Introduction:
A.W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous- One of their big milk companies makes capital of the fact that their cows are all satisfied with their lot in life. Their clever ads have made the term “contented cows” familiar to everyone. But what is virtue in a cow may be a vice in a man. And contentment, when it touches spiritual things, is surely a vice. Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness. One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency…Orthodox Christianity has fallen to its present low estate from lack of spiritual desire. Among the many who profess the Christian faith, scarcely one in a thousand reveals any passionate thirst for God.
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Our lack for the spiritual attributes of God is self-evident and those that have a passionate thirst for God. It is not that we lack opportunity for God is everywhere.
I. God’s Omnipresence:
1. God’s omnipresence fills the entire world, if this is the case then why can’t we feel that same presence in a mighty way right here in our hearts.
2. However there are stipulations in experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit.
3. The high priest before he went into the holy of holies he had to go through a ceremonial cleansing and he did not do everything that was required he was struck down dead.
4. God did this so that we would not only love him but also fear him.
5. In order to feel this powerful presence we must be a clean vessel.
6. Illustration: For instance if you were in a room filled with human and animal waste all over the floors.
7. Some was smeared on the walls, flies were everywhere along with the cockroaches that would run around in broad daylight.
8. Dirty foal clothes that reek with human body odor fill the room in piles.
9. Sprinkling the room like confectionary sugar was food moldy and filled with maggots.
10. You were standing in the middle of all this you would positively feel out of place and look for the nearest exit to go and vomit.
11. Just exactly how you feel just thinking about this is how the Holy Spirit feels in or near a body filled with sin.
12. Giving in to our weaknesses all the time nauseates him and make him want to vomit.
13. When we ask for forgiveness we reestablish our relationship with him.
14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer -Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a struggle until the sin is openly admitted, but God breaks gates of brass and bars of iron (Ps. 107:16).
Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother. The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin. It can no longer tear the fellowship asunder. Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother. He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God. It has been taken away from him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God and the cross of Jesus Christ… The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham; the sin confessed has helped him define true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 112-113.
15. He is there to bring us back into fellowship with God forever whispering in our ears to say Jesus has a better way.
16. Listen to me and I will guide you into his truth, the truth of life.
17. So instead of saying yes to our weaknesses we need to adopt the drug slogan, “Just Say No” to sin.
18. The more we say no the stronger we will get in that specific area and the more the Holy Spirit we will experience in our daily living.
19. Moses said no to the pleasures of Egypt, traded all the power, wealth and women to have an experience with God.
20. Solomon said in Ecclesiastes that all the pleasures that you can find under the sun is meaningless and vain.
21. Ecclesiastes 1:14
14I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
22. Judas Iscariot traded his experience with the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver.
23. Jesus told him that if you trade in your experience with me, it would be better if you had never been born.
24. In hell the memories, the opportunities that he had and experienced would torment him mentally just as much as the fire and worms would torment him physically.
25. In the book The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. 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.
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God presence is everywhere we need his Godly presence in our lives to settle the restlessness and uneasiness we feel deep into out hearts.
II. The Restless Soul:
1. Is trying to find a cure for itself.
2. Within every person there is hollowness, an emptiness that we all try to fill in with something.
3. We are all in search of a cure a remedy a quick fix.
4. Humor-A little girl became restless in church as the preacher’s sermon dragged on and on. Finally, she leaned over to her mother and whispered, "Mommy, if we give him the money now, will he let us go?" Contributed by: Tim Gresham
5. This is the feeling that the world has today, restless for something.
6. If we could buy it off the shelf we would no matter what the cost.
7. If we could go somewhere to find it we would.
8. The Beatles in 1968 went to India for two months studying and practicing Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
9. They were trying to find a cure for their restlessness only to become disillusioned.
10. They stormed out of the compound when they suspected he was using them for financial gain and that he was hitting on their women.
11. See even the Beatles was looking for something or someone that was pure, innocent, genuine something that would fill the void that they were unable to find in wealth and fame.
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The restless soul is always wanting but not looking in the right places and when they do find it the devil gets them to relax, take it easy, be mediocre this is the best you could ever hope to ever expect from God.
III. Mediocrity:
1. What does it mean to be Mediocre?
2. It is a person who is Moderate to inferior in quality, ordinary, or average with everything they do and want.
3. They settle for junk when they can have top quality, the very best.
4. Why settle for hotdogs when you could have steaks.
5. We need to not settle for second best when God wants to give us the very best that he has to offer.
6. Charles Swindoll says that competitive excellence requires one hundred percent all of the time. If you doubt that, try maintaining excellence by setting your standards at 92 percent. Or even 95 percent. People figure they’re doing fine so long as they get somewhat near it. Excellence gets reduced to acceptable, and before long, acceptable doesn’t seem worth the sweat if you can get by with the adequate. After that mediocrity is just a breath away. Ever tracked the consequences of the “almost but not quite”? Thanks to some fine research by Natalie Gabal, I woke to a whole new awareness of what would happen if 99.9 percent were considered good enough. If that were true, then this year alone…2,000,000 documents would be lost by the IRS; 12 babies would be given to the wrong parents each day; 291 operations would be performed incorrectly; 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions would be written; 114,500 mismatched shoes would be shipped (to just cite a few examples).
7. That is fascinating.
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We need push ourselves to the limit, to reach higher and farther than we have ever reach, we have to hunger and thirst for it above all else.
IV. We Need to be Pushing Into His Presence:
1. How many of you have experiences of which you will never forget.
2. Experiences that were so meaningful to you that just thinking about it send chills up your spine and a warm smile to your face. (Ask for a show of hands)
3. The same number of people that raised your hand if I were to tell you that you have thirty seconds in one sentence tell about that experience indelibly written in the forefront of your memory, could you do it?
4. We fail to realize that God wants to give us experiences with him that we will never forget.
5. Paul caught up to the third heavens in 2 Corinthians 12:2 as he put it seen things that were to great for him to mention.
6. John on the Island of Patmos.
7. Moses with the burning bush in the desert his face glowed from being in the presence of the Lord.
8. Paul and Silas after they were flogged for the sake of Christ had an experience with Jesus that shook the foundations of the prison and unloosed every shackle.
9. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
10. This is the kind of experience tailored made just for you that Jesus wants to give you.
11. He wants too if only we can just keep our nose clean long enough for us to experience him.
12. A.W. Tozer says, “God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole life there.
13. This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held, it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day.”
Conclusion:
Tommy Tenney, The God Chasers- The reason people who know you aren’t interested in your God may be because you don’t have enough of the presence of God in your life. There is something about God’s presence that makes everything else crumble in comparison. Without it, you will be just as pale and lifeless as everybody else around you. No matter what you do, without His presence, you will be “just another somebody” to those around you.
"I don’t know about you, but I am tired of just being ‘another somebody’ to the lost around me. I have made a decision. I made up my mind and set my heart to declare, ‘I am going to pursue the presence of God in my life. I am going to get so close to God that when I walk into secular and public places, people will meet Him.’ They may not know that I’m there, but they will definitely know that He is there. I want to be so saturated with God’s presence that when I take a seat on a plane, then everyone near me will suddenly feel uncomfortable if they’re not right with God – even though I haven’t said a word." I’m not wanting to condemn or to convict them; I just want to carry the fragrance of my Father with me.
Wherever we go the people around us will not only feel his presence through us but he right hand will hold us fast wherever we go.
