Encountering God in the Present Moment

Developing the ability to get into the present moment brings us into a deeper encounter with the Presence of God. We can find the Scriptural basis for this in Heb 3:7-8; 3:15; and 4:7: "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,…” Three times this is repeated in the same general passage. There are three parts to this Scripture which if we understand them will take us deeper into spiritual ground. These parts are:
1. Today
2. When you hear His voice
3. Do not harden your heart

The Greek word for “Today,” semeron, is used 41 times in the New Testament and implies the present moment. Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament defines ‘semeron’ as the time at man's disposal…; that is, the time of actual being. The past is gone, the future is not yet; only in the "to-day" of temporally secured or hampered dealings between God and His people (Kittel’s) can we encounter the Presence of God. This encounter is expressed by the second part of the passage in Hebrews: “When you hear His voice.” Thus, says Kittel’s, "to-day" can be the means as well as the content of revelation.

The problem is that it is not easy to get into the present moment. Either we are regretting or lauding the past or we are anticipating or fearing the future. It is not so much a matter of learning from the past or planning for the future, which we can do in the present moment, but we tend to live in the past or future. I can speak for myself and perhaps you can relate. I fear that if I let go of the past or future and live in the present I will be set adrift in an ocean of uncertain temporality. I therefore try to make the future turn out the way I want it by vividly imagining it. I find myself constantly rehearsing the future. Also for me the past holds a lot of regrets. So I try to go back in my mind to work over the memories of the past so as to make them less condemnatory. In effect then, in my conscious self, I am actually projecting myself into either the past or the future. So I have to let go of all that in order to get into the present moment where I encounter the God who was with me in the past and holds my future course in life.

This is why I believe that entering into the present moment requires practice. It is a spiritual discipline. This is the third part of our passage which says, “Do not harden your hearts.” Here is a powerful statement that we will unpack more thoroughly in later posts. The word for “harden,” sklerotrachelos (don’t try to pronounce it), has to do with unbelief. And this is our natural state in our fallen condition (Ro 3:11-12; Jn 3:19). We are hardened into unbelief.

Here I’m going to step out on a limb and make a general statement; that we cling tenaciously to the past and future because we do not trust God with our lives. Let us make no delusions about this. It does require some doing to come into the present moment with God, which ultimately has the effect of softening up the ground of our hardened hearts. And softened ground is what we need to dig deeper and to draw closer to God. How we do this we will address in future posts. Suffice it to say now that it involves making some ‘sacred space’ in our lives where we can begin taking the risk of letting God hold us in the present moment.

Reaching Inward to Flow Outward

As Jesus performed acts of healing or other miracles where He revealed His divinity the Scripture records that the crowds were astounded or amazed. This is not the sort of “how’d he do it?” amazement that we might experience at a magic show. The Greek words that stand behind the reaction of the crowds indicate that they themselves were experiencing a transformative spiritual presence that was flowing from Jesus. One of these words is ekstasis from which we get our word ‘ecstasy’ (present in Mark 5:42; 16:8; and Luke 5:26). According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon a state of ekstasis is …a throwing of the mind out of its normal state,… A person in a state of ekstasis is …

“…transported as it were out of himself, so that in this rapt condition, although he is awake, his mind is so drawn off from all surrounding objects and wholly fixed on things divine that he sees nothing but the forms and images lying within, and thinks that he perceives with his bodily eyes and ears realities shown him by God. (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon).”

As Jesus ministered to the crowds through healings and miracles He was making place for the actual presence of God to become manifest to the men and women who stood around Him. This is the same ‘witness’ that we have to give to world around us. I often think about how we serve others, which is an important part of how we identify ourselves as Christians. Surely that outward focus points us in the right direction. But here is the crucial question: How much of serving others really does engage our created design enlivened by the Holy Spirit within us? How much do we look inward to flow outward?

There is no doubt that we feel good about helping people. But if we keep our helping on a ‘feel good’ level it doesn’t often result in deep changes in a person’s life. Transformative helping calls forth a whole different dimension. Rather counter-intuitively the focus actually shifts from what we ‘do for’ that person to how we ‘be with’ him or her as God has created us to be; that is, in our enlivened inner nature.

God has designed us to be a transformative influence in the world around us. Other things, however, tend to creep into the picture of reaching out. Obligation, expectation, reputation… even a desire for good feelings tends to dominate our motives for helping. Real transformation is not always accompanied by good feelings. It is, after all, a painful process. A person in transformation may go through times of grueling self-doubt, of fear, anger, confusion, envy ... all of the myriad unpleasant emotions that accompany the disorientation of real change. As we become enmeshed with this struggling person we may even become painfully aware of the disfigurement of our own souls. In my own experience the light of the emerging sacred space begins to reveal much in myself that makes me feel inadequate to help anybody. As the good feelings of helping turn into doubts and deep questionings about, “Why am I even doing this?,” it is here that the only answer simply has to be, “Because God has purposed me to.”

In helping others we seek an outward expression of something both human and divine within us. It is usually the case that we get halfway there. We set out to express that desire in our service to others but we don’t very well tap into those deep inner wells where the real source of healing lies. Our task is not to impose our own expectations on how our helping should make a difference in a person’s life. Rather it is the painful work of digging through the layers of our own distorted surface nature, conditioned by the world around us, to tap into those inner springs of spiritual life. As we do this a spiritual space enlarges within us and expands outwardly making place for healing in the souls and lives of others around us.

Struggling through this process deepens us – both helper and the person being helped – because the spiritual space does not belong exclusively to either one. It is God’s deepening work in all involved. It is not really me ‘fixing’ you in a directly intentional manner. It is me opening my inner being up to the work of the Holy Spirit to produce an ever-surfacing sacred space which spreads outwardly beyond my own skin. And so I invite you into this space. It is not up to me to change you. Yet I do not stand apart from you and just ‘do for’ you. I am with you in the struggle because we are both here in this spiritual space struggling toward becoming all that God intends for us to be.

Jesus Himself came into a state of ‘ekstasis’ as He healed those around Him. Mark 3:19-22 records:

Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, "He is beside himself."

The word used here for ‘beside himself’ is existemi which literally means to stand outside of one’s self; that is, to not be in one’s normal mind. This is how others saw Jesus at this moment. What might have appeared to these on-lookers, and, indeed, the scribes took it as demon possession, was most probably that He was taken up in that same Spirit of healing that He was pouring out on others. As we yield ourselves to the Spirit working within us so it is that same Spirit that pours out into the lives of those that God has purposed us to serve.

The Experience of Going Deeper

Have you ever experienced what has been called ‘existential anxiety?’ It is an uncomfortable feeling deep within us that there is no solid bottom to our lives. It is based, I believe, on our cultural ideal of self-determination; the idea that we must determine our own lives. This on the surface seems like a pretty good idea but there are implications that may not be immediately apparent. If we have the ‘freedom’ to determine our own lives then we must be nothing to begin with. This freedom has in fact become an obligation. If we do not go out there and ‘make something of ourselves’ then we will wind up being nothing.

I have developed a mental image of this. It is like hanging over a bottomless chasm by a thin strand that is in danger of breaking at any moment. Then I will go plummeting down into the dark nothingness below. Existential anxiety is the fear of being nothing. It impels us to build up in ourselves a strong sense of ‘somethingness’ that has value and worth.

We may get a sense of the void whenever we suffer some sort of loss. Even a small loss might feel quite uncomfortable because it lets us know that the void is there. If you are like me you are pretty good at imagining that the slightest misstep in life will topple the whole structure. If you are not like me, and perhaps that would be most fortunate, you can rebound fairly easily from a significant loss without being too disturbed by the void lurking beneath.

But perhaps it is not so fortunate to be not like me; that is, to have that ever-present sense of insecurity. Because I’ve found it most difficult to cover over the void I’ve had to look for another way to deal with it. I’ve found that no matter how high I’ve tried to build myself above the void I have not been able to eliminate it. In the Biblical sense the void is at the heart of our separation from our true nature which God has created within us.

In seeking spiritual depth, instead of trying to protect ourselves from the void by building high and strong above it we actually turn and head into it. If our inner being has been enlivened in Christ it is no longer in a state of alienation from the Life of our Creator and thus no longer a void. But we really don’t experience it as enlivened until we let ourselves fall into it; that is, until we surrender to it. I should say surrender to Him because what we surrender to is the person of the Holy Spirit. He has moved into that empty space which we once feared and have worked to build a strong wall against.

Our true nature lies beyond our own making. It is that which simply is. It is already created. It is what scripture calls the perfection of our being. This word for ‘perfect’ in the Greek is teleios which can be translated as ‘wholeness.’ Here in the depths of our being lies everything that God has intended us to be. We are drawn toward it because our deepest desire is to be what we truly are.

Our dilemma is that our greatest fear and our deepest desire lie in the same place. Going deeper, then, brings us into the conflict of letting go of those strong towers which we have erected against the very place where we yearn to be. If it be that we have allowed Christ to dwell in those inner regions we will exchange a somewhat slippery existence of self-making for a solid region of absolute being. By this I mean that we no longer need to strive to be something because we begin to find that we already are something. I can say from actual experience that if I have ventured into the void and found there absolute being in the Holy Spirit then I am no longer hanging over a deep chasm by a thin strand. I begin to sense solid ground. You see, my life has become grounded on something greater than myself. I am not my own creator.

My whole spiritual journey is to increasingly give myself over to that eternal solid ground of being which I find within me. This has become a center point around which my whole life is taking shape. I no longer try to cobble something together on the surface. Living from this spiritual center point, a place which I once feared, is bringing the pieces of my life together into a wholeness that is beyond my own self-determination.