What Is The Presence Of God? - 2 Corinthians 13:14 Series

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2 Corinthians 13:14 May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Introduction

We are in the midst of a study of the most important topic in the entire Bible – Loving God. We began by looking at the Greatest Commandment and thinking through what it means to love God with your heart (the emotional aspect of love), with your soul (the desire aspect of love), with your mind (the mental aspect), and with your strength (the action aspect of love). Now, after seven weeks of that, hopefully we all have a grip on what love is. So what I would like to do now is turn the corner and talk about how to do it. Having looked into the definition of love, now we turn to the activity of love. What does the Bible teach about how to enjoy God’s love for you, and how to express and increase your love for Him?

Dead Orthodoxy and Superstitious Mysticism

This matter of how to have daily, hourly interaction with God is so incredibly important, and yet it is clouded with so much confusion. If you were not here last week I would urge you to listen through that message, because what I have observed so often is people running back and forth between two deadly errors – superstitious mysticism and dead orthodoxy. Dead orthodoxy turns Christianity into an intellectualized, theoretical, impersonal system of doctrines that make God a king who reigns over our behavior and our thoughts but not our emotions or desires.

People get tired of that. They get tired of lots of truth and information and structure, but no heart and soul. God made us with a need to be moved. Following a religious system is not enough. We want to be moved and deeply touched by real experiences of God that penetrate our entire being. And so they fall out of the back door of dead orthodoxy and run into the front door of superstitious mysticism, where truth takes a back seat and everything is driven by emotion and subjective experience. It feels like the voice of God? – It must be the voice of God. It moves your soul deeply? – it must be the presence of God. It feels like a powerful impulse? – it must be God’s guidance. You have a vision with lots of light and wonderful things? – must be heaven. People who are disillusioned by stale, dead, emotionless orthodoxy are attracted to that.

But when they get into it, they often realize that their experiences may feel powerful, but they are not real. God has given us an appetite for moving experiences, but He has also given us an appetite for reality. The soul gets tired of pretend transcendence that you have to talk yourself into, and that leaves you empty afterward. Superstitious mysticism leaves you empty the moment it is over. After a while people figure that out, and they sense that it is not really real. And their God-given craving for truth draws them out of the mystical churches into churches that feel stable and true and that carry rich, solid tradition and definite authority. So people get thrown back and forth between empty-hearted religion to empty-headed religion.

But if you look at the interactions with God described in the Psalms you see that the most moving and most profound mystical experiences with God are also the ones most deeply rooted in truth. And this study is all about how to have those experiences. The problem with the superstitious mystics is not that they look for a direct experience with God. Their problem is they want to just invent their own ideas of what that looks like. So what we want to do in this study is discover biblical mysticism. What does the Bible say about how to express love for God, how to enjoy God’s expressions of love for you, and what those kinds of interactions with Him look like and feel like? What, exactly is all this eating and drinking and tasting of God?

So let’s begin by defining these terms. We need to do that because fellowship with God and experiencing the presence of God are both concepts that can easily become meaningless abstractions or platitudes.

The Presence of God

Let’s start with the idea of God’s presence. Have you ever thought about what it means when Scripture speaks of drawing near to an omnipresent God? “Omnipresent” means He is everywhere all the time. How do you draw near or come closer to Someone who is everywhere?

To answer that we have to understand the biblical concept of presence. Is God here in this room with us right now? Yes. Is He also out in the field out there? Or in the 7-Eleven across the street - or on the moon? Yes. However, His presence in this room right now is not the same as His existence in the field or on the moon. So in what way is God present on the moon? In what way is He present everywhere?