The wonder of closeness with God is available to you here and now. In The Presence, Alec Rowlands reveals the ways God makes His presence known, how you can prepare for it, and how experiencing it will transform everything. As you draw near to God—as you are consumed by His love and your life is rearranged by His grace—you’ll find fulfillment, purpose, and an unmatched sense of adventure. If you’re feeling a hunger for more of God, you are already on your way to discovering: He is good. He is powerful. He is here.
The wonder of closeness with God is available to you here and now. In The Presence, Alec Rowlands reveals the ways God makes His presence known, how you can prepare for it, and how experiencing it will transform everything. As you draw near to God—as you are consumed by His love and your life is rearranged by His grace—you’ll find fulfillment, purpose, and an unmatched sense of adventure. If you’re feeling a hunger for more of God, you are already on your way to discovering: He is good. He is powerful. He is here.
The Presence: Experiencing More of God
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Overview
The wonder of closeness with God is available to you here and now. In The Presence, Alec Rowlands reveals the ways God makes His presence known, how you can prepare for it, and how experiencing it will transform everything. As you draw near to God—as you are consumed by His love and your life is rearranged by His grace—you’ll find fulfillment, purpose, and an unmatched sense of adventure. If you’re feeling a hunger for more of God, you are already on your way to discovering: He is good. He is powerful. He is here.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496400291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tyndale House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Alec Rowlands is senior pastor of the 2,000-member Westgate Chapel in Edmonds, Washington. Alec is founder and president of Church Awakening, a spiritual renewal network of more than 1,300 pastors. Born in King William’s Town, South Africa, Alec is an international speaker who holds a doctorate of ministry from Carey Theological College, University of British Columbia. He and his wife, Rita, have two daughters.
Read an Excerpt
The Presence
Experiencing More of God
By Alec Rowlands, Marcus Brotherton
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Alec RowlandsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-8724-6
CHAPTER 1
UNTAMED LION
Revival is the overwhelming sense of God's presence that falls powerfully on a Christian people who have become dead or lethargic in their spiritual lives, reviving those elements of the Christian life that God intends to be normal for his church.
I recently returned to my homeland of South Africa, with a camera crew. I wanted to interview people from my father's church who had witnessed a dramatic display of God's presence during a season of spiritual awakening back when I was a boy. After days of recording interviews, the crew asked if they could see some of Africa's wildlife in its natural habitat before we left for home. We drove them several hours out into the bush, west of Johannesburg, to Pilanesberg National Park. The officials at the main gate informed us that visitors had seen no lions or elephants for several days, but that other game would be easy to find. Cameras poised, we proceeded in our rented van on one of the many dirt roads that crisscross the park.
While my brother drove the van, I sat in the back with the camera crew and pulled the sliding door open so we would have an unrestricted view of whatever animals we could find.
We hadn't traveled more than a mile from the gate when my brother spotted a huge male lion off to the left of the van, no more than a hundred feet from the road, lying in the dirt with his face resting on his paws, facing us. The rest of the pride was behind him, camouflaged by the tall, brown savannah grass. They were so well concealed that the cars ahead of us had completely missed them.
The sliding door of the van was already open, and the cameras were rolling as my brother gently applied the brakes. It was a magnificent sight, except for one tiny detail. In the midday heat, none of the lions were moving. They were so still, in fact, that the video was going to look like a snapshot.
We have all seen lazy lions at the zoo, and we had traveled too far to simply replicate that experience. So I decided to shout at them. No response. Then, despite my brother's protests, I quietly slid out of the van, and with my eyes trained on the lion, picked up a stone from the side of the road. (I don't recommend that anyone try this.) I threw the stone in the direction of the lion, but on my windup, my throwing hand hit the roof of the van behind me and the stone didn't make it more than fifteen feet in front of me. The lion was watching me but seemed fairly disinterested in my antics.
By now, my brother was reciting how quickly a lion could cover the distance between us. But I was determined. Still watching the pride very carefully, I bent down for a second stone. Stepping far enough away from the van so my hand wouldn't hit it again, I was able to bounce the stone a few feet from the nose of the male lion. He jumped straight up and roared. Perfect footage for the camera!
Not knowing if he was going to charge me, I stumbled backward onto the floor of the van and tried, in the same motion, to close the door. To my horror, the door had latched in the open position.
This all happened in a matter of seconds, but it felt like it took an eternity to close the door. As it turned out, the lion didn't charge, but to this day I still think about how quickly he could have covered the distance between us and had me for lunch before I ever got the door shut. What was I thinking!
Most of us have seen the ferocity of a lion catching and devouring its prey in a National Geographic special, but all from the safety of the family room couch. I can testify that it is an entirely different matter to be eye-to-eye with the real thing only a hundred feet away. Your heart beats a little faster. Your palms get sweaty. Your brain races to calculate escape routes. Every nerve and muscle in your body is alert and ready to respond. It is not for the faint of heart. No wonder C. S. Lewis uses Aslan the lion to represent God in his famous Chronicles of Narnia.
"Is he—quite safe?" asks Susan. "I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"Who said anything about safe?" replies Mr. Beaver. "'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."
Lewis was right. There's nothing safe about pursuing and being near to God, if by safe you mean being left as you are, to follow your own agenda and depend solely on your own wisdom and resources for living. Those are the things that Aslan will devour.
The Christian life is not a game or a quiet pastime.
But if you are willing to have your life turned upside down, your values reshaped and your energies redirected by God, who is always loving and good; if you are willing to be used by him for the extension of his Kingdom here on earth, then drawing near to him is the only way to live life fully. The only things at risk are things not worth living for. And living in the daily pursuit of God's presence is the best way I know to get to the quality of life and unmatched sense of adventure with God that we desire. It is the Christian life lived the way God intended.
The amazing good news is that we serve a God who loves to be close to us and to make himself known. Given what we know about our lives and our brokenness, that's often hard for us to really believe. But that is God's loving nature and his design for us. He has been drawing near to reveal his love to broken, imperfect people from the times when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the Garden to my quiet time with him just a few days ago in my study, when his presence flooded my heart through a single verse of Scripture and brought me to worship with tears of joy.
The reason Jesus came was to open the door to this kind of intimacy with God for all humanity. It is part of the inheritance of our salvation. And after Jesus ascended to the Father, he sent us the Holy Spirit expressly to facilitate our intimacy with God—in revelation, in worship, in prayer. God invites us to seek his presence. He welcomes our pursuit of him. He rewards it. And his presence will be revealed to us in limitless ways as he makes himself known. But there is risk involved. Proximity to God involves not just having a good feeling. We have to be willing to be wholly consumed by his love and to have our lives rearranged by his grace.
So let me ask you: How satisfied are you with your Christian life, with the way you experience God? Be honest. How often do you enjoy his presence? Do you live too much of your life feeling empty, weary, abandoned? Do you wonder about a God who promises to love and provide for you, but who too often seems distant and silent? Maybe, like many Christians, you live somewhere between those two extremes, occasionally sensing God's presence, but at other times feeling as if he's a million miles away.
What about the church you attend? How frequently do you sense awe and wonder in Sunday worship when you gather together? Is the presence of God producing a humble and ready willingness within the congregation to repent of sin and receive the grace to change? Are lives being transformed? Are people there to serve rather than be served? Are they passionate to bring the gospel to those who don't yet know Christ? Or does church seem rather rote and predictable—even dull? Are people just going through the motions, singing the same songs and participating in the same programs year after year? Do they attend only when it's convenient—and even then, with an eye on the clock to see how quickly they can get out the door and on to lunch or to watch the football game on TV?
Too many of us have settled for far less of God than he wants to reveal. Yes, we've been saved. Yes, we've been forgiven and justified. But there is so much more to living the Christian life. God wants to be intimately known and experienced in the life of every believer. God is alive and on the move. He is, very literally, "God with us." He's not distant, unapproachable, or uninvolved in our lives. He's here. He's now. He's around us and in us and through us, ready to communicate, guide, empower, challenge, bless, and fill us with the full measure of his joy and wisdom and strength.
He wants us to experience him, to be aware of his presence.
Before the first word of Scripture was ever written, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses experienced God's presence—in person—and those encounters changed absolutely everything about their lives. It was dangerous and wonderful at the same time. The question is, have we resigned ourselves to living our lives of faith vicariously through the experiences of these biblical heroes, or can we in any way expect to experience God's presence for ourselves as they did?
Salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ alone. We understand that. But if we're honest, there are times when, like Moses, we long to experience something more of God, to see the glory of God. God never rebuked Moses for his request. On the contrary, he rewarded Moses with a glimpse of his glory. Remember, God loves to make himself known. I don't believe this kind of "seeing" is a substitute for faith, nor are our encounters with God ever to be elevated above Scripture. But I believe we were created to experience God's presence, and that he "rewards those who earnestly seek him."
I am convinced that God has not changed since his intimate encounters with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. In the beginning, he created us with the capacity to experience him intimately. It's a capacity that Adam and Eve forfeited in their foolish desire for independence, but it is restored in you and me when we are reborn in Christ. Our highest purpose is to know, experience, enjoy, and glorify God. It is time to recapture our spiritual birthright and God's design and purpose for the Christian life!
That's why this subject is so vital for us today. There is a growing hunger for God, as well as increasing dissatisfaction with the Christian life as it is typically defined, especially in the Western church. Church attendance is in decline. Young adults are abandoning the faith in unprecedented numbers. Far too many Christians have come to view church as lifeless and irrelevant, and as a result, are not connected to any community of faith. An alarming number of Christians are experimenting with nontraditional spirituality to fill the void. Many are being misled by a manufactured spiritual vitality promised by alternative church ministry models, alternative worship styles, and in some tragic cases, spurious theological innovations presented as the solution to their deep dissatisfaction. Electronic media today provide instant access to these spiritual alternatives for a global audience, negatively affecting the body of Christ in many nations of the world.
Many "solutions" to spiritual discontentment today are being presented as "new wineskin" alternatives for discarded church traditions. I understand new wineskins, but filled with what? New wineskins are for new wine. Where is the new wine of God's presence and power in the church? The apostle Paul told the Corinthians that he didn't come to them with carefully crafted and persuasive rhetoric, but with a "demonstration of the Spirit's power." Contemporary Western Christianity offers innovations in style, clever marketing, therapeutic self-concern, and well-rehearsed worship sets. The Western Christian experience is simply and desperately in need of the presence of God. So in a sense, the new wine is old wine rediscovered.
We need a fresh and dynamic experience with God that warms our hearts and transforms our lives. That's why I write with a sense of urgency today. To those who pursue the presence of God, this book doesn't merely offer a new wineskin—it offers new wine! It is only in God's presence that hearts will be stirred and filled and our struggles will find resolution.
My prayer is that this book will change us, that it will dislodge our faulty understanding of a distant and aloof God—our notion that he somehow isn't alive and moving actively in the world today. At the same time, I pray that this book will increase your faith and open your heart to a deeper experience of God's abiding presence.
I'll admit that it's an intimidating task to write about the presence of God, one that reminds me of the time when a friend's first-grade daughter was asked about her father's work. Because she didn't have the words to tell her classmates that he was a seminary president, she simply explained that he studied God. At a subsequent parent-faculty gathering, the teacher retold the story and then turned to my friend and asked, "Just how does one study God anyway?"
"Very carefully, ma'am!" he replied.
That note of caution describes the attitude of my own heart as I invite you to join me on a quest to discover what it means to experience the awesome yet very tangible presence of God.
Prayers for Revival
The current spiritual climate in North America, with its declining church membership, especially among the younger generations, is reminiscent of the situation in much of Europe after World War II.
As the war drew to a close in 1945, the effects of those years of horror took a terrible toll on many cities around the world, including Stornoway, a town on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the west coast of Scotland. Originally a Viking settlement, the town is the largest in the area, though it has only a few thousand residents.
A disproportionate number of young men from the islands had died in battle, and the postwar years were bitter for many families there. Young people were disillusioned, and many had abandoned even a pretense of faith in God. In fact, by 1949, there wasn't a single young person to be found in any of the churches on the Isle of Lewis.
Not one.
Alarmed by this state of affairs, two elderly sisters from the Church of Scotland in the town of Barvas spoke to their pastor and the elders of the church, sharing a surprising vision. While deep in prayer, they had seen the sanctuary packed to the doors with young people. But for this to happen, the women said, the church absolutely needed to dedicate itself to prayer. They challenged the church's leaders to join them in their barn every Tuesday and Friday evening for prayer.
For six weeks they prayed, and nothing happened.
They kept on praying.
And they prayed.
And they prayed.
Still nothing.
One night, one of the elders opened the evening prayer meeting with a reading from Psalm 24: "Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart ..."
Suddenly, the man could read no further. Dropping the Bible, he fell to his knees on the barn floor and cried out, "God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure? It is not the young people of this island who need reviving. It's me!"
Gripped by a deep conviction of sin, everyone else dropped to their knees alongside the elder and began praying prayers of repentance. That prayer meeting continued late into the night. Years later, the pastor of that church recalled the scene, describing how "the power of God swept into the parish" that evening. According to one account, "The following day, the looms were silent, little work was done on the farms as men and women gave themselves to thinking on eternal things gripped by eternal realities." One man I spoke to concluded that the prayers for revival and that single act of repentance had released something from heaven over the islands.
But what exactly did it release?
God's presence.
God's overwhelming presence was poured out over the islands for the next four years.
God's Presence and Glory
In the Old Testament, many people encountered a special sense of God's presence in a pillar of fire, a cloud, a wind, an earthquake, a burning bush, and a still, small voice. Moses encountered the presence of God on the top of Mount Sinai for forty days, and his face glowed for days afterward as a result. Glory is a noun used to describe God. It is the effect of God's revealed presence. It is not just a theological description of God. Glory is real stuff. As used in the Old Testament, glory means weightiness, heaviness—a substantial manifestation of God that we experience when he makes his presence known to us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Presence by Alec Rowlands, Marcus Brotherton. Copyright © 2014 Alec Rowlands. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Jim Cymbala ix
Chapter 1 Untamed Lion 1
Chapter 2 Driven to Worship 15
Chapter 3 A Candlestick in the Darkness 31
Chapter 4 Start Expecting 47
Chapter 5 Remembering the Way We Were 63
Chapter 6 Can You Hear Me Now? 79
Chapter 7 Speed Bumps on the Road to God's Presence 93
Chapter 8 Where Reason Kant, Experience Can 109
Chapter 8 We Are What We Love 125
Chapter 10 This Present Weirdness 141
Chapter 11 A Holy Tailwind 159
Chapter 12 Together We Are 175
Chapter 13 God's Positioning System 193
Chapter 14 Forged in the Fire 211
Chapter 15 Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It 229
Acknowledgments 245
Notes 249
About the Author 261