Storm Chasers: To be raptured in His Presense

The fol­low­ing is from a post by “Onesimus4God” over at http://www.sermonindex.net. As I read it, it brought me back into that sim­ple plea­sure in God’s pres­ence: In lov­ing Jesus, and know­ing he loves me as well.

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The great A.W. Tozer wrote the following:

“To be artic­u­late at times, we are com­pelled to fall back upon ‘Oh’ or ‘O’ — a prim­i­tive exclam­a­tory sound that is hardly a word at all, and that scarcely admits of a definition.…

In the­ol­ogy, there is no “Oh!”, and this is a sig­nif­i­cant, if not omnious thing. The­ol­ogy seeks to reduce what may be known of God to intel­lec­tual terms, and as long as the intel­lect can com­pre­hend, it can find words to express itself. When God Him­self appears before the mind, awe­some, vast, and incom­pre­hen­si­ble, then the mind sinks into silence and the heart cries out “Oh Lord God”. There is the dif­fer­ence between the­o­log­i­cal knowl­edge and spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence, the dif­fer­ence between know­ing God by hearsay and know­ing God by acquain­tance. And the dif­fer­ence is not ver­bal merely; it is real, and seri­ous, and vital.

We Chris­tians should watch lest we lose the “Oh” from our hearts. When we become too glib in prayer, we are most surely talk­ing to our­selves. When the calm list­ing of requests and the cour­te­ous giv­ing of the proper thanks take the place of the bur­dened prayer that finds utter­ance dif­fi­cult, we should beware the next step, for our direc­tion is surely down, whether we know it or not.“

OH God! OH God! That I might know You more, so that I may be at a loss for words that describe my experience.

Last year, I was read­ing in Matthew. When I got to the 6th chap­ter and the 33rd verse, I could not pro­ceed any farther.

“Seek ye first, the king­dom of God and His right­eous­ness, then all these things shall be added unto you”.

I had spent the vast major­ity of my life seek­ing “things” to make me con­tent that I might then find vocab­u­lary to thank God. What a per­ver­sion of exis­tence that is.

All that we have in Chris­tian­ity and all that we do should be an out­flow of our acquain­tance and expe­ri­ence with our God. Spend­ing time with Him and His Word will pro­duce all we want to know and be in Christ Jesus. If God is our sup­plier, would it not be a bet­ter thing to pur­sue the sup­plier rather than the supply?

When we “wit­ness” to some­one, how often do we find our­selves at a loss attempt­ing to describe our God Who is of Him­self, lim­it­less? Or do we rather, describe the sup­ply, and bits and pieces that we know and can some­how attempt to under­stand? Worse yet, often our focus is on our achieve­ment rather than His won­der. Is it any won­der that peo­ple only see us, rather than His image? I think not.

I remem­ber when I first “encoun­tered” God. It had never entered the sphere of my under­stand­ing what hap­pened on that day. Some describe it as His “shek­inah glory”, and it likely was. But descrip­tion beyond that leaves me at a loss. I can tell you the effects. But I can­not describe the cause, God Himself.

As our dear departed brother Tozer so won­der­fully shared above, as we pro­ceed in our the­ol­ogy and learn of God, we tend to reduce Him to the level of our under­stand­ing. Worse yet, we con­tend with oth­ers that “we know”, when if fact we are “unknown­ing” com­pared to His greatness.

When I encoun­tered God for the first time, His real pres­ence in me, it was incred­i­ble. It was very obvi­ous to those who saw me there­after. They knew some­thing had hap­pened to me with­out me say­ing a word, yet nei­ther they nor I could define what it was that brought about this “change” or “look” that had come over me. I was float­ing as I went my way. My head and my heart was in the clouds. I was in love with God. More, I believed that God was in love with me. But I could not tell you just what hap­pened to bring me into His pres­ence or how it came to be. His sov­er­eign good­ness just chose to do it. But I have to believe from the reac­tions of those who saw me, that some­how they saw more than me…they saw a glimpse of Him upon me. Is that what the unsaved are look­ing for?

Such an occur­rence can­not be described, nor can it be taught or learned. I am quite cer­tain that there are Doc­tors of The­ol­ogy that have not expe­ri­enced God. They have plenty of head knowl­edge, but lack expe­ri­ence and acquain­tance understanding.

Sadly, the image of God that some­how shown on my face faded. I had no idea how to main­tain the expe­ri­ence or acquain­tance. I was born into reli­gion. What did I know about per­sonal expe­ri­ence with God? Noth­ing. I knew it was fad­ing, but was at a loss as to what to do about it.

Some 30 years later, I came to the rhema of Matthew 6:33, and I stopped right there. I remem­bered that before that week­end, I had told God that if He did not reveal Him­self to me, I was never going to darken the door of a church again. You see beloved, I put all the reli­gios­ity away from me and sought God. Noth­ing more, noth­ing less. “I want YOU, God!” It was then that He showed up in all of His mag­nif­i­cent glory. I was for­ever changed, in a moment, in the twin­kling of an eye, God flooded my soul. The rhema of Matthew 6:33 revealed to me that the object of all my pur­suits have been a per­ver­sion of the rela­tion­ship that God has desired to have me with me.… up close and personal.

I sought things, car­nal things, reli­gious things, sin­ful things, glory, power, pres­tige, position…you name it, I was look­ing for it. What actu­ally hap­pened was that it was all van­ity, all in vain. The real­ity of all that I had pur­sued eluded me because my pur­suit was for the sup­ply rather than the sup­plier. I didn’t real­ize that if I had the sup­plier, I had the sup­ply as well. But by com­par­i­son, the sup­plier far paled the supply.

I, like you, live in this car­nal flesh and yet see through a glass darkly. So I can­not any more com­pre­hend the vast­ness of God than fly to the moon. We are like the tiny uncapped bot­tle that was tossed into the mid­dle of the ocean and sank to it’s deep­est depths. There was from that moment on, noth­ing but ocean in the bot­tle. But the bot­tle did not con­tain all the ocean, only a minus­cule part. We have 100% God in our hearts, but we do not con­tain the com­plete­ness of God, no not by any stretch of imag­i­na­tion.
We are like the town res­i­dents who pon­der of the refuse left behind by a vio­lent tor­nado. We see it’s effects and won­der about it’s power. It over­whelms us when God shows up. But too often our atten­tion is on what was left behind, rather than on God Himself.

We should be like the “storm chasers”. They are after the storm that has such power. They some­how sense it’s won­der and want to expe­ri­ence it up close and per­sonal. Could it be that God wants us to find Him and expe­ri­ence Him up close and per­sonal? Oh yes, yes, yes. He gave His only Son, that we might do just that! God wants us to be vitally con­nected to Him­self. God wants to be found, not for His sup­ply, but for Who He is. When we begin to pur­sue Him in such a way as this, our prayer life begins to take on a whole new per­spec­tive. Our wor­ship becomes enthralled. Slip­ping away to be alone with Him becomes a pas­sion rather than chore. We are com­pelled to drink in His wonder.

Not long ago, I was pon­der­ing all of this. It was spring time once again, and all the new life was spring­ing forth. I was out­side and just look­ing at the growth of new life. Fresh green leaves, beau­ti­ful flow­ers, the end­less repet­i­tive per­fec­tion of the clover leaf. I real­ized that man in all his knowl­edge and pride had yet to cre­ate one liv­ing cell. Yet our God has cre­ated all of this life. His cre­ation sus­tains itself in bal­ance. All is pro­vided for. Only our own domin­ion over cre­ation given to us by Him dis­turbs the bal­ance of life and even the con­ti­nu­ity of some species of life. But what about our God? Who can fathom the depths of His aura?

Are you con­nected to God in reli­gious prac­tice? Or are you seek­ing Him above all things? God desires to be con­nected to us by acquain­tance and experience.…..do we share His desire and live to bring it to pass? Or are we busy try­ing to be our own god, or worse yet, make God our servant?

Well, as usual, I’ve ram­bled on here, just shar­ing as it pours forth. But God wants us to want Him more than any­thing else. What will you do to coop­er­ate with His desire, His pro­vi­sion and expe­ri­ence Him for your­self. He is so much more than a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure in the book we call the bible. He is wait­ing for you to come to Him for Who He is, not for what He has.

In awe of Him,

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