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The Presence of God

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
368 Seiten
Englisch
Crosswayerschienen am30.11.2014
'God is with us.'  We say this in our sermons, prayers, and songs, but what does it really mean? For many Christians, the whole notion of God's presence remains vague and hard to define.   Exploring both the Old and New Testaments, professor J. Ryan Lister seeks to recover the centrality of the presence of God in the whole storyline of Scripture-a theme that is too often neglected and therefore misunderstood. In a world that longs for-yet struggles to find-intimacy with the Almighty, this book will help you discover the truth about God's presence with his people and what his drawing near means for the Christian life. 

Ryan Lister (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is professor of theology at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of The Presence of God and serves as director of doctrine and discipleship for Humble Beast, where he also helped start the Canvas Conference. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Chase, and their four children.mehr
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Produkt

Klappentext'God is with us.'  We say this in our sermons, prayers, and songs, but what does it really mean? For many Christians, the whole notion of God's presence remains vague and hard to define.   Exploring both the Old and New Testaments, professor J. Ryan Lister seeks to recover the centrality of the presence of God in the whole storyline of Scripture-a theme that is too often neglected and therefore misunderstood. In a world that longs for-yet struggles to find-intimacy with the Almighty, this book will help you discover the truth about God's presence with his people and what his drawing near means for the Christian life. 

Ryan Lister (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is professor of theology at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of The Presence of God and serves as director of doctrine and discipleship for Humble Beast, where he also helped start the Canvas Conference. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Chase, and their four children.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781433539183
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2014
Erscheinungsdatum30.11.2014
Seiten368 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse677 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14345997
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



1

Introduction

A Forgotten Storyline

It is everywhere. We hear about it all the time. It is alluded to in the sermon. We call for it in our prayers. We sing about it in our hymns and choruses.

For Christians, it is hard to escape. As I write this paragraph, I have just returned from a Christian college´s chapel service where I counted seventeen references to it in a fifty-minute service while, of course, paying full attention to the sermon, prayers, and songs. In fact, I think you would be hard pressed to leave your own sanctuary this Sunday without at least one reference to it as well.

What is this refrain we hear over and over again in our churches, small groups, and devotionals? It is the presence of God.

Take a minute to listen to the Christian-speak and, even at times, yourself. How many of us have heard or spoken a prayer that starts like this: Lord, we come into your presence now to lay our needs before you, asking you to be here with us as we cry out to you ?

Sound familiar?

And this is only the beginning. The vocabulary of divine presence weaves its way through our hymnals and PowerPoint slides:

I need Thy presence every passing hour.

What but Thy grace can foil the tempter´s power?

Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.1

As I stand here in your presence,

Of your beauty I will always stand in awe,

I reach my hands out to the heavens,

And I will lift my voice to you alone, to you alone.2

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.

Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.3

This is the air I breathe

Your holy presence living in me.4

Surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel? . . .

Will I stand in your presence, or to my knees will I fall?5

These examples-along with our sermons and other Christian teaching-reveal that the language of God´s presence is, well, omnipresent in our churches and in Christendom at large.6

But there is a problem. As we constantly hear these vague references to God´s presence, the concept remains just that: vague. So as our churches sing the chorus of divine presence, many of us simply do not have ears to hear what it means. So how do we tune our ears to hear the beautiful melody of God´s presence?

To begin, we must understand the reasons for the theological dissonance surrounding this biblical reality. First, many of us are too busy or too overwhelmed to pick up on the overused references to God´s presence in our worship. We are just happy if we can get out of church with all the kids we came with, with all their limbs intact, and with the nursery or education classrooms still standing. Between keeping our son´s restless legs from kicking the seat in front of him and running to the car for a sippy cup every seven minutes, we have limited time to reflect on the sermon, much less a threadbare Christian expression touched on by the associate pastor praying between worship songs.

Second, we can easily become too passive in our worship. Granted that reading Scripture and hearing it preached is a noncontact sport, but our minds should be engaged. We should be asking questions and pursuing truth vehemently in these small windows of study and prayer. I think this is part of what Anselm was getting at with his maxim faith seeking understanding. 7 For some of us, we stop at the first word and forgo the last two. We talk much of faith but we must also talk about pursuing the Lord in an intellectually informed and spiritually vibrant understanding of him. In other words, we must seek God. And not only that, we must seek to understand him relationally as he discloses himself to us through his Word and revelation.

Finally, and possibly the most significant concern, we have simply grown too accustomed to the jargon. Talk of God´s presence is part of the white noise of evangelicalism, a catchphrase that means as little to the one saying it as to the one hearing it. This is typical for many of us. The more we hear something, the less we tend to contemplate its meaning and significance. Unfortunately, this is quite dangerous-especially for the church.

True Christianity is by nature repetitious-and that is a good thing. It is repetitious because God knows exactly who we are and what we need. We bear God´s image and Adam´s sin. So while the gospel shows us that we are the image of God and can know him as he reveals himself, it also reminds us that, at one point, we rejected God and continue to struggle with neglecting him. For this reason, true Christianity points us to Christ and his work on the cross over and over and over again. Scripture tells us that we are broken cisterns, cracked and chipped, needing minute by minute to return to the well of the gospel to be refilled and refreshed.

As I hope to show in the pages ahead, the presence of God is more than a mere buzzword of evangelicalism; it is a strong, fresh current of living water that fills jars of clay like you and me. It is central to the hope-filled message of Scripture. This is what I want to make clear: beneath the cacophony we have made of this biblical theme is a deep, beautiful melody vital to God´s song of salvation that is there only because of the presence of God. In short, I want to show just how intrinsic this theme is to the story of Scripture and to our story.

A King´s Treasure

Part of the rationale behind this book is that it is part of my story. All the busyness, passivity, and familiarity you read about above, well, that was me. I grew up in the church, so I was well versed in Christian-speak and employed such phrases quite compellingly too-especially at church and other opportune times.

I remember the day when the games stopped and the concept of God´s presence became more than just spiritual jargon; it was now the attention-arresting theme of Scripture that God intended us to see. It was the summer of 2000, and I was sitting on a pontoon boat in the middle of the Tennessee River. And though before me was a pristine view of the countryside and the beautiful girl who would soon become my wife, I was blind to it all because of King David´s words:

You make known to me the path of life;

in your presence there is fullness of joy;

at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Ps. 16:11)

Joy and pleasure were what I was looking for-things we all want, I think it safe to say-and here David was telling me exactly where I could find them. All that I sought, all this world relentlessly pursues in all the wrong places, is found in the presence of God.

Needless to say, this was a game changer. David had handed me a biblical treasure map for life.

But mixed in with the happiness of this discovery was the nagging feeling of doubt. Okay, so the fullness of joy and eternal pleasures are found in the presence of God; but I am no closer to that goal than I was before I was hit with all of this. Where was I supposed to begin? To my chagrin, there was no You Are Here sticker in Psalm 16. All I had to go on was the virtually meaningless understanding of God´s presence I had misused and misunderstood up to this point. But I knew the best way forward was to follow David´s lead and let Scripture direct my steps.

Since that day on the Tennessee River, I have been on an expedition to understand the biblical motif of God´s presence. In the past years, as I have been blessed to examine and study it in depth, the Lord has graciously directed me to a better grasp of God´s presence and helped me see the way to the promises of Psalm 16:11.

This book, in a sense, is part travelogue and part key to David´s treasure. My desire is that it can be simultaneously the You are Here and You Want to Be Here stickers of Psalm 16. Hopefully, then, this work can help us move beyond the stagnant notions of God´s presence to the joy and everlasting delight that marks those who truly understand, biblically and experientially, the presence of God. To get us there, I hope to walk with you through the vistas and valleys of God´s mighty acts in redemptive history to show where God reveals his presence and, to the best of our ability, help us understand why he does so.

The Way Ahead

Once we step out beyond the initial overgrowth of confusion and obscurities surrounding this theme, we actually find that the biblical path ahead is well worn. Yahweh is the present God, and the biblical Canon is a beautiful and creative story of how he fulfills his promise to be in the midst of his people. Scripture´s narrative suggests that the past, present, and future realities of redemption are inextricably tied to God´s drawing near to a people.

What I hope to help impress upon us all is that the presence of God is not about mere intuitions and platitudes. It is not a mystical feeling or emotional charge. It is first and foremost a theme of Scripture; and even more, it is a theme on which the story of Scripture hinges.

To demonstrate this, I want to make one major argument in this book that rests on two very simple but very significant biblical truths. The first truth is this: the presence of God is a central goal in God´s...

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Autor

Ryan Lister (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is professor of theology at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of The Presence of God and serves as director of doctrine and discipleship for Humble Beast, where he also helped start the Canvas Conference. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Chase, and their four children.