Encountering God

We started looking at this topic in our last lesson. We discovered that God's plans for us are for good, not for harm. We also learned that when He does allow us to go through "the valley of the shadow of death," He never intends to leave us there for very long. He is not going to abandon us in our suffering, He is going to bring us through to the other side and put is in a place of victory.

But the fact remains that, from time to time, the Lord will allow us to encounter difficulty. And when we go through those times, we can encounter God in the midst of all that difficulty.

Faith Encounters With God

One of the ways we can do that is by tapping into Him through our faith, because He will meet us where we reach out to Him in faith. We looked at that in our last lesson. One of the ways we can tap into our faith is by reminding ourselves of God's promises to us and clinging to them. We can also remind ourselves of what the bible says about God's character and about His relationship with us. Then we choose to believe what the bible says and to comfort ourselves with His good promises to us.

[I did not mention this in the last lesson; but I'd like to throw it in now. There is another thing we can hold onto in addition to Scripture and that is the promises that God has made to us through personal prophecy. If you have words from God that contain His promises over your own life and destiny, then you might want to review them frequently. Listen you your prophecy tapes or transcribe them and read them often. War for your word by continuing to believe His personal promises to you even if the circumstances around you seem to be screaming the opposite.]

We know that God does not lie, so we choose to believe His promises in the midst of our difficulties. Then our faith raises up, and that is one of the ways that we can encounter Him in difficulty. But it is not the only way.

Seeking God In The Midst of Adversity

We can actively seek God in the midst of difficulty and ask Him to meet us in it. This was one of King David's favorite strategies.

David had more than his fair share of danger and hardship. A lot of that was caused because a demonized King Saul actively persecuted him and sought to kill him. All kinds of bad things happened to David. His wife was taken away from him and given to another man. He was forced to live in hiding as a fugitive and he frequently had to flee for his life, pursued by armies bent on capturing and killing him. There were many times when David had to hide out in caves and live a life of physical hardship and there were times when David and his men went hungry because they did not have food. But despite all the danger, all the hardship and difficulty, David still actively pursued God.

If you look at his psalms, you will see that many of them started out by complaining about how miserable he was, but by the end of the psalm, David had switched his focus to worshiping God, and God seemed to meet him in that. Take Psalm 22 for example. The psalm starts out with a bunch of complaints and a sense of feeling abandoned by God. Look at verse 1: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning?"

David complains about his suffering and persecution in verses 6 and 7: "But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All those who see me ridicule me; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head." We seen more of his complaints in verses 16 and 17: "Many bulls have surrounded me; strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me. They gape at Me with their mouths, like a raging and roaring lion."

But in the midst of his suffering, David begins to engage his faith that God will keep His promises and will help him. Look at verses 19 to 21. They start asking God to help and end with faith engaged that God will indeed heed his cry and help him.

19. But You, O Lord be far from Me; O My Strength, hasten to help Me!
20. Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog.
21. Save me from the lion's mouth and from the horns of the wild oxen!
    You have answered me.

He goes on to talk about God's goodness and faithfulness and drops into active worship. By the end of the psalm, David is in an encounter with God, his hope and vision are recharged, and he is excited about God's goodness. Look at how he ends the psalm: "A posterity shall serve Him. It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation, they will come and declare His righteousness to a people who will be born, that He has done this."

Not only did David encounter God in the face of his suffering and hardship, but God released spiritual gifts on David as he pressed into Him. In the case of Psalm 22, God released a strong prophetic anointing on David. David thought he was expanding on his own suffering, but a prophetic anointing came over him, and he detailed many things about Jesus' crucification, a torture that hadn't even been invented when he wrote this Psalm. Several verses describe what Jesus went through to redeem us, especially verses 14 to 18.

God is the same with us as He is with David. When we press into Him in the midst of our difficulty, He meets us and gives us an encounter with Himself.

Suffering Can Bring Spiritual Sluggishness

The problem is that we are not at our best when we are miserable, and that can make us spiritually sluggish. Or we can be in a "scary" situation that demands our full attention, where our focus of that moment is on "surviving the situation," and not on pursuing God. The good news is that God understands our weakness and at times He will make a point of being found of us even when we are unable to actively seek Him.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own life. We had a rather forceful earthquake a few weeks ago. I was sitting on my sofa watching a television program, and suddenly a jolt shook my whole house, rattling the windows and shaking the credenza and moving my sofa about 6 inches away from the wall as I was still sitting on it. I recognized it as an earthquake and immediately jumped up, startled. I would have been ok if it was just one jolt, but there were three more. Each jolt was very strong and really jarred my house. I have been though some really bad earthquakes, and this one was strong enough that it scared me. I felt adrenalin surge through my veins and my heart began to pound. I shot up a quick "Lord, protect me!" prayer, but I wasn't really thinking much about God at that instant--I was scared and I was thinking about things pertinent to my immediate safety. We have a lot of floor-to- ceiling windows in our family room, at is is very unwise to be near glass windows in an earthquake. So I grabbed my two dogs by the collar and moved into the hallway, which had no windows. My 100 pound dogs weren't sure whether to be excited or scared--but I was definitely scared.

Fortunately the jarring stopped about 15 seconds after it started. I remained frozen for a few seconds, unsure whether or not the quake was really over. Then I took my dogs into the yard, because I knew that there are frequently aftershocks and sometimes the aftershocks are just as strong as the original quake. I figured it would be safer to weather them outside. We stayed out there for about 10 minutes, as did many of my neighbors, but there weren't any aftershocks.

It wasn't until after I went back in the house and then I finally started thinking about God again. I thanked Him for protecting me and my home, and I felt bad that I hadn't given Him much of my attention when I was in a potentially dangerous situation. It seemed like all I wanted at that moment was His help and not Him. I was concerned that maybe I'd offended Him by that, so I asked Him about it. He told me that He'd created the human endocrine system, including the adrenal gland, so that we'd be able to react quickly to dangerous situations. He wasn't upset with me because my mind and body had functioned the way He created me to function.

Sometimes God doesn't meet you on a cognitive level so much in the crisis as He does after it is over, when you are "looking back" and thinking about it.

The same thing goes (at times) for when we feel really miserable for short but intense periods of time. Some people are really good at pressing into God in the midst of their misery and experiencing Him in it. Most of the time, I am not one of those people.

I am more likely to "shutdown" my higher cognitive and spiritual reasoning, and go into an "endure and get through it" mode. It is not that I am running from God or intentionally avoiding Him in the midst of my "suffering"--it is that I may not be cognitively aware of His presence and of His sustaining me through the difficulty at that moment--but I become aware of it later on when I look back.

For instance, I came down with a mild case of Salmonella late last August. Please don't misunderstand the use of the word "mild"--I felt horrible beyond what I can describe. I had a piercing headache, fever with chills and shakes and hot flashes, upset stomach, bad intestinal cramps and a lot of diarrhea. That bad part of the symptoms lasted about 36 hours. I wasn't sure what caused it, so I threw away all of my breads and vegetables. I started to get hungry again about 48 hours after the initial onset. I wanted to be careful about what I ate, so I had a broiled chicken thigh. To my dismay, the symptoms started again about three or four hours after I ate...it turns out the chicken was the thing that was tainted and it had accidentally been undercooked. I got much sicker the second time. Hubby was away on a business trip and I was alone in the house. I felt so bad that I actually toyed with calling an ambulance to take me to the emergency room. But I prayed briefly and asked the Lord if I was seriously sick and He replied, "No, it only feels that way to you. But in truth what you have is not serious, just unpleasant."

I spent the next 30 hours or so trying to sleep if off (when I wasn't running to the toilet). I felt so miserable that I almost wanted to die. I wish I could say I used the time to pray and press into the Lord--but the truth is that I felt too sick to do that. I did sort of remind Him about that verse about poison not hurting us, and I suggested that He instantly heal me. I got some of my friends to pray for me, but it soon became clear that He wasn't going to that--and I just had to endure the symptoms. I promise you that being sick with Salmonella was not a spiritual experience for me. It did not really draw me and close to God. However, once I was past the worst of the symptoms and almost starting to feel "human" again, then the Lord began to meet me. He also began to dialog with me a bit. He asked me why I ate the chicken the second time after it had made me sick the first time. I told Him that was because I did not know it was the chicken that made me sick. I also assured Him that I would not be eating it a third time!

Then the Lord began to use my experience to launch into giving me some teaching on inner healing, and how we will face the same problems over and over again if we keep repeating the behavior that causes them. I did not feel at all spiritual or close to God in the midst of the strong salmonella symptoms. But once I started feeling better again, the Lord really began meeting me and speaking to me.

You might be one of those lucky ones who has the constitution to really press in and draw closer to God in the midst of intense suffering. If you are...good for you and I wish I was like you. But if you are more like me, then look to the Lord to begin meeting you as you start to walk out of the suffering and back to normalcy.

Even if you have a delayed response like I do, it is still possible to encounter God in the midst of your suffering...especially when you are in the tail end of it and just starting to feel better.