The God Encounter and what it can teach us
Introduction
God wants to have an encounter with you. He wants you to know His Holy Spirit living inside you and bringing you His joy and peace. This is not just a theory – it is the reality for many millions of people in this world – and if you want, it can be for you too.
However, in order to experience God fully in the way he intends, we need to look at the bible and see times and places where God met with other human beings and spoke to them in extraordinary ways. We need to discover the lessons we can learn from God encounters.
What is a God Encounter?
It is important to make clear from the outset that the term God encounter need not always be something dramatic. At the moment I am recovering from a broken hip and to some extent I am experiencing a “God encounter”. By this I mean that in spite of the pain I am feeling, I am experiencing a sense of the Holy Spirit with me on a deeper level than I have felt for at least a year. I sense new feelings of peace, joy and love with me. This is tangible. It comes as quite a relief after a prolonged period in my life where God has felt rather distant and where I felt stress and disorder. However, as you will see, even this time in the desert can be part of the God encounter that can make such a difference to our lives as we follow Christ.
A God encounter, in the terms that I am describing in this book, is any experience in which we sense we are in contact with the Holy Spirit, or the presence of Christ or our Heavenly Father (these are of course all part of the same being that is God). God encounters lie at the heart of all true Christian experience, but we tend to forget that they also occur when we go through times of spiritual aridity and depression, which we often do.
Of course I am aware that people who are not Christians also profess to having God encounters, and I shall be dealing with this issue in the course of the book. When, from a Christian point of view, might these God encounters be real encounters with the true God, and when they might be self- deceptions, or even encounters with the demonic? The first part of this book however will deal with a specifically Christian context.
God encounters, for the Christian, are times when we feel we are spiritually benefitting from our experience of the Christian faith, and when we sense God’s presence with us in some shape or form. However, it is not as simple as that. God encounters can also be times when we go through a spiritual desert and do not feel God’s presence at all, because it is in the desert that we are refined and made strong in Christ. As Jacob says in his God encounter “Surely God was in this place, and I was not aware of it.”
God encounters should not just be restricted to those who describe themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic. Without the day to day presence of the Holy Spirit alongside us, we quickly become discouraged in our Christian lives. By dismissing the power and presence of the Holy Spirit as a theory and not a reality, some theologians and preachers have restricted faith to something relying only on human willpower and strength of character. However, it is the experience of Christians down the centuries that when we are weak, we are strong, and that without Jesus was can do nothing (john 15 v 5).
Will you yearn for a God encounter in your life, whatever form your spirituality might take? This book is for people who have already launched out on the Christian voyage of faith but it is equally intended for anyone who has not yet taken a significant step of faith in their lives and who therefore might describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. An encounter with the divine, a God encounter, is likely to help such people take this first step of faith.
If you are an agnostic or an atheist but you are intrigued by the concept of a God encounter, then I would urge you to read this book. Agnostics and atheists are often not as aggressive to faith concepts as Christians might imagine. They are often people who would like to believe in God if only they could believe with some sense that they are not abandoning their reason, their intellectual capacities or their integrity. They are often people who yearn for that chance to respond to a spiritual reality that is calling out to them from the depths of God, if only they had more evidence. There are many who secretly or openly wish for a God encounter. As St Augustine once said
"God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you."
God encounters do happen. In today’s sceptical and unbelieving world the widespread testimony of people who have had God encounters and the many forms these take reminds us that our step of faith is not a blind step but a response to something calling within us, or outside of us, that we know is not simply our imagination. Most people’s conversion or decision to follow Christ is attributable to the fact that they have in some shape or form experienced a God encounter. As you read this book, may you experience a God encounter for yourself or may you understand that one may be just round the corner.
Chapter 1 - JACOB
This book will use examples from the bible to base its understanding of God encounters. To begin with, let us start with Jacob. In the passage below, Genesis 28, Jacob encounters God through a dream.
Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28)
This is an amazingly exciting vision that came to Jacob’s mind as he slept. The stairway going up to heaven, the angels descending an ascending, and the Lord actually standing above it proclaiming this incredible promise to Jacob. There are few in the Bible of its magnitude.
However, it is interesting to note where it occurs. The context is extremely important.
The passage comes shortly after Jacob had tricked his father Isaac, who was elderly and blind, into giving him his special and life-changing blessing, even though it was intended to go to Jacob’s elder brother, Esau. The blessing that Jacob received was a solemn blessing which carried huge spiritual significance. It represented the handing on of the promises that God had given to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham, to bless all nations through the offspring of Abraham:
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12)
Even more important than handing on family possessions, land and livestock from one generation to another was the handing on of this Abrahamic promise and blessing. The blessing should have gone to Esau as the older of the two brothers, but Jacob received it through his act of deception. By wearing Esau’s clothes and putting on animal skins so that he felt like his hairy brother, Jacob tricked his father into believing he was Esau, and the blessing was given to Jacob instead. By receiving this blessing, Jacob had positioned himself as the recipient of divine favour, a favour that was coming to him straight down the family lineage from the original first blessings of Abraham, and meant that forever more the God of the Abrahamic covenant would always be known as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not Esau. Yes, this was a stolen inheritance.
Some critics argue that Esau had forfeited the blessing earlier in the book of Genesis when, hungry for some of Jacob’s food, he gave up his first born birthright. Such a foolish act by Esau may give more justification for what happened later, but it does not let Jacob off the hook. He still acted in a deceitful way. He still lied. He still pretended he was Esau.
So the main point to consider is this. Jacob had an encounter with God through this dream even though he had had acted dishonourably just a short while beforehand with his father and brother. The mystery starts to unfold. God encounters happen with sinful people – that means people like Jacob, and people like you and me.
Lessons for us today
One of the things that stops a God encounter from happening is the belief that we have to be spiritually all sorted out first in order to have the encounter. The theory goes as follows : we have to be living a very good life; we have to have managed to control and subdue all our bad habits; we have to have a heart free of any bitterness; we have to have a wonderful prayer life; we have to be a model of holiness. Only when we have reached this standard, the argument continues, will we experience God in any meaningful way. He would not entertain the presence of a person who has not managed to get very far along this way.
Yet this type of thinking is deeply harmful. Where is the reality of love and grace in such thinking? We have got our theology all twisted up if we expect God only to bless us when we are perfect.
Such a faith-destroying approach is one of the main reasons why so few people have a living and vibrant faith, because nobody ever feels they reach the pinnacles they consider they should be at in order to encounter God. They never feel that they are in a good enough place to receive. Their concept of God may be notionally a God of love but their real understanding of God deep in their subconscious reveals a stern autocratic and demanding dictator, the Uncle George that Gerard Hughes talks about in his book “God of Surprises”. This is a God who demands attendance at church and fearful obedience on the threat of hellfire. Gerard Hughes spells it out in his vision, using the term “Uncle George” as his metaphor for God:
Uncle George was a family relative, much admired by Mum and Dad, who described him as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in us all. Eventually we are taken to visit good old Uncle George. He lives in a formidable mansion, gruff and threatening. We cannot share our parents professed admiration for this jewel in the family. At the end of our visit, Uncle George turns to address us. “Now listen dear,” he begins, looking very severe, “I want to see you here once a week, and if you fail to come, let me show you what will happen to you.” He then leads us down to the mansion’s basement. It is dark, becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear unearthly screams. In the basement there are steel doors. Uncle George opens one. “Now look in there, dear”, he says. We see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women and children who failed to visit Uncle George or to act in a way he approved. “And if you don’t visit me, dear, that is where you will most certainly go,” says Uncle George. He then takes up upstairs again to meet Mum and Dad.
As we go home, tightly clutching Dad with one hand and Mum with the other, Mum leans over us and says, “And now don’t you love Uncle George with all your heart and soul, mind and strength?” And we, loathing the monster, say “Yes I do” because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace.
How many readers of this book, including those without faith, have a deep subsconscious image of a God who is like Uncle George? Probably quite a high percentage. It is an image of a God who is ready to pounce on us at any moment, a God who is angry with us and ready to push us into a fiery furnace, a God who is adding up all our sins in a little book and will be ready to punish us for each one.
One day I was walking along Whitstable beach, near to where I live, when I came across an empty plastic bottle in which I found a note.The note remains in the bottle, which is on my office shelf. The note reads as follows:
LOST SINNER YOU NEED CHRIST
The only living Saviour of this fast dying, perverted, permissive, immoral, greedy, selfish, fun loving, God hating world died for YOUR sin. LOST SINNER you “know” you are a sinner you have NO EXCUSE. “No man has”. You must “REPENT”, turn from your sin now or spend ETERNITY in Hell with all other Christ Rejectors who condemn their own Creator and Saviour WITHOUT A CAUSE. Jesus loves you but you will not mock him and get away with it. You WILL be judged for your MOCKERY AND REJECTION. If you should die tonight and none of us know when we will die, where will you SPEND ETERNITY, in Heaven or Hell with or without Christ.
Whatever your beliefs about judgement might be, I am sure you will agree that one of the central problems with the message of the bottle is its tone. It presents a God of anger who seems intent on putting the majority of his creation into hell and uses the threat of it to save a small minority from the flames. There is no hint of love in the tone, only menace. It is so sad that many Christians have hidden Uncle Georges in their spiritual memories and consciousness . Christians who promote this image of God have caused many wise and spiritual people to turn away from the Christian faith in horror.
The reality is far from this. The God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and artful Jacob, is a God who is with us in our sinfulness. To experience a God encounter is to understand the nature of God and his love for us in spite of our imperfections. The God of the bible is a God of grace, not a God of just desserts. He is not the God of performance and reward, but the God of love and forgiveness.
Performance and Reward instead of Grace and Forgiveness
A system of performance and reward is a concept found in the west based on an increasingly meritocratic (you get what you deserve) mindset.
“That criminal got what he deserved”. “You deserve a better partner than your current wife”. “He made his fortune and he deserves every bit of it.”
When it comes to our relationship with God, from a Christian point of view, one of the central points for us all to realise is that in the bible God encounters nearly always happen to people who are far from perfect. The God encounters we shall see in the coming pages will involve characters like King David the adulterer, Moses the murderer, Saul the persecutor, and Simon Peter the betrayer, to name but four. None of these were perfect. All of them had at some time or other committed serious sins. Nonetheless, God was prepared to have an encounter with them, and he is prepared to have an encounter with you – yes with all your imperfections and inadequacies.
Paul captures this well in his letter to the Romans
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans chapter 5)
For those who are just starting out – discovering the God of Love
For those who have not yet taken the first step of faith, or who are in the process of taking the steps but are unsure where they are heading or what is in store for them, it is important to hear the gospel message of love and forgiveness.
Accepting terms and conditions
For those of us in a post-modern, post-Christian culture, like here in Britain, it is difficult to even start explaining the Christian gospel to those around us. There may well be readers of this book who disagree profoundly with the whole concept of them being sinners in need of forgiveness. You may say to me – I am not aware of any sins in particular?
The language of sin is so unpopular in today’s culture I can understand people saying this. However, what is useful to know is that from a Christian point of view any attitude which is not perfect is a sin. That may be a bad attitude towards another human being, even if they have hurt you. It may be a habit which is in some way short of the ideal. For example, I remember as a teenager being addicted to fruit machines, but the sin could be much less embarrassing and costly than that. It could be attitudes of pride or vanity, possibly a short temper or a judgemental spirit. It might even be something you quite enjoy, such as greed or a hard edged mocking sense of humour or a lustful spirit. It is still a sin.
The trouble with sin is that it gets in the way of our relationship with God and in order to be free of it we have to bring it to God and ask for his Holy Spirit to cleanse us and make us whole.
In order to receive a sense of assurance that God is with us and that he loves us and wants us to know his Holy Spirit inside us, all we need to do is ask him to make this all real to us. If this is the case with you, I would advise you to keep reading this book and gradually I believe the Lord will make things clearer to you.
Forgiveness from God is a free gift being offered to everyone, if they should only decide to receive it. At a church baptism of an infant, I often say to the congregation that any of them are welcome to dip their finger in the font before leaving the church and make the sign of the cross on their own forehead, as a sign of God’s love for them and his willingness to forgive them for anything wrong they have done in their life. I explain of course that a proper formal baptism would have to be booked as well, but the dipping of the finger in the font by the unsure member of the public, perhaps in church for the first time in years.
I ask you then, will you metaphorically dip your finger in the font of Christ’s forgiveness today? It does not matter what your background is or how good or bad you feel your life has been so far. The offer of forgiveness is extended to you. You will be surprised to discover in time that the Christian God is not the Uncle George that the church has sometimes portrayed, but a God revealed in Jesus Christ who suffered on the cross in order to forgive you your sins. He carried the punishment for them instead of you having to carry them. You are now free.
For those who have already taken a step of faith – Rediscovering the God of Love
Those who have already started their journey on the Christian way can be as confused, or even more confused, than those who have not even begun that journey. The following will be equally of interest to those who have not yet taken the step of faith.
It is easy to pay head knowledge to a God of love when really we have an Uncle George deep in our sub-conscious who we are really serving. It is easy to abandon the pathway of grace to retreat to the dictates of trying to earn God’s favour – the way of law, not grace. It is quite possible for us to do this while thinking we are still following the way of grace, when actually we have abandoned it aItogether.
In the letter to the Galatians, Paul spells out the difference between following the Christian faith in a law or grace centred sort of way.
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain? So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Paul here explains the difference between living our lives from a spirit of duty and fear, and living our lives out of a spirit of love and grace. It is vital to understand this difference if we are to live full and happy lives in which we have a close relationship with our heavenly Father.
It is the difference between following Christ out of a spirit of legalism and following Christ out of a spirit of grace. Central to this is recognising that Jesus died on a cross to take upon himself our sins, so that we might be forgiven and fully reconciled to our heavenly Father.
Let me explain a little more about the theology of the cross. The theology of the cross that our heavenly Father sees us as perfect, without sin or stain, because Jesus carried those sins on the cross for us. Even when we sin, which we still do, Jesus effectively continues to carry those sins on the cross too, providing we confess them before God and turn from them. Importantly though, when we do sin, we are no longer thrown into a state of condemnation before God. We remain part of his family, loved and accepted, with just areas of our lives still needing repentance and forgiveness. This is the way of grace.
The way of law is very difference. It is not to have any assurance that God loves us. The way of law is to believe in a stern and autocratic God who every day wants us to reach a certain standard in our prayer life, our behaviour, our thought patterns, our speech, our habits, and only then will he – just possibly – be pleased with us and willing to give us a sense of his peace and joy. The God of law is a stern taskmaster who is never particularly pleased with us though. He would be the equivalent of a stern fitness trainer who is forever asking his athletes to run another lap of fitness training, and even after the fitness session is still angry that it was run too slowly and with too little commitment.
The way of law then is based on our perfect behaviour as the way to placate God’s wrath. Yet we all know that none of us can possibly live a perfect life. We need to go the way of forgiveness.
The way out of law, and into grace, according to Paul, is through faith. We simply need to believe that Jesus has died for us to pay for our sins and bring us peace with our Heavenly Father. Believing this gift of forgiveness is to live the life of faith. By recognising our salvation as a free gift, brought to us through the death of Christ on the cross, we no longer see salvation as something we have to do in our own strength or for our own glory. Instead, we approach God as thankful children who have been forgiven and set free from guilt and condemnation by the death of Jesus, who paid the price for our sins. What is more, the Holy Spirit mediates this to us as a gift of deeper grace in our hearts.
It’s as if God says to you “John, Sally, Peter, Jane and (your name), I love you, and I have taken care of your salvation for you. I died for you to forgive you and free you from having to prove yourself to me. All you need to do is respond in gratitude to me receive my grace”.
This theology of the cross is also known as the theology of the atonement. Of course atonement theory is not popular with everyone. The idea of atonement (paying the price to atone for sin) reveals to some a God of wrath who is bent on pouring out his anger on his Son, to placate his wrath. Therefore some within the church sidestep the whole notion of atonement theory because they feel it undermines the notion of a loving God.
Writing as a church leader who has had many discussions with many people in recent years, some of whom attend my church, I would say that I have reached the conclusion that the atonement is not a sign of God’s wrath but a sign of his love. God the Father was not pouring out his wrath on His Son in some cruel and vindictive way. God the Son willingly accepted the role as the Lamb of God, to become the sacrificial victim who would of his own freewill take upon himself the sin of the world.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
An atonement free system of faith leads to a guilt heavy, performance focussed faith that cripples the believer. Without the atonement we can never be sure that God really loves us and has truly brought us into a deep and eternal covenantal relationship with him. There always will be the lingering doubt – have I lived a good enough life? Does God really love me? Only accepting God’s forgiveness through Jesus slays the dragon of fear and condemnation once and for all.
What Paul is saying in the letter to Galatians is that once we receive by faith the fact that Christ died for us, we are then in a better position to make this love real to us and we obtain this by receiving the Holy Spirit, who lives within us and helps us live out the Christian faith out of love and gratitude. The Holy Spirit fills us with his peace, joy and love as we recognise that , though still sinners, we have been cleansed and made righteous in the sight of our heavenly Father by the blood and body of Jesus, shed and broken for us.
Why did Paul describe the Galatian community as a people who had been bewitched? It is because the Galatian community had forgotten how to receive the blessings of God. They had started to believe they had to be circumcised again in order to please God – then he would give them his blessings. Circumcision, a rite of the old law, had been a sign of something that had to be done in order to obtain peace with God. It was human effort, not grace, that was the driving force behind the theology of circumsion. If, Paul argues, circumcision is the process by which we find peace with God, then Christ’s death is of no use. Christ need not have died if we can find peace with God through our own attempts.
Therefore, Paul focusses in on the fact that Christ has been “clearly crucified” to remind them that the crucifixion is the basis of their acceptance before God, not their own efforts to be holy.
For the beginner and the long-time traveller alike – the same message
Whether you are just starting out on the Christian journey or whether you have been travelling for some time, the simple message must always remain the same. Our efforts to be holy are not the basis on which we will receive the blessings of God. The basis of our relationship with God is dependent on the forgiveness Christ made possible for us through his shed blood of the cross. Once we start living our Christian faith in a spirit of fear, we will not be able to receive a proper God experience in the way God wants us to.
Dave was an ex-drug addict who had come to faith when I was a University student in London in the late 1980’s. He was emotionally all over the place. He still smoked and drank too much. He still swore and was lustful in his heart towards various women. However, through his intimate relationship with Jesus he exuded the love of God and a victorious belief that Jesus had set him free from his drug addiction and that through the work of the Holy Spirit he was being gradually set free of alcoholicism and lust. I have lost touch with him now, but whenever I think of someone who radiated the joy and love of Christ, and the gospel of grace, I think of him.
At the same university campus was another person, whose name I shall not reveal. He was a member of the Christian Union. His bookshelves were filled with Christian books and his walls covered with Christian posters. He even had a poster which said “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” However, he was often making caustic and scornful remarks about “non-Christians” and gave off a sense of superiority and self-righteousness. His bible studies were full of duty centred admonitions which made those in his study group always feel they were never doing quite enough to please God in terms of their prayer life or Christian witness. I do not believe he had one “non-Christian” friend – and he may have been proud of this fact. He wrapped himself up in the protective bubble of Christian radio, Christian meetings, and Christian friends and never seemed to leave it. I saw little of the love of God in him, for he was living the Christian life in a law centred way, even though he used the language of grace.
It was this person’s pride that meant he had separated himself from the love of God, but there are far more Christians who are unwittingly living the life of law because they have been deceived by Satan, or by their own poor memory of the gospel message of love, into the dungeon of guilt and duty.
If you are living in that dungeon now be reminded of Jacob and his dream. Imagine a large building if you like with a sign over the front saying “Welcome to the Household of Forgiveness”. If you take that step of faith now for the first time, or take it again as someone wishing to re-enter that household, may I encourage you to take that step. You have the right to be a member of that household of forgiveness, with other people who are forgiven, even though you and none of them are yet perfect. Jesus welcomes you to this building with open arms and Jacob and Dave from University will be among the first to greet you.
You have the perfect right to enter that house and live there once you accept Jesus died for your sins on the cross. You wear the white robes of righteousness which were purchased for you by the death of Christ on the cross, who bore your sins on your behalf, so that you might go free. Yes, you may still sin, but when you confess these sins to God, he immediately removes their weight from off you and you can start again with a completely blank page, no sins imputed to you.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. (1 John 1)
Time for a clear out and refurbishment
Maybe it is time for a clear out and refurbishment in your life. Maybe the attics and cellars of your mind and heart and spirit – and possibly even some of the front rooms – have become filled with guilt and a misdirected sense of God’s displeasure. Maybe you are following the gospel of grace but in a law centred way, or you may have even forgotten the language of grace too. Maybe you felt grace was only for the opening overture of your spiritual life, and now we are on Act 1 or Act 2 all the benefits from God for you have been withdrawn permanently. Maybe you have never dared to enter the courts of the Lord as you always felt he was displeased with you in some way, and are only taking first tentative steps now. No wonder then that you may feel far from a God encounter.
It may be time, even at this early stage in this book, for you to encounter the God of grace and love again. I say “may be time” for of course from God’s point of view it is always time. The condition is on whether you want to find your way back to the sweetness and graciousness and passion of God’s love for you.
Remember, God knows everything about you. He loves you with an eternal love. His love for you has not changed in any way from the moment you accepted Christ as Lord and Saviour or do so now for the first time.
God wants you to shine for him in this world – shine with his love and joy – but you cannot do this if you are in a spiritual dungeon. You may have approached the Christian faith rather like a child approaches a sweet shop. You entered and saw all the wonderful things inside. You tasted some of the delicious confectionary. However, somehow you were fooled into leaving that shop and went down into a dark basement under the shop. Suddenly, however much you may try and like the shop, you actually hate it, because you are not in the right part of the building. You need to get back upstairs and start enjoying yourself again.
As awareness of the God of grace, not law, is the first step on the way to a God encounter.
CHAPTER 2
DAVID
Psalm 51[a]
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.
1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. 4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. 5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. 6 Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place. 7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. 13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you. 14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, you who are God my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. 15 Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. 16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. 17 My sacrifice, O God, is[b] a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
18 May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem. 19 Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar.
One of the apparently conflicting things about the Christian life is that Christians believe in a God of grace, the God of Jacob, but also a God who demands holiness and obedience.
This appears to be a paradox. On one hand we are told that there is forgiveness for us if we should sin, and that God loves us even when we do sin, and on the other hand we are told to resist sin and be careful to avoid it at all costs because indulging in it could eventually lead to our spiritual death.
Such apparent contradictions need metaphors or illustrations to help us see through the apparent inconsistencies and gain a fuller picture of what God is really saying to us.
For those of you already on a journey with Christ, I want you to picture a swimming pool as an image of your spiritual condition before you became a Christian. The water was far from clean. Of course there were lots of beautiful things in that swimming pool – the best of your character. However, there were also things that were far from clean – pride, vanity, lust perhaps being the three most common.
When you became, or when you now become, a Christian, God immediately removes all the dirt from the swimming pool and filled it with entirely fresh water, because of what Jesus had done for you on the cross. You were cleansed from a guilty conscience by the blood of the Lamb and given the white robes of righteousness. The dirt has already gone out through the drainage system and is now in the sea, far away from you.
Maybe, as I suggested in chapter one, you found those clean fresh waters especially delightful in the early stages of your Christian life, but now feel that you are responsible for keeping the waters fresh yourself. As I explained in the last chapter, you are not responsible. God will always provide fresh water when you ask. He is the giver of life and forgiveness. He owns the source of the water.
However, it is not as simple as just asking God to keep the waters fresh, even though that is very important. At any point we can ask the Lord to clean the water again, but if we are asking with one part of our mind, and muddying the waters through deliberate sin elsewhere, then the waters will never be as pleasant as if we are deliberately and wholeheartedly trying to live a life of holiness and repenting at every stage of rebellion and disobedience. The more we keep deliberately throwing dirt in the waters, the harder it becomes to allow the Lord to effectively cleanse them and keep them pure.
Therefore, although at any point God can clean the waters, we also have a part in keeping the water clean. It is this responsibility which means we are sometimes called co-workers with God in our salvation as we enter into a partnership with him to lead us from impurity to purity and from disobedience to obedience:
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Philippians 2)
We play a part in our salvation as we work it out with fear and trembling. God is at work in us, but we are not entirely left without responsibility. A good thing too, as without any sense of responsibility arguably life we would lose our personalities and would cease to grow in character.
Coming off the rails and the God encounter
However, what do we do when we really come off the rails in our Christian life? I want to talk about the issue of serious sin and how it affects the God encounter.
The magnificent psalm 51 was traditionally believed to have been written by David after he had been confronted for his sin of adultery with Bathsheba, by Nathan the Prophet. Nathan had been given discernment by God about David, and David had no place to hide. The full force of his guilt hit him and the weight of his sins overcame him in this tragic lament of repentance.
The whole story is to be found in 2 Samuel 11. David falls in love with the beautiful Bathsheba and makes love to her. She becomes pregnant, and in an effort to hush the adultery up, David arranges for Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to be killed in battle, so that Uriah cannot reveal that the child was not his. David is therefore guilty of both adultery and murder.
David’s words in this psalm are full of remorse:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.
Interestingly though, his words are also full of faith. He believes in a God who will restore him and who will not despise his broken spirit.
Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
As these verses gather momentum, one is the left with the sense that David is taking a step of faith. Yes he has done exceedingly wrong, but he also believes in a God who will restore him and even use him in future to bring other transgressors back to God. He is banking on God for his restoration, knowing he himself is bankrupt without God.
We can learn a lot from this psalm about the nature of a God encounter and how we can best experience the power of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. Let me give you the example of Chris to amplify further.
I visit Chris every six months at a lifer prison in Leicestershire. Chris received a seventeen year sentence for murder. The details surrounding the horrific incident itself are still not clear to Chris as he was heavily intoxicated and under the influence of drugs at the time. He is, however, an extremely well spoken and intelligent person whose grandfather was a churchwarden for many years at my church here in Whitstable. Miraculously, he came back to faith in God during the early years of his imprisonment when he had a powerful spiritual experience and fell in love with the Lord.
He has actually become a good friend. On my visits to him, he ministers to me as well as I to him. He listens to my problems and I listen to his problems.
One of the defining things about Chris’s spiritual life is not the level of remorse he feels for his crimes even though he is still confused about the details of the night of the crime (a factor which does not help him come to terms with it). His level of remorse remains strong at all times. The defining thing about how he is spiritually is how strong his faith levels are in God’s forgiveness. Like David, he sometimes has a strong faith in God’s mercy and forgiveness. At other times, he lacks that comfort and feels very much away from God.
In the early years of his religious renewal in prison he had a very fresh and powerful belief in Christ’s forgiveness of his sins. One visit, in 2007, he took me up to the chapel at the prison and sung me a delightful song he had composed about how Jesus had forgiven him for his crime, even though he realised he still needed to bear the guilt of it on one level and serve his sentence. He still felt the force of his crime, but he no longer felt cut off from God. It was a song full of love and adoration ad intimacy with the Father through Jesus.
However, since that wonderful occasion in October 2007, there have been other times when the shutters are closed and he feel s none of the releasing forgiveness and grace of the Lord. At times like this he is unable to have the faith of David or stand on the mercy and love of God.
So I repeat, this awareness of God’s mercy, not his crime, is the defining factor in Chris’ walk with God to this day. It goes up and down like a yo-yo. In this respect I am sure many Christians are the same. Our experience of God, our God encounters, are not dependent on our sinful past or even present, but on how much faith we have in our Lord to forgive us.
Faith levels are so important when we talk about God encounters. In order to have a God encounter, we need to take God at his word. He is a God of love and forgiveness. If we repent of our sins, we can be sure that he will hear us and apply the blood of Jesus to our sins.
For the seeker after God reading this chapter, maybe you will be comforted by the story of Chris. You may feel far away from God, but if Chris is able to meet with God and experience the joy and intimacy of knowing God then surely you are to. For the person who has already started the Christian faith but is locked in guilt and a sense of failure, may I encourage you to draw afresh from the waters of salvation that I encounter on my visits to this prison. Often as I sit and talk to Chris, I can hear the sound of the other prisoners, all on life sentence for murder, rehearsing the chapel choir. Those tunes of worship always stay in my mind on the journey home as the tunes of those released from the torture of life without God, and now made one with him through the forgiveness made possible by Jesus Christ. I often think to myself that some of these prisoners seem more free and happy than many of the warders, who lack the spiritual benefits that Christ can give us.
Repentance and ongoing sin
What if we repent of a sin but are unable to actually turn from it? Addiction to drugs, gambling, pornography, smoking or alcohol; feelings of bitterness or hatred towards someone; habits of gossip or slander of another person; adulterous feelings towards a work colleague or friend , are all but four examples of quite common attitudes of sin which may beset Christians on a regular basis.
The first thing to say is that Satan has a habit of exploiting this area of a Christian’s life and putting him or her in chains of guilt and condemnation. Some readers of this book may not believe in the devil, but my experience of ministry leaves me in no doubt of his existence, along with my understanding of scripture and the writings of Christians down the centuries.
Satan, the accuser of the brethren (Revelation 12.10), constantly tries to find ways to undermine the security of our position in Christ. He tells us that our repentance is not true repentance because we are continuing to feel lust or malice or bitterness or pride, despite repentance. He makes us feel worthless because we say with our lips that we are sorry, or when we do so in our minds as we confess to God our sins, but he shows us that we continue in sin the very same hour or the same day or same week. What hypocrites and traitors we are, the accusation says.
To counter these accusations it is helpful to remember that repentance does not lead to instant transformation. Flowers bud from an apple tree gradually, after the cold winds of the early Spring have assaulted them for some time. The onset of these flowers may take a whole life time for some people who have been traumatised by harmful addictions from their past. Besetting and internal sins may reoccur for many years, or suddenly reappear when we think we have shaken them off entirely.
With my addiction to fruit machines, I used to constantly ask God for forgiveness for the addiction. I would then return to the pub and put a further £10 into the machine and would feel horribly condemned. The sense of condemnation made me less confident about praying to God to ask for forgiveness again. Condemnation is therefore never helpful in itself when there is no sense that we can escape from it. Rather it imprisons us further into the mire of sin.
However, in time I was shown through prayer that if I continued to confess my sins and ask the Holy Spirit to help me resist fruit machines, I would eventually be free of them. Accepting the devil’s lie that I was condemned would never help. The only way forward was returning to the foot of the cross. It is the same with every sin – pornography, adulterous thoughts and feelings, malicious gossip, evil thoughts, pride and desire for fame and success.
It is helpful to remember that many of these sins appeal to our human nature – sexual desires for example are part of our God-given personality. Therefore we should not feel that we are evil if we have such feelings. The desire for more money, at the heart of the fruit machine addiction, is not in itself evil if it does not become our God. We may find a friend of the opposite sex deeply attractive – we just need to avoid seeing them or communicating with them on their own if we ourselves are married.
What is evil is when these desires take control of us and sap our spiritual strength and trust in the Lord. The only way to break free is to come to the foot of the cross each time and confess our sins and ask for strength to resist the temptation next time.
Jesus of course knows all about our frailties and limitations. Right at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer are these words “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. Jesus knows that our walk with him is a daily struggle.
David, the God encounter, and grace abuse
In order to find our way into the presence of God, we have to have the same attitude of David is Psalm 51. We have to earnestly be aware of our own capacity for sin, and our own brokenness, and trust in the mercy and love of God, made manifest in Jesus Christ. If we do not do this, we are in danger of becoming what Philip Yancey calls “grace abusers”.
A grace abuser is someone who deliberately continues in sin whilst knowing that they can rely theoretically on Christ’s forgiveness to cleanse them of the sin at any moment. It is basically using the love of God as a prop behind which to hide our sinful attitudes and habits.
I am sure you have all heard the half-hearted statement “I will live the life of ease and then repent on my death bed”. This gives a flavour of what grace abuse is. Put more seriously, it is the attitude where we decide to be lax on our moral development and walk with the Lord because we say to ourselves that God will forgive us when it becomes necessary, or even that he forgives our sins as we deliberately continue in them with no sense of remorse.
Note here the issue of remorse. Grace abuse and remorse are directly antithetical. If you are genuinely remorseful for your sin, but cannot yet break free from that sin, you are not guilty of grace abuse. However, if you feel no guilt or remorse, but rather feel a sense of righteousness in your sin, then that is a sign that you are falling into the trap of grace abuse.
An example of laxity in terms of grace abuse can particularly be found in our attitudes to difficult people. Several times in my life I have come into conflict with someone and felt justifiably angry with them and spoken about them behind their back. “That so and so is a terrible person – they have been so rude to me – they dreadful …”. The self-righteous indignation I have felt has protected me from the hurt and helped to restore my damaged ego. However, it has hardly kept me full of the Holy Spirit and more able to experience a God encounter.
A recent encounter with a particularly difficult person has led me to re-evaluate this whole area of my personal life. I now believe that any slandering of another human being behind their back, however justified it might be, deprives us of receiving God’s grace afresh for our own life. We become grace abusers when we try and receive God’s forgiveness without at the same time passing it on to those who hurt us and even abuse us. This is why the command to love our enemies and forgive others is found so often in the pages of the New Testament, appearing as a condition of receiving God’s forgiveness right at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us (Luke 11.4)
The parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18 is but one example of many in scripture which warn of the danger of grace abuse when it comes to the triangular relationship we all have with God and the people around us.
The tragedy is that the church has taken on the individualistic culture of our Western society. Although I am lover of modern Christian worship, so many songs are about the vertical relationship between us and our Heavenly Father made possible through Jesus Christ, to the exclusion of any reference to the horizontal relationship with those around us. Yet if we do not protect the relationships we have with those around us, we become guilt of becoming like the Pharisees in Jesus Day – full of religious fervour but with very little love or mercy for those around them.
Also, if we continue in grace abuse, we become less open to a real encounter with God. So let the example of David remind us that when we hurt those around us we may have to go through a considerable amount of emotional and spiritual pain for us to return to the fountain of grace once again.
God and your conscious and subconscious mind, heart and spirit
The second remarkable aspect of Jacob’s God encounter is that it happened when he was asleep. This is a helpful reminder to us that God knows us much better than we know ourselves. God has full access both to our conscious and our unconscious minds, our waking and our sleeping consciousness. This is perfectly summed up in Psalm 139:
1 You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
This psalm reminds us that God knows everything about us. Even our thoughts are known to God.
Thomas Aquinas wrote the following:
The existence of an absolutely necessary being means there is a divine sustaining hand whose withdrawal means annihilation; it means that we cannot contact anything of reality without confronting divinity; that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, that every moment of life, every particle of dust, every stitch of a garment is permeated with divinity or it could not continue to be. (Summa Theologica – Thomas Aquinas)
In other words, God, who is omnipresent (present everywhere) and omniscient (knowing everything) is not a distant God at all, as many imagine. He is not a only a God who is “out there”, though he does of course exist beyond time and space. He is also a God “in here”.
Karl Jung, the famous psychologist, believed that God is not just familiar with our conscious thoughts too, but our subconscious thoughts. In the brilliant book Jung and the Christian Way, Christopher Bryant explained how for Jung the realm of the subconscious is a place which God nonetheless inhabits. Indeed for Jung, God is to be found in the centre of one’s being, deep within the soul. Bryant writes about how many mystics down the centuries have located God’s presence deep within the subconscious, and how Jung was influenced by that concept:
In the Interior Castle St Teresa represents the soul as a great house containing many rooms. She describes the spiritual journey as a progress in which the individual is led by stages closer and closer to the central room where God dwells. (p.49)
Bryant argues that Jung saw dreams as a place where God could speak to the conscious mind, using the material that was dormant in the mind’s subconscious. In other words, things buried in the subconscious could be woken up through the dream and truths about God could be discovered through examining the dream once the person had awoken. Jung also believed that the journey into the subconscious, both through dreams and through the discovery of the “shadow self”. Through the crises of life, Jung argued, we become aware of parts of our personality which are trapped within our subconscious and which are in need of healing and redemption. This process is called “individuation” by Jung.
The point I am trying to make is that you do not need to pretend that God does not know everything about you. He knows not only everything you know about you, but also all the things in your sleeping mind, your subconscious. Therefore when you approach him in prayer, there is need to pretend. If you think that you are not good enough, he already knows your thoughts. If you think that you have committed a mortal sin and can never be forgiven, he knows your thoughts. God is not interested in what you think about yourself, so much as whether you are willing to believe that Jesus died to forgive you.
Many people harbour thoughts and feelings which they would be ashamed about were they to become publicly known. Physical or emotional attraction towards someone other than our spouse or partner; feelings of anger and bitterness towards our spouse or partner or parents or even children; feelings of anger towards God or towards ourselves. Added to that there are the usual feelings that many people suffer from – stress, depression, anxiety, grief, loneliness.
It is important to remember that our Heavenly Father knows all there is to know about us, as well as the great scope of our unconscious mind. As we turn away from law and back to grace, let us take comfort that even this process cannot be done through our own human effort. We need to pray for the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us back to the cross and to cleanse our minds, spirits and hearts of all law centred thinking. He knows all the deep things about us, and
In order to do this, I would like you to consider saying this simple prayer with me now to close this chapter.
