You Can’t “Be with God”. – Lies of the Enemy #36 – Purity 1048
Purity 1048 05/20/2023 Purity 1048 Podcast
Purity 1048 on YouTube:
Good morning,
Today’s
photo of sunrise from the vantage point of the Panther Top Tower in Murphy NC
comes to us from Fred Dimmick who shared this scene on social media back on May
12th with the following prose:
“Fire in the sky
From the morning sun
As whippoorwills sing
The day’s begun”
Well It’s Saturday and while I am
happy the day has begun, because I have to work today, I am looking forward to
the end of my shift because I will be headed north to join my wife at our countryside
home to celebrate the 18th birthday of her son Jakob with a
barbeque. Although the local forecast is
calling for showers today, you can’t rain on my parade because, as long as the
Lord wills it, rain or shine I will be in the company of the one I love.
And this is how you know that you are
in a love relationship, you find peace in the other person’s presence no matter
what the circumstances are. It doesn’t
matter if it rains or it’s sunny and it doesn’t really matter what you are
doing, when you love someone you long for and enjoy their company. A love relationship’s “quality time” is not
necessarily based on the things you do or the places you go to as much as it
has to do with being with the other person.
Early on in my relationship with TammyLyn,
we recognized that often couples worry about what plans they could make, what
things they could do, or what places they could go and are busy trying to “make
one another happy” by creating circumstances for happiness and when those
activities stop they don’t know what to do with one another. But we agreed that true intimacy, true love
was found in just being at peace in one another’s presence. So early on we took
some time to grow closer together by just being with one another, talking,
looking in one another’s eyes, embracing, and just “hanging out”. We tried to establish being comfortable with
one another by just “doing nothing” and “hanging out” and I think we have
benefitted from it because now whether we are “just hanging out”, or working on
something together, or going out to explore and enjoy God’s creation or the
things men have built, we are “together in it” because we know one another and focus
on that aspect – we aren’t striving to accomplish “some thing to make us happy”
because we already have peace being with one another.
Likewise our relationship with God shouldn’t
necessarily “doing everything right” to “make God happy” where we feel good if
we are doing everything we think we should to please God and where we feel
condemned when we mess up, step out of line, or make a mistake. We are not in a relationship based on performance.
God has sought our love and presence by revealing the truth of Jesus to us and
He has fully accepted us the moment we put our faith in Christ. However, most Christians forget about God’s
grace the moment they receive it and quickly make their walk of faith about “doing
everything right” where they judge their
relationship with God on the things they do – I’m not praying, I’m not reading
my Bible, My attitude isn’t right, I should give more, I should do more. I got
to clean up my act. I have to learn
more.
Now don’t get it twisted because, I usually
define the path of Christian Discipleship by some of the things listed here as
they are “disciplines of our faith”. But
a love relationship isn’t about discipline, it’s about being in love and acting
in love. It’s not about getting approval
or acceptance; you already have it. Its about being at peace in God’s presence. Prayer, Bible Study, serving, giving and
living for God are not things we do to earn the love of God, they are the
things we do because we already have it and desire “to be with Him” and “to be together in” whatever it is you
are doing. Whether you are just hanging
out, working, or going somewhere or doing something “fun”, no matter the
circumstances or outcomes, when we are “with God”, we already have what we
need: peace in His presence.
And that
brings us to our current
series the “Lies of the Enemy”, which is an examination of some of the common lies, sometimes
sneakily whispered into our minds as “first person” statements, that the enemy
tells us to cause us to doubt our faith, lose our peace, cause division, or
influence us to not follow the Lord with the way we live our lives.
So today’s big lie is:
Lie #36: You Can’t “Be with God”.
This lie of the enemy is the foundation of “religion”
where the only relationship you have with “god” is by trying to please him
through performance, where the foundation of one’s faith is little more than
following rules and often degenerates on looking good on the outside but having
little or no changes on the inside, perhaps other than the puffing up of one’s
pride if one is able to “do everything right” or the establishment of a double
life as secret sin and shame are stewing just below the surface of what would
look like a “normal Christian life”.
Church sex and financial scandals and abuses testify
to the fact that things were actually not “okay” when it seemed everything was
good, righteous, and holy. Although the people involved in these scandals
seemed to be walking with God, it turns out that they were putting on a show as
large portions of their lives were not spent “being with God.” because their
attitudes and behaviors in some areas demonstrated that they chose to not
follow the full counsel of God and twisted things to have their will be done
rather than His.
This is an extreme example however and as much as it
may be popular to go after the “mighty who have fallen” I would choose to go
after those whose “simple faith” sneers at the idea of “being with God” as
something extreme and our as artificial as the “seeming faith” of those who
have fallen in to sin.
These “regular Christians” are wary of any claims of intimacy of God and
treat the subject as “hocus pocus” and reduce their relationship with God to “just
being good people”. They “just believe”.
They don’t pray. They never read the Bible (Why would I? I’m not the priest).
They give sparingly. They never serve. Their
church attendance can vary. These “believers”
could go to church a couple of times a year or could go to “the building” once
a week or even every day but that’s as far as they will go with their intimacy
with God. God apparently lives in the
church building so that’s where you can “be in His presence” but the moment you
step beyond the threshold of the local cathedral or sanctuary, you are no
longer with God as “normal resumes.” Regular
Christians like this honestly don’t even understand what someone is talking
about when someone mentions their “relationship with God”. How can you have a
relationship with someone who is invisible? Impossible! I’m pretty sure those
people are cuckoo!”
Now before anyone gets upset. I have to admit that I
lived most of my life with similar attitudes.
My liturgical church tradition was a religion not a relationship. We went
to church; we weren’t the church. That’s crazy how can we be a building! Church
was for Sundays and the occasion weird non-Sunday Holiday like Ash Wednesday,
Not every day.
You can’t be with God. You can’t have a relationship with Him. He’s
in heaven.
OF course that all changed back in 2010. I was so
far from God it wasn’t even funny; I had basically stopped believing in “a God”
and had adopted a spiritual philosophy that denied the Creator as a mystical
unseen impersonal force that was too mysterious to know, Karma. I was wrong of course but many “regular Christians”
still believe this lie – of an impersonal God, a distant God, or a Super-Mysterious
God that you can’t know, that you can’t have a relationship with, that you can’t
“be with”.
God is alive and well and is available to those who
seek Him. But if you believe the lie
that “You can’t be with God”, you will never even try to have relationship with
Him.
God revealed Himself to Abraham, Moses, the nation
of Israel, and to all of us through His divine interventions, His word, and the
word made flesh, Jesus Christ. We can know Him and when we put our faith in Jesus
we can “be with Him”.
Jesus is also known as Our Immanuel – which means “God
with Us”. So don’t believe the lie that
you can’t “be with God”. God gave us
His word and His Son and the Holy Spirit to believers so we could be with Him. SO when we treat our Christian faith as a set
rules or empty disciplines to appease an unseen entity, we deny and fail to
receive the fullness of God’s love.
We can “be with God” but it does require our interest
and desire to know Him. Contemplative
prayer or listening prayer is heralded as one way that you can know God’s
presence. Googling “being with God” turned up several books on the subject, in
the fact. Liberating Prayer by Dr. Neil T. Anderson is good book on prayer but
reading the book won’t do much good unless you decided to actually pray and to
do it as a means to “be with God” rather than by trying to do something.
My basic instruction for “being with God” is to “seek Him” and to do so in whatever ways the Lord guides you to – whether through prayer, Bible study, thinking about God, listening to sermons, reading Christian books, or by serving His will in some way – all of these “activities” as long as they are done from a heart that wants to know and connect with God can be means to be with Him. Give it a try because I assure you that when you seek Him, you will find Him.
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For those who want more evidence for Christianity
than my simple apologetic will provide, I offer apologist, Frank Turek’s
website, https://crossexamined.org/ .
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Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book for Men”.
This
morning’s meditation verses are:
Psalm 23:1-3 (NKJV)
1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He makes me to lie down in
green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
3 He restores my soul; He
leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name's sake.
Today’s verses were offered by our resource under the heading: when you feel burned out in your job…. And direct us to focus on the peace that we have when we stop the striving (I shall not want) and rest (lie down in green pastures) in the Lord’s peace. When we do this we will be renewed (He restores my soul) and gives us a direction for the future (He leads me in path of righteousness).
Notice this dichotomy of
rest and walking - God leads us to lie
down but also to get up and walk in righteousness. To be restored and to “not want” we need to
follow the Lord’s lead and live with and for Him.
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As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.
Today we continue sharing from The Holy Spirit By A.W. Pink.
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage you all to purchase A.W. Pink’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available online
for $0.99 (https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Arthur-Pink-Collection-ebook/dp/B008CM5292/ref=sr_1_3?crid=AHKAQOM39CTN&keywords=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit&qid=1684376225&sprefix=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit+%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-3)
A.W. Pink’s The Holy Spirit
2 - The Personality of the Holy
Spirit
If we were asked to state in a comprehensive form what
constitutes (according to our views of Scripture) the blessedness of the Lord’s
people on earth, after His work of grace is begun in their souls, we would not
hesitate to say that it must be wholly made up of the personal knowledge of and
communion with the glorious Trinity in their Persons in the Godhead—for as the
church is chosen to be everlastingly holy and everlastingly happy, in uninterrupted
communion with God in glory when this life is ended, the anticipation of it now
by faith must form the purest source of all present joy. But this communion
with God in the Trinity of His Persons cannot be enjoyed without a clear
apprehension of Him. We must know under Divine teaching God in the Trinity of
His Persons, and we must also know from the same source the special and
personal acts of grace by which each glorious Person in the Godhead has
condescended to make Himself known unto His people before we can be said to
personally enjoy communion with each and all.
We offer no apology,
then, for devoting a separate chapter to the consideration of the personality of the Holy Spirit, for
unless we have a right conception of His glorious being, it is impossible that
we should entertain right thoughts about Him, and therefore impossible for us
to render to Him that homage, love, confidence, and submission, which are His
due. To the Christian who is given to realize that he owes to the personal
operations of the Spirit every Divine influence exercised upon him from the
first moment of regeneration until the final consummation in glory, it cannot
be a matter of little importance for him to aspire after the fullest
apprehension of Him that his finite faculties are capable of—yea, he will
consider no effort too great to obtain spiritual views of Him to whose Divine
grace and power the effectual means of his salvation through Christ are to be
ascribed. To those who are strangers to the operations of the blessed Spirit in
the heart, the theme of this chapter is likely to be a matter of unconcern, and
its details wearisome.[1]
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tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MT4Christ247
Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.
My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ), her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
For those who require the assistance of a Deeper
Walk International Prayer Minister to experience healing or your freedom in
Christ, I highly recommend Christy Edge’s Life on the Edge Freedom Prayer
Ministry. You can schedule a session by going to : https://cedge216.wixsite.com/life-on-the-edge
“The views, opinions, and commentary of this
publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to
reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries,
or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication,
and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the
author may represent.”
Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
Arthur Walkington Pink, The Holy Spirit
(Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, n.d.).
