Desperation For God's Presence

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Introduction: Being desperate for God isn’t about acquiring His presence in our lives—we must already believe that God will always be with us and the Holy Spirit will accompany us everywhere. It’s about knowing He already exists in our lives—this desperate need for God stems from already having a relationship with Him, and wanting more of Him so that we are reduced to nothing.

A widespread cry is growing in the hearts of believers for a real, tangible encounter with God. They want, like Moses, to see Him face to face. They don't want only to read about Him, have head knowledge of Him, talk about Him, and pay homage to Him on Sunday mornings. This strong undercurrent in our nation manifests as a holy dissatisfaction with the status quo of the institutional and traditional church. Many people who have attended church faithfully for years are now wandering around disconnected from any connectedness to the Body of Christ. Researcher George Barna estimates that more than ten million born-again believers in the United States are now considered "unchurched." People have become disillusioned and jaded, many are unwilling to return to the local church in its current condition.

What are people longing for? God being Omnipresent is just not enough for them. I believe it's the presence of God in the midst of His people, the manifestation of His nearness, and an awareness of His love that is both real and relevant. We desperately need the tangible presence of Jesus both in the church and in our communities!

God is looking for people with a heart like David, who declared: "One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple" (Ps. 27:4, italics added NKJ).

David’s desperation

Specifically, we can trace this desperation for God back to David, who wrote Psalm 63 while he was in the Desert of Judah.

David’s language in Psalm 63:1 is not only poetic, but desperate. The NIV and similar other translations have David “earnestly” seeking God—David’s “whole being” thirsting and longing for God. One translation says that not only did David “eagerly” seek God but that his body “faints” for Him.

The sons of Korah had similar things to say in Psalm 84, saying that they “long and yearn for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh cry out for the living God.” (Psalm 84:2)

These verses do more than show Old Testament writers who were desperate for God—they show men who were desperate for more of God. In Psalm 63, David immediately exclaims that God’s “faithful love is better than life” (Psalm 63:3), clearly showing that he already has a relationship with this God he “faints” and thirsts for.

These are not people seeking God for the first time—these are children seeking more of Him.

There is an unsurprising lack of poetry throughout the New Testament, so finding similar language in the days after Jesus is trickier. But one need only look to reminders to “seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6) and “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33) to see that God never provides us with an end-date to seeking Him. We are to do so continually, through all of our days here on Earth, until He comes again, or we are taken to Him.

What is desperation for God’s presence?

Many people dismiss this desperate longing for more of God by relying on a dictionary definition of “desperate.” The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “feeling or showing a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.”

This does not sound like the sense of hope we know God provides His children. But any English teacher or student will surely be able to point to the fact that words have multiple definitions, or variations on a definition. Such is the case with “desperate” which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, also has a predicative definition which reads; “(Of a person) having a great need or desire for something”, such as a drink of water or relationship with people.

This is the desperation that we should have for God—a great need or desire for God.

Jon Bloom, author and co-founder of Desiring God, writes that “the lack of a sense of desperation for God” is deadly. Bloom speaks specifically of the easy lifestyle in America “in which it costs the least to be a Christian” compared to the “hard struggle with sufferings” (Hebrews 10:32) that many missionaries face day to day. “If we don’t feel desperate for God, we don’t tend to cry out to him.”

? And this leads to spiritual death.