Encountering God

I wasn't planning to have a sixteenth lesson, but I added it because it seemed like we needed some type of "wrap up" after two lessons of sharing testimonies about encounters with God.

This teaching series has been about encountering God on various levels. It has approached the subject from two directions. The first was learning to recognize when God meets us, as well as to learning to be more receptive to God when He does choose to break into our day, so that He will want to do so more often. The second was about actively pursuing God and asking Him to reveal more of Himself to us.

Let me try and bring it together in some sort of "wrap up." I'd like to give you a few thoughts to "take away" from this series.

Living Our Relationship With God On A Daily Basis

Most of our encounters with God will happen in ways that are not overtly supernatural. This will include things like: God speaking to you in that "still small voice," God working in your circumstances for good, experiencing God's comfort and peace, God putting a series of "coincidences" in place for you in such a way where you know it is Him, etc. We will find Him more in our day-to-day lives than in visions, angelic visitations, divine visitations, or other direct encounters with Him.

As we saw in the first few lessons, even the spiritual giants of the Bible did not really have that many direct supernatural encounters with God. They built their relationship with God primarily by obeying Him and living in a way designed to honor Him. Of course they loved Him with all of their heart, soul, mind and spirit, as Jesus commanded us in Matthew 23:28. They did have special encounters with God, but they also "walked the walk" on a daily basis in their everyday lives.

I truly believe that most of us won't get the "big" encounters with God (the open visions, the angelic visitations, being caught up into Heaven, etc) until we've gotten responsive to Him in the more mundane aspects of our lives. Therefore, we want to learn how to begin to recognize when God breaks into our day, and we want to respond to Him. We need to learn how to recognize His voice when He speaks to us, and we need to listen to what He says to us and obey what He tells us to do.

A big part of that, especially in the early days, is by reading His written word (the bible) and learning what does and what does not please Him, and then endeavoring to live that out in our day to day lives. We need to turn away from intentional (or willful) sin and choose to live the way He likes. We need to make obedience part of our lifestyle, and we need to learn to have heart-attitudes and motivations that are pleasing to God.

By the way, one of the best ways to get those "right" attitudes and motivations is to ask Him to transform us and make us more like Him, and then to do our best to cooperate with Him in the process.

We also need practice the "spiritual disciplines" that draw us closer to God on a regular basis, including things like reading His word, praying, worshiping, fellowing with other believers and encouraging each other in the Lord, etc. In addition, we need to let go of the things that we know interfere with our relationship with Him. This includes sin, unforgiveness, bitterness, carnality, fear, etc.

In addition, we need to start explicitly looking for how God meets us in the day to day life activities, how He meets us in difficulty or in failure or in emotional turmoil, etc. We want to start "training ourselves" to recognize the ways that He does interact with us, so that we can recognize it easier and be more intentionally responsive to Him when He does this.

Actively Pursuing God

The more we pursue God, the more likely we are to find Him, and the more likely He is to break into our day. I gave the example in one of the lessons about my two dogs. I love them both the same, and I try to treat them equally. But the one who is always following me around tends to get petted more than the other one. Why? Because he is actively pursuing me and he is always in easy reach.

I believe that God loves you every bit as much as He loves people like Heidi Baker or Billy Graham or Rick Joyner or any of the others who have had such incredible experiences with God. They are not getting these encounters with God because they "earned it" or because God loves them more, or anything like that. They are getting their encounters with God because they passionately and actively pursue God. In short, they chase after Him more than most, so they "catch Him" a bit more than most. So it stands to reason that if you begin to chase Him more, you will also catch Him more.

There is, of course, a caveat to what I just said. That is the area of sin and willful disobedience. Those things can hinder us from coming into direct encounters and deeper levels of intimacy with God. If you have those things in your life, the Lord may want to spend time working with you on cleaning them out as one of His first and highest priorities.

There will be times when you seem to run into a roadblock in growing closer to God. If you hit a roadblock like this and you are aware of an area of sin or disobedience in your life, you may have to address it before you can move closer to God. Sin (especially unrepented sin) does tend to separate us from God.

However, sin and disobedience won't always preclude you from having a supernatural encounter with God--but when you do have one, that might be the area the God wants to focus on. Isaiah had that experience when he had a vision of God's glory filling the temple. He was immediately convicted of his sin and the first thing God did with him was to purify his mouth (or deal with his sin). God did not commission him until after He sent the angel with the burning coal from the altar. So don't be surprised if God starts to convict you about certain areas of your thoughts, attitudes or behaviors as you start to draw closer to Him. Remember that He is Holy, and He wants us to be holy as well.

So we must be sure to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in ridding ourselves of intentional sin and disobedience. Assuming that we do this, then how do we actively pursue God?

First we start with the basics. We invite Him into our spiritual disciplines and activities. We ask God to speak to us while we are reading His word, we listen to what He says to us in prayer, and we begin to expect to encounter Him in worship. We intentionally invite God to come into our day, and we make a point of obeying Him any time that He does choose to break into it and give us direction. We begin to wait on the Lord. This gives Him a priority on our time, and it shows Him that He is more important to us that television, computer games and the internet (or whatever else occupies our leisure time).

Supernatural or "Direct" Encounters With God Are Possible

When it comes to the commodity of Heaven, faith is always the first step to doing what seems impossible. We have to to "believe it before we receive it" as some denominations are fond of saying.

This same principle applies to entering into a deeper relationship with God, and it also applies to having supernatural encounters with Him. We have to believe it is possible in order to start pursuing it, and we usually have to pursue it to get it. At least, that is what Jesus said in Matthew 7:7: "Ask and you shall receive."

Likewise Psalm 37:4 says "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." If you play around with the original language, you will see that verse is really saying 'when you delight yourself in God so that you really desire Him, God will begin giving you that desire--more of Himself.'

We need to start to realize that it really is possible to have a direct encounter with God. We see it in the bible--God manifest Himself to Abraham, to Jacob, to Moses, to Isaiah and to others in the Bible. In fact, manifest Himself and His glory to the entire nation of Israel shortly after He delivered them from Egypt. He offered that type of direct encounter with Himself as an ongoing state, but they were afraid and asked Him to speak to them through a third party (e.g., a prophet). Even after that, God manifest His glory to when Solomon dedicated the temple to Him. We know from Scripture that God can (and will) give His people a direct supernatural encounter with Himself.

Then we have testimonies of people encountering Him today. Heidi Baker speaks of some of her encounters with God. Rick Joyner has written books about some of his visions and supernatural experiences. There are countless others who have given testimonies of their supernatural encounters with God--at conferences, in books, on the internet, in magazine articles and on and on. We know that God is meeting His people today and revealing Himself to them. Their testimonies tell us that this is possible in our day and time--we really can have supernatural encounters with God.

Now we have to take a leap of faith from the corporate "we" -- e.g., other believers -- to "me." Each of us needs to believe in our own heart that "God loves me as much as He loves so-and-so, and that God is willing to manifest Himself to me, too."

There are exceptions to this, but most of the time, we have to start by desiring, and then pursue a direct encounter with God before we actually have one. First we believe it is possible. Next, we begin to actively pursue Him.

We need to start expecting to have increased and more direct encounters with God. We need to ask Him to come and meet us, to allow us to experience His nearness and to be saturated by His wonderful presence.

Lessons 12 and 13 gave us four practical steps to pursue God in this manner. First, we can draw faith and inspiration from the testimonies of others. Then we can go to God and say, "Lord, me too! Please let me know You more. Please reveal more of yourself to Me. Please let me begin to have some direct encounters with you."

In addition, we can "seal the deal" by making a commitment to radical obedience--that we will make Him Lord (boss) of every area of our life, and that we will obey Him because we love Him.

Finally we can begin to submit our imagination to the Lord, and putting it under His glory. We can invite the Holy Spirit to work through it, to show us more of what He is really like.

But the bottom line is that the more we pursue Him in the way He chooses to be pursued, the more likely we are to have direct encounters with Him.