It All Comes From His Presence

Well, I consider this to be my first ‘official’ blog entry. The past few have been informing you about who I am, what I believe and what kind of thing you can expect from this subscription. If you’re reading this now then I guess I’ve caught your attention and maybe offered you a morsel of something unique that you may not find on other blogs. I do hope it’s a breath of fresh air, and I do hope that you can sit back and relax as you read this, knowing that there are other women out there just like you who face the realities of life as a woman, wife and mother but who have the intense desire to live it victoriously through the power of our God. Which brings me to today’s post. I’ve chosen this as my first key to share with you, because I believe it is foundational to all else. If we can get this in our life then everything else can be built upon it. What is it? It’s the presence of God!I feel incredibly blessed to have been born into a Christian family that has such a rich spiritual heritage and having had generations before me praying for me and my children and my grandchildren long before my own parents were even born! How’s THAT for the faith of my prayer-warrior grandmother! She is still alive today and some of the most beautiful and powerful experiences I have are while praying with her. Woman of God! I attended church since before I can even remember and my entire education was through a Christian school. I had ‘Christianity’ in my life right from birth. And I am so thankful and grateful for it! Yet there came a point in my teenage years where all of this knowledge and teaching that I had been surrounded by since I was a little girl had to become real for me. There was something pulling at my heart as I grew into a young woman that was telling me there was more than just this. I knew the Bible. I knew about God. I went to church. I was surrounded by Christians. But Jesus was knocking on my heart asking me to truly let him in and make him the Lord of my life.I remember the night I lay in bed when I was about 15 years old. Nothing special or out of the ordinary had happened that day, it was just a typical day in the life of a teenage girl. Yet as I hopped into bed that night I decided to get serious with God and told him that I would now give him my life. All of me! My present, my future, my career, my husband to be, my children, everything! I was all his. From that moment on what had been knowledge of and about God now became real in my life. I had a relationship with God. He was my God and I was his!Looking back I can see a definite shift in my life. From this point on my ‘knowledge’ became experience. Before I ‘knew’ but now I was LIVING it. It went from my head and understanding, to my heart and experience. But it still wasn’t all there was. As I read my Bible and prayed and worshipped, I saw something that I didn’t quite have yet. After finishing high school I moved from the country town I grew up in to the city and started attending a church that was very different to the church I had grown up in. There was something on it, something I desired yet couldn’t describe. One Sunday night the pastors asked if anyone wanted to come to the front and receive the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives. I knew this was it, this is what I was hungry for! I had grown up ‘knowing’ God, but at 15 Jesus wanted to be in my life. Now at 18 the Holy Spirit wanted control...and I wanted to give it to him! I went down the front that night and experienced the power of the Holy Spirit fall upon my body and spirit for the first time. Since that time things inside of me have come alive - gifts, callings, talents, skills, prayer and worship to another level - all I can say is POWER. Power came into my life and it has been my desire to foster it and increase it in all the years since.So that brings us to today. Well, I’ve skipped a good 12 years actually, but what I know, who I am and how I live today have been an accumulation of what I experienced from that night on. Over these past 12 years I have grown in not just my knowledge of God and his Word, but my experience of his presence and power in my life. This, I believe, is the key.Everything comes from living in and from the presence of God. What do I mean by that? The manifest, tangible and felt presence of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is present, then God is here. And when God is here...he brings his power and glory with him. And where his power and glory are present, things change and transform. In other words...WE transform in his presence!How do we live in and live from the presence? First of all we need to experience it. The Psalms tell us that the way to enter into his presence is through thanksgiving and praise. We enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise (Ps 100:4). The king is in his courts! When we have entered his courts we have entered his presence. Thanksgiving and praise can be done through prayer, and through worship. When we worship we open up the heavens above us. Heaven hears our hearts and the presence of God comes and falls upon us, around us, in us, through us. We can remain in this presence and be filled up - filled with refreshing water, filled with glory, filled with peace, hope, faith, love.We enter his presence to be filled with him, all of him and everything he is. But the idea of being filled up with strength and grace is not so we walk out and lose it all, leaving it all behind...we have to learn to carry the presence with us, and take it wherever we go. We need to learn to be presence carriers! I could talk about this forever, but I highly recommend Bill Johnson’s “Hosting the Presence” as a read that will change your life if you don’t already live by this now. Also, Brother Lawrence’s “Practicing the Presence of God” - his writings are hundreds of years old, but profoundly applicable to us today.When we live from a place of the presence we have every resource to draw from, whenever we need it. Everything at hand. Heaven is at hand! The power of the living God is available to us to draw from. It is exactly like having him in the room with us helping us and supporting us and giving us the strength to go on. Stressed? Draw some peace from his presence. Discouraged? Draw hope. Weak? Draw strength. Depressed? Draw joy. Sick? Draw healing. Frustrated? Draw patience. Whatever you need is available to you on hand. Practice the presence of God and live life through his grace and strength, not trying to do it all yourself.This whole thing took itself to a new level when I had a newborn baby for the very first time. I was suddenly plunged into a life that I had never experienced before and didn’t have a clue what to do or how to do it or even where to begin! Of course, the natural instinct that is inbuilt into us kicked into gear, but nonetheless being a first time mom is rather overwhelming, to say the least. Within the first few weeks I found myself in situations where I had no idea what to do or how to handle it. My capacity had seemed to diminish overnight. Even finding the time to go to the restroom seemed long gone.I remember one night in particular, Hugo must have been only two or three weeks old and I was sitting in bed early, giving him a feed before I put him in the crib next to me and we all retired for an early nights sleep. It had been a tough day. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual exhaustion of having a newborn. My mind was fuzzy and my body was weak. Suddenly, I heard some music playing that I had never heard before. My husband Gavin was in the other room playing it through the iPod. This music was so anointed that I could literally feel the presence of God enter the room and thicken in the atmosphere around me. Immediately, this profound peace came out of nowhere and fell upon me. My spirit was totally rejuvenated and I felt not just strengthened, but full of joy and excitement.The presence of God carries power. Power to transform us. It carries a grace that gives us the strength to go on. It takes the heavy burden from our shoulders and exchanges it for a light and easy yoke. We cannot do this life in our own strength! I cannot stress that enough!!! We will burn out, crumble under the pressure and weight. We will kill ourselves trying - kill ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. But hand over that control to the all-powerful God and allow him to be at work in our lives and we will have the capacity to run and run and run and keep on running. It ALL comes from his presence! Seek his presence. Rest in his presence. Host his presence. Carry his presence with you, in you and around you wherever you go and you will have the power of God at hand to draw from whenever you need it.