Sensitive?

This week's lesson has yet to happen in person.

"Are You More Sensitive to God's Presence?"

You may have had a unique God experience at camp, during a quiet alone time, in a Sunday service, looking at a baby, reading a book, or so many other times.

"But how often are you aware of the presence of God?  If we take the teaching of the Bible seriously, perception of God should not be an occasional experience." (pg. 52)

Continual awareness of God's presence helps with growing in the spiritual disciplines, fighting besetting sin, and depending on God more and more.

The presence of God is made known in so many different ways.  Through the universal presence of God, his omnipresence is that God is everywhere but is not everything.  The Christological presence of God is the fact that Jesus is God.  God is present in the believer through the indwelling presence of God.  In sermons and specific work on earth, the perceptible presence of God is known.  God's heavenly presence is what heaven is all about.  People often focus on the streets of gold, the "mansion," and seeing loved ones.  But the new heaven and new earth will be about God.  The eternal presence of God will be known through love and mercy OR divine wrath and justice.

We need to seek God "through His Word; or through experiences which are founded on His Word (such as biblical worship); or through daily life in ways that are informed by His Word (such as doing our work "as to the Lord," Ephesians 6:7)."  Knowing God's presence must go through His word not our emotions and experiences.  

We can grow through God's Desertions.

These desertions are not because God has left us but because we feel he has left us.

“If, while reading this chapter, you’ve thought, I haven’t been sensing God’s presence much lately, take note that it’s one thing to long for a sense of God’s presence while not experiencing it, and another to live routinely with no awareness of His absence.”

Some Practical Ways to Grow In Our Awareness of God’s Presence:

• Go often to where God has revealed Himself most clearly—the Bible.
• Acknowledge His presence with you by talking with Him.
• Seek Him in manifesting His presence, which is given only in congregational worship.
• Continually reaffirm the truth that He is omnipresent. God seems so far away.