SEPTEMBER 26: The Manifest Presence

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1 SEPTEMBER 26: The Manifest Presence The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. Proverbs 15:3 The omnipresence of the Lord is one thing, and is a solemn fact necessary to His perfection. The manifest Presence is another thing altogether, and from that Presence we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the trees of the garden, or like Peter, to shrink away crying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord (Luke 5:8). So the life of man upon the earth is a life away from the Presence, wrenched loose from that blissful center which is our right and proper dwelling place, our first estate which we kept not, the loss of which is the cause of our unceasing restlessness. The Holy Spirit is God, and the most important thing is that the Holy Spirit is present now. There is unseen deity present. I cannot bring Him to you; I can only tell you that He is here. 1 1

2 SEPTEMBER 27: Saved to Worship Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty. 1 Chronicles 29:11 I believe a local church exists to do corporately what each Christian believer should be doing individually and that is to worship God. We are saved to worship God. All that Christ has done for us in the past and all that He is doing now leads to this one end. If we are denying this truth and if we are saying that worship is not really important, we can blame our attitudes for the great wave of arrested development in our Christian fellowships. Why should the church of Jesus Christ be a spiritual school where hardly anyone ever graduates from the first grade? Do you love Jesus for the divine glories of His person, for the excellence of His life, for the benefits of His death, for the prevalence of His intercession, for His resurrection, His dominion over the world, and His office as the supreme and final Judge? Are the feelings of your heart drawn out towards Christ as your chief joy? Can you sit down under His shadow with great delight, and find His fruit sweet to your taste? 2 2

3 SEPTEMBER 28: When God Breaks Through I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the LORD. Then the LORD put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. Jeremiah 1:8 9 Pascal wrote on a piece of paper a brief account of his experience, folded the paper and kept it in a pocket close to his heart, apparently as a reminder of what he had felt. Those who attended him at his death found the worn, creased paper. In Pascal s own hand it read: From about half-past ten at night to about half-after midnight fire! O God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob not the God of the philosophers and the wise. The God of Jesus Christ who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. Security feeling peace joy tears of joy. Amen. Were these the expressions of a fanatic, an extremist? No. Pascal s mind was one of the greatest. But the living God had broken through and beyond all that was human and intellectual and philosophical. The astonished Pascal could only describe in one word the visitation in his spirit: Fire!. What we need among us is a genuine visitation of the Spirit. Nothing can prevent the spiritual rejuvenation of the soul that insists upon having it. 3 3

4 SEPTEMBER 29: The Being and the Seeing They shall know that I am the LORD their God that I may dwell among them: I am the LORD their God. Exodus 29:46 Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible; he tried to hide from the presence of God. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? (Psalm 139:7). Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me (139:8 10). And he knew that God s being and God s seeing are the same, that the seeing Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His presence. 4 4

5 SEPTEMBER 30: God Will Manifest Himself And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? Genesis 3:9 If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world? The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His presence. On our part, there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His work is to show us the Father and the Son. If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face. Oh, may He come to us now and light up the sanctuary of our hearts until they shall shine like the chambers above! May He open to our vision His own immediate, everlasting presence! Amen! 5 5