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.

Four Dimensions of Spirituality

In his letter to the Ephesians Paul digs deeply into the mystery of Christ. In the realm of the eternal he speaks of four dimensions; height, breadth, length, and depth (Ep 3:18). I’m not really sure what all of these dimensions represent, but I find it interesting that he mentioned four dimensions; which we usually think of as going beyond our three-dimensional world. Since in this passage Paul speaks of the ‘mystery’ of Christ – to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things (vs. 3:9) – it would seem that he desires that we …being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth (vss. 3:17-18)… of this mystery.

Now on one of these dimensions we do quite well, that of breadth. As evangelicals we are focused on service, on spreading the gospel, on increasing church membership. But what about depth? These four dimensions seem to work together to make up a singular spirituality. Just as a three-dimensional object cannot be missing one of its dimensions and remain a three-dimensional object, so in the spiritual sense we need to attend to all dimensions of our spirituality in order to be whole. The point here is that if our Christian service and evangelical witness (breadth) is not rooted in the essence of who God created us to be (depth) then it will be severely lacking.

I don’t know about length and height, but I would invite you to explore with me the dimension of spiritual depth. What we really have to give outwardly into the world around us is not so much our much doing but our essential being. As we explore this dimension of depth I believe we will find some answers to some of our most perplexing questions about our Christian service. How do we deal with ego – pride? How can we be both self-negating and yet be wholly fulfilled? How can we both suffer with Christ and yet find a profound peace? On the surface we struggle with these Scriptural contradictions but as we dig deeper they seem to converge into a revelation of the deep mysteries of the gospel. I therefore invite you to explore with me the depth of the mystery of Christ.

Creating a Spiritual Center Point

It actually doesn’t make sense to talk about contemplative practice in isolation. It is interwoven into the journey itself. This is why I think many people fail in their attempts to establish a contemplative practice. It is because they are doing it apart from the larger context of the spiritual journey. It is like trying to drive your engine apart from your car. It just doesn’t seem to work. We don’t establish a contemplative practice in the same manner that we take piano lessons or join a service organization.

We shouldn’t really be too concerned if we haven’t yet established a contemplative walk. It is enough that we are seeking a spiritual depth. We shouldn’t really try to make it happen. God will build us toward the depths that we earnestly seek. What we can do is make place for God to draw us into those spiritual depths. James 4:8 says: "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you." We can draw near to God by making a place where He can find us. We can give Him greater access to us. This is our real work.

When I was entering onto a contemplative path I did not even know what it was. I was not trying to establish a contemplative practice. I just felt that I needed a deeper spiritual walk. So I simply went down to our family room every morning, not with the intention of doing anything, but just being where God could find me. I began with an intention, not any kind of practice. Eventually this developed into a full-blown contemplative walk.

In one of my contemplative classes I had someone come up and draw a circle on our white board. I asked this person to concentrate on the marker itself, and the line that was being drawn. Try this some time just with a pencil and paper. If your focus is on the pencil itself drawing the line, your circle will probably not be very round. This is how we normally arrange our affairs in life. We focus on each individual affair itself. It usually turns out to be quite a balancing act trying to put them all in order. You see, it is often this way in our spiritual practices. We try to make them just another of our life’s affairs, and to arrange them in the same manner.

So how can we draw a perfect circle? I made a sort of compass by tying a lag bolt to a marker with a piece of twine. I drew a dot on the board and placed the bolt over the dot. Then, without even attending much to the marker, I moved it around that center point in the fashion of a compass. The circle came out pretty good. Here, I was focusing on the center point, not the circle itself. This is really a form of contemplation in itself. In fact, it is the essence of contemplation; to focus on the center.

If we establish a spiritual center point then that tends to arrange our affairs in an orderly way around that point. Like spokes in a wheel, our affairs radiate outward from our center point and keep the outer surface of life firm and in a shape determined by our spiritual center.

As we go along this path that essential spiritual center point will begin to grow. Our spiritual space will enlarge. Here God will be able to bring whatever disciplines into our lives fit the way that He created us. The one essential thing along the contemplative path is what Paul tells us in Col 3:1-3:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

A Continuing Journey

I am entering into the final stages of life on this earth. But the sense has been coming on me for several years that I am entering right now, even in this present life, into eternal realms. You know, we have a picture of what it is to die. I mean, the common idea of dying and going to heaven is one of a sudden change. There we are, a person lying on his or her deathbed and at the moment of death that person’s spirit leaves the body phantom-like and floats up to heaven to be with God. One moment that person is here on earth, the next moment he or she is sitting on a cloud playing a harp. That is not a Biblical picture. I don’t mean the cloud and harp part but the idea of one moment here, the next in eternity.

According to the writings of the apostle Paul if we are in Christ here and now on this earth then we are already seated with Him in heaven at the right hand of God. Paul says:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Col 3:1-4

We have been raised with Christ. Our spiritual essence is with Christ in the eternal realm. As we walk a spiritual path of intentional reaching toward that heavenly existence we live more and more within our spiritual essence. We draw ever nearer, ever more fully into the eternal realms the closer we get to our physical death. We hold less tightly to the things of this earth. Our physical death, then, is not so much a sudden flying up to our heavenly home as it is our final and complete letting go of our earthly existence.

We are not really ending life. We are continuing a journey. We know this because as we walk this path of spiritual surrender we become increasingly aware of the divine realm. Increasingly, it merges with our existence here on earth. We become ever more heavenly minded. I have heard that old accusation of being so heavenly minded that I am no earthly good. But Paul says that we are to set our minds on our eternal home. Far from being no earthly good, you see, as we increasingly seek our eternal essence the Divine Nature that we receive from above finds an ever wider place to manifest here on earth.

This is a journal, the journal of my journey into the eternal realms. I invite you to share in this journey, to share your reflections if you are on this spiritual path. If you are seeking this path I invite you to share your questions, your comments, your struggles, doubts, fears, joys, dark nights, divine comforts and consolations. For we are truly walking into eternity. I have walked an intentional contemplative path now for twelve years; walking ever deeper, ever higher into the eternal realms. I am on my way out of this life but on my in to a larger space where increasingly I live within His Divine Presence. As I decrease in the world Christ in me increases. His light shines brighter as I let go of the life that I have been clinging to in this life. As I let go of that self that I have built around my concerns here on earth the eternal within me finds greater place to manifest Himself on this earth.

The contemplative path is a path upwards and inwards. More and more I sense myself ever being lifted upwards, transcending, going toward my true destination. I know so many people in this stage of life that perceive only the end of this life. Perhaps after having a good career, gaining reputation, having made a comfortable living, and then sort of whiling the time away until they finally die. The usual conception, I think, is one of a hill or a bell curve. One ascends in a career, reaches a peak, and then descends into retirement.

I don’t see my life like that. I have not had a brilliant career, nor made lots of money, nor established a good reputation. In fact, I can feel with Paul that I count it all as dross. Actually I count it all as preparation for what God is right now doing with my life. I am at the prime of life! I have come now earnestly into my Divine Purpose. All my whole life to this point has been but preparation for where God is right now taking me. There is no downward trend into retirement. It is all upward, all progressing toward eternal life; not toward deterioration but toward the fullness of my created being. Consider this passage:

When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Col 3:4

This all sounds like the sweet by and by but it is just so evident to me from Scripture how the eternal bleeds over into this present life. We draw too definite a line between this temporal realm and the eternal. Christ who is our life is manifesting in us as we open ourselves to Him and increasingly give our lives over to Him. As we walk toward the eternal so does the Glory of Christ manifest within us spreading outwardly into the world around us. The more heavenly minded we become the greater is the Glory of God able to penetrate into this world and to touch all that are around us. How cool is that! This all happens as we venture into the eternal realms. We are not really trying to be Christ-like. It happens as we walk ever deeper into the wholeness of life.

Walking in Divine Purpose

How do we think of ‘church work?’ The image, which my own experience with ‘church’ has shaped into my mind, is that of a static institution honey-combed with slots in which people serve. The people that serve in these slots are rather interchangeable. I may serve in a slot one year and someone else doing pretty much the same job serves in the same slot the next year. I think this helps people feel that they are being good Christians by putting in a couple of hours of church duty per week. But it seems rather dead. And how does such a church speak outwardly into a world that is hungry for something other than the same sort of institutional life that we find everywhere in the world?

This is a picture of an institutional church filled with slots seeking people. I would contrast this with an image of a community of people seeking purpose within a spiritual body. Ah, you can just feel the fluidity, the melting of that rigid structure into something that flows both inwardly and outwardly. Here there is Life flowing both deeply within our souls and outwardly into a world of rigid facades where people are hungry for deep meaning.

How do we break out of this institutional rigidity? It is not really a matter of how we structure the church. It is not trying to find some sort of church program that will do this. That just adds program upon program. It is a matter of how we work within the church structure. We do not need to change what we now have, but perhaps we need to look at how we approach what we now have. Here is the question we should ask ourselves. Are we seeking in our work in the church to simply fulfill an obligation -- to discharge a duty -- or is this an opportunity to really dig into the divine purpose for which each of us was created? If the church is static it is because a rigid church position forms us. We become quite ‘churchy.’ The church becomes living as we ourselves live our work in the church from the inside out. Paul says in Ephesians 2:10: For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. This goes to the heart of who we are, our essential identity. We are designed inwardly for a purpose on this earth.

Do we regard ‘church work’ as the outward expression of our inner identity? If we did, then our work in the body of Christ would be about the most meaningful thing we do in life. That few hours per week of church work would encompass our whole being. If we give God but a small space to work within us that is all He needs. In that small space He can ‘mine’ into that which is of ultimate importance in our lives. It only takes a small door to lead into a large space. It reminds me of the main entrance into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which was erected over the site where Jesus was born. The church itself is immense, once you get inside. But you enter the church through a door so small that you have to duck through it.

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Contemplative practice can bring us through that narrow opening into an immense region of Spiritual purpose. It is not even a matter of struggling with how we are suppose to do this church work to make it fit our inner design. If our contemplative practice focuses us on working our innermost being open to the Life of Christ within us, this begins to release our Life-charged inner nature into our external work. Over time our work in the church, and everywhere else for that matter, will take on the shape of our inner design.

This is the struggle of becoming. It is the birth of our created souls. Our work will not be benign. Our spiritual becoming involves breaking through the thick armour of our ‘false self.’ As we move in the work for which God created us He will bring much to the surface that He wants to purge out of us. We must expect to walk through rough places of conflict and opposition, and some ‘dark nights’ of painful enlightenment about ourselves.

Scripture talks about silver being refined. The silversmith heats the silver to a liquid. This frees it up so that the impurities can rise to the surface. For so long the silver has clutched onto those inner impurities. They have become part of the silver itself. When the silver becomes liquid it is able to release those particles of impurity. They rise to the surface and the silversmith scoops them off. Then he or she can mold the silver into a beautiful and useful object -- a wine goblet, perhaps, or an eating utensil.

Contemplation makes us workable to God. When we release our whole being into His hands it makes us as molten silver. When a solid becomes liquid the rigidly bonded molecules can flow and slide freely over one another. It is an unfreezing process. Perhaps we can think of contemplation as just such a de-solidification. The rigid thing that we have built up to protect us and make us acceptable to the world around us is an unworkable object in the hands of our Maker. Contemplation is the practice of releasing our solidified self into the hands of the Molder of our lives. We become clay in the hands of the Potter.

This is how God can use church work to form us into His true intention for us. He shapes our work to serve the purpose that He is working over the whole earth. It really is a big deal. We give Him the space to unfreeze us from our false self and He integrates us into the entirety of His work on the earth. You see, it is not just an isolated slot that we work within. We become connected to the whole body of Christ. All things came into being in Christ. That few hours a week of church service can become spiritually connected into everything that there is. On the surface it looks small but its roots run deep. It connects with the very center of Being itself.

If we walk in such a surrendered manner letting God shape us, the emerging purpose within each of us fits us together into a living body. The gifts of others are the very means by which our own gifts get unwrapped. The body that comes into being through the release of our inner nature is itself the nurturing ground in which we grow in purpose. It works back on itself. Paul presents a profound picture of this in Ephesians 4: 12. The gifts that God gives us are …to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Working within our gifts, that is, within Divine purpose is …for building up the body of Christ. Which in turn has the result that …we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature (personhood), to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. You can see how beautifully this works. It grows upon itself. If only a few of us reach for the depths of spiritual purpose it begins to infuse the whole church with the spiritual nurturance by which the whole body reaches “…the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” This fullness does not stop at the church walls but reaches outwardly with the living, breathing Presence of Christ into a world hungry for meaning and purpose.