Making Room For God

Three Reasons Why There Weren’t Room for Jesus

1. Too Crowded

2. Too Busy

3. Distractions

How do we make room for God practically on a daily basis? Spend time alone with God.

However, here are a few ideas:

Talk to God - tell him how you feel and what you’re thinking about.

Listen for his voice - make use of a diary, notebook or journal to record your thoughts and what God says to you.

Read and meditate on his Word, the Bible.

Be still and simply enjoy his presence.

Pray using your spiritual language – It helps you pray according to God’s will and build up spiritual strength.

4 Things Happened When You Make Room For God in Your Life:

1. Joy (2 Kings 4:8 – 10; John 16:21 – 24)

The Shunamite wanted more than a vistation. She made an upper room for the prophet.

An Upper Room - where we encounter the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1)

What are you asking for?

2. Changed Life (Luke 19:5 – 10)

Zach was a sinner yet Jesus spent time in his house.

Priorities Changed; New Appetite. Generosity instead of Greed. You take on Kingdom Personality.

3. Miracles (Mark 2:1)

It was Peter’s house (Chapter 1). There was room in that house. Jesus came back from a tired ministry trip and rested there.

Miracles happened when Jesus was in the House. No publicity and advertising but the place was packed.

4. Burning Hearts (Luke 24:28 – 35)

They compelled Jesus to spend the night with them. There’s room in their house for God. Their hearts burnt and went out telling others about the resurrected Christ.

Practice of the Presence of God – Brother Lawrence

Brother Lawrence was born Nicholas Herman around 1611.

He was captured as a soldier in the Thirty Year War when he was 18, charged with being a spy, and threatened with hanging. Somehow, he managed to convince his captors that he was innocent and was released. Shortly thereafter, he was wounded in a fight with Swedish soldiers, which ended his military service. The atrocities he witnessed led him to become a Christian that same year.

He served as a footman to the treasurer of the King of France, but this was short-lived because Lawrence describes himself as a "clumsy man who broke everything."

He then decided to dedicate himself to the religious life and spent a short time living as a hermit, but gave this up in favor of the communal living of the Carmelite monastic order. He was given the name Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and became a full member of the order in 1642.

At the monastery, he spent most of the time in the kitchen. Initially, Brother Lawrence hated this. For a full decade, he chafed against his situation. "I must tell you, though, that during the first ten years I endured great suffering." Though his first decade as a monk was full of spiritual anguish, one day he experienced a profound peace that never diminished. "I suddenly found myself changed and my soul, which up till then was always disturbed, experienced a profound interior peace." From that day on, Lawrence was overcome with an unusually intense awareness of the presence of God. It was so strong that sometimes he had to consciously keep himself from laughing in the company of others.

No longer dreading work in the kitchen, he now felt as close to God peeling potatoes as he did kneeling at the altar.

This spiritual transformation still left him at odds with his body. After about fourteen years in the kitchen, a chronic case of gout finally got Lawrence transferred to a shoe repair shop. He was never much to behold, physically. Fenelon actually met him and called him "gross by nature and delicate by grace. The mixture is agreeable and shows God in him."

Jesus – ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nest, but the Son of Man has no where to lay His head’

QN: Is there room in your life for God? ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock…’ Revelation 3:20