the present time in my life, how is God revealing Himself to me?  (In what ways or through what means is God speaking into my life?)

Today I would like to address the question, “To what kind of people does God manifest his presence?”  Do we have to be a certain age, a certain spiritual maturity, a certain disposition, or at a certain level of obedience?  What kind of person or group of people does God choose to manifest his transforming presence among?  Are there things we can do to prepare the way for the presence of the Lord?  Invite God to meet us with his manifest presence?

It may surprise you just WHO God manifests himself to and WHEN he does that.  In fact, perhaps the manifest presence of God can be described simply as SURPRISING.  He doesn’t necessarily work on our time schedule or choose to pull back the veil usually obscuring his presence in the ways we expect. So let’s look at a few instances in Scripture WHERE God manifested his presence and to WHOM he showed himself.

God manifests himself to SAINTS & SINNERS, but their responses usually differ greatly.

When I say “saints,” I don’t mean somebody that the Roman Catholic church has beatified or declared a “saint” based on some arbitrary church standard. “Saints” according to the Bible are anyone who has put their faith in Jesus Christ for forgiveness of sins and new life in the Holy Spirit.  The moment you are born again by the Spirit, the moment you believe in Jesus and choose to follow Him the rest of your life, you are declared by God to be a “saint.”

      Most of us don’t have trouble believing that God would reveal himself to “saintly” people—people who seem really pious, holy and good.  It’s your every-day, run-of-the-mill Christian like us we have difficulty believing God will display his presence to. 

      But God repeatedly shows up and reveals himself to people who are far from perfect.  He seems to be constantly meeting with in life-transforming ways people who are anything but perfect.  In fact, often he seems to choose to reveal his presence to them when we might least expect them to deserve it.  Just think about a few of the following biblical “saints.”

  • Adam & Eve:  We understand how God would like to daily walk with them “in the cool of the day” (morning & evening?—Gen 3:8).  But he actually went seeking them out after they sinned and were ashamed.  They didn’t really want his presence at that time, did they?  They were having enough trouble with the shame they felt before each other let alone God.  They were sinners who were trying to hide themselves and the effects of their sin from God when God chose to seek them out and reveal more of himself to them—more of his truth, more of his fatherly discipline, more of his sternness and his love.  I’m guessing they were pretty surprised by all the new things they learned and experience of God that day they sinned for the first time.  They discovered perhaps more about God that day they sinned and ran from him than the days in which they didn’t sin and walked with him.  It wasn’t all pleasant and easy revelation; but it was good and right.
  • Cain—God went after him when his anger was seething against Able…and God.  Sin was “crouching at the door” desiring to dominate him and God called out to him to master it rather than let it master him. He listened to his own anger instead of God.  And what kinds of further “revelations” of God did that produce?  Judgment.
  • Jacob:  When Jacob cheated Esau out of his first-born blessing and decided to run for his life to his uncle, Laban, God meets him in a manifest way at a place called Bethel.  God goes after people who are running from facing the music, running from the consequences of their sins, running from even God himself. 
  • Moses:  God let Moses run from his murder in Egypt for 40 years. He let him run from his calling to be a deliver of his people. He let him run deep into the desert, deep into sheep-herding, deep into isolation and loneliness.  And then he revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush on the back side of the desert.
  • But one of the most interesting encounters of God with people who were anything but obedient comes in Exodus 5.  Moses is recounting what happened to God’ people while he and the elders of the tribes and Aaron were on the Mount of God that was ablaze with fire due to the presence of God.  This is what happened according to Exodus 5:23-33.

23 When you heard the voice out of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire, all the leading men of your tribes and your elders came to me. 24 And you said, “The LORD our God has shown us his glory and his majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a man can live even if God speaks with him. 25 But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any longer. 26 For what mortal man has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire, as we have, and survived? 27 Go near and listen to all that the LORD our God says. Then tell us whatever the LORD our God tells you. We will listen and obey.”

 28 The LORD heard you when you spoke to me and the LORD said to me, “I have heard what this people said to you. Everything they said was good. 29 Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!

 30 “Go, tell them to return to their tents. 31 But you stay here with me so that I may give you all the commands, decrees and laws you are to teach them to follow in the land I am giving them to possess.”

 32 So be careful to do what the LORD your God has commanded you; do not turn aside to the right or to the left. 33 Walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess.

      When God comes near and reveals himself in palpable ways, many people…perhaps most people…will not want Him to continue to speak to them. The presence of God is not necessarily comfortable.  In fact, it is often just the reverse: it makes us uncomfortable, at least until we deal properly with our own rebellion and sinfulness.  Moses had to do that at the burning bush and enjoyed a lifetime of God’s manifest presence.  The Israelites could have done it at Mt. Horeb, but they opted out and suffered under a lifetime of wandering in the desert.   

ILL:  This past week, I was having breakfast with a few pastors in Spokane. I asked them, “What do you think it will be like in our churches when God reveals himself in revival fire?” 

      One of them responded immediately, “Our churches will get smaller.”

      “What do you mean,” I asked, a bit surprised. 

      “Well, many people who today are very comfortable in church with a diminished presence of God will be very uncomfortable in church with an increased presence of God.” 

If Deuteronomy 5 is any indication, I’m afraid he is right.  The reviving presence of God may eventually lead to a church growing and new people coming to faith in Jesus.  But it will probably initially lead to some people getting very upset, digging in their heals and telling spiritual leaders, “over my dead body” when it comes to deeper holiness and personal devotion to the Kingdom. 

ILL:  The great Puritan Jonathan Edwards was one of the key people God used in what is known as the First Great Awakening in America from 1734-1750.  Though used greatly of God to bring thousands of people into faith in Jesus Christ, Edwards was fired from his home church on June 22, 1750, by a vote of 230 to 23.  He had dared to object strongly to what was known as “the Halfway Covenant,” a New England church custom that permitted baptized persons to have all the privileges of church membership except communion although they had not openly professed conversion.  (I guess those church members were just sort of “halfway Christians.”  Kind of like being “half-way pregnant.”  There is no such thing, right?)

ILL:  Unfortunately, that is precisely where we are as a church in America today.  Only 16% of born again Christians polled in America identify their faith in God as the leading priority of their lives. [George Barna, Has The Economy Influenced American Priorities? On-line article at www.barna.org/culture-articles/405.]  Lifestyles bear that out as studies show that we American Christians pretty much mirror our secular friends and neighbors when it comes to financial, social, sexual, business and marriage behaviors. 

The good news, however, is that our God is still a God who reveals his awesome presence to people who seem like the last candidates in the world for a manifestation of God’s presence. 

  • Saul on the road to Damascus to kill Christians.
  • Simon the Sorcerer who, in Acts 8, thought he could buy the powerful presence of God and use it for personal gain.
  • A centurion who took part in the crucifixion of Jesus.
  • A thief who died on the cross next to Jesus.
  • A doubting Thomas who wouldn’t believe the reports from his own friends about the resurrected Jesus.
  • A woman caught in the act of adultery (Jn. 8).
  • A man crippled by his own sin and self-pity.

US!  Every one of us was an enemy of God, many of us running as fast and hard from God as we could, when Jesus first made his presence known to us through conviction of our sin and that heart-desire to surrender to His loving, saving grace. 

[INVITATION to begin experiencing God by faith in Jesus.]

So the really good news is that God even reveals himself to people who don’t want to encounter him.  He goes after us when we are running away from him. He seeks us out when we want to hide out.

But when it comes to experiencing the manifest presence of God in ongoing, repeated, continual ways that revive our hearts and transform us over and over again, there are some common threads running through a spiritually vibrant, alive and renewed people of God.

  • It doesn’t have to do with age:  both the elderly man Abraham and the young boy Samuel experienced the up-close presence of God. 
  • It doesn’t have to do with race or nationality:  Jews and Gentiles alike experienced the outpouring of God’s presence in the N.T. church.
  • It doesn’t have to do with gender or race or education or socio-economic level or even how long you’ve had a relationship with God.  It has everything to do with our HEARTS.

Jesus’ message to the 7 churches in the book of Revelation are given virtually 2 generations after the Gospel swept through Asia Minor so radically changing people in each of these cities.  But just 2 generations after such amazing transformation of so many people by the power of the Gospel, God sends virtually the same message to 5 of the 7 churches.  70% of those once vibrant churches needed to correct something. And the only way to do that was by what God calls “repentance.”   5 of those 7 churches were told to “repent”.  The sins varied somewhat (and overlapped at times), but the needed response was the same:  REPENT!

  1. Ephesus:  for having “forsaken [their] first love.”  (Rev. 2:4)
  2. Pergamum:  for compromising with the worldly culture around them by sharing in food offered to idols and engaging in sexual immorality.
  3. Thyatira:  for pretty much the same thing—compromising holiness by sharing in the sins of the culture (food offered to idols and sexual immorality).  (Rev. 3:18ff)
  4. Sardis: spiritually dead (though a reputation of really being ‘alive’), spiritually asleep; needed to remember what they had received, obey it and repent. (Rev. 3:1ff)
  5. Laodicea:  lukewarm in their actions; saw themselves as well-to-do and in need of nothing when God saw them as “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”  Repentance involved hearing God’s voice at their door and opening it to Him.  (Rev. 3:14ff)

Virtually every recorded revival and spiritual renewal has included some form of repentance by people. 

  • Alec Rowland’s experience in S. Africa in his father’s church—repentance gripped people when God’s reviving fire fell.
  • 5 of these 7 churches:  repentance was the only way to stay God’s judgment and their spiritual demise.
  • And when it comes to the Old Testament revivals, of which there were many, repentance always played a critical role in any and every revival God brought to his people. 

Just look at one example as we close today.  There are two kings of Judah that appear back-to-back in 2 Chronicles 14-21.  They are the father-son duo of King Asa and King Jehoshaphat.  We’ll look only briefly at Asa today.

      Asa is said to have done “what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God” because he removed the foreign altars and the high places.  He “commanded Judah to seek the Lord…and to obey his laws and commands” (14:5). 

      APP:  Granted, none of us is a monarch with absolute power over an entire nation as was Asa.  But a child of God doesn’t develop a passion for holiness without first dealing with his own life.  Most of us probably have some compromises to our culture that we’ve made, some “foreign altars and high places” that we give offerings of time or affection or resources. If God said to us, “Get rid of your own altars of compromise and accommodation to your culture and then we can talk about revival and spiritual renewal, what might be the ‘names’ of some of those things?  [Allow people to comment.]

Once the “high places and foreign altars” had been dealt with, the people of God in Judah were ready to enter into some fresh covenants/fresh commitments to seek God “with all their heart and soul” (2 Chron. 15:12).  Look at a couple of amazing statements in chapter 15.

  • Vs. 2—The prophet Azariah told Asa, “Listen to me….  The Lord is with you when you are with him.  If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.”
  • Vs. 12—After repairing the altar of the Lord, he called all Judah to get together at Jerusalem and offer sacrifices to the Lord.  This is what happened.  “They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord…with all their heart and soul.”  Vs. 15—“All Judah rejoiced about the oath because they had sworn it wholeheartedly.  They sought God eagerly, and he was found by them.”

Unfortunately, Asa’s end was not as strong as his beginning.  He finished his reign by making unholy alliances with king Ben-Hadad that resulted in war and physical illness for the rest of his reign. 

Do you notice a common thread running through God’s commentary about Asa and the nation of Judah under his reign?  It’s all about seeking the Lord wholeheartedly, no?  Asa sought to be a man who was “with” the Lord.  He sought the Lord wholeheartedly…and he taught the people of God to do the same…with “all their heart and soul…wholeheartedly…eagerly.” 

ILL:  Last week I mentioned a conversation I had the week before with Ajay Palai from India.  In the course of that breakfast, I asked Ajay where the pastors of India most often experienced defeat and moral failure.  He thought for a moment and said, “You know, the most obvious sin the enemy attacks them with is misuse of money.” We went on to talk about what life is like ministering the Gospel in a nation where you are often beat up and sometimes killed for preaching Christ.  We all shook our heads marveling at how our Indian brothers and sisters stand for Christ against truly life-threatening enemies. 

      Then Ajay said something that really caught me off guard.  He said, “You know, you may marvel at the strength of the church in India in the face of persecution, but the believers in India really truly marvel at how anyone in the American church can stand up against the constant pressure of so many constant distractions pulling you away from simple devotion to Jesus Christ.  They see it as equally astonishing that many more American Christians do not cave in and succumb to the draw of so many worldly distractions as there are in our culture.” 

Asa sought the Lord “wholeheartedly.”  And in so doing, he set the pace for the rest of Judah.  They followed by entering into a new agreement, a new covenant, with the Lord “to seek the Lord…with all their heart and soul…wholeheartedly…eagerly.”

This is, along with hearts that are open to repentance when God says “repent,” THE most important characteristic of those who would live to see God’s reviving work. 

      No church does this perfectly.  But I’ve been privileged to watch Alec Rowland’s church in Edmonds through the past 5 or 6 years.  And I’ve been impressed how passionately and consistently so many in his church seem to seek God eagerly, wholeheartedly and with all their heart and soul. 

      Alec is the first to tell you his church has more distance to cover, that it isn’t perfect by any means.  But their story is encouraging because it is about people just like you and me.  Listen as Alec shares a bit of the journey they have gone through in the last 20+ years. 

[Video:  Chapter 5: 6:55-18:18]

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