Pentecost sunday - experiencing god
Whatever else P was it was an experience – when the Spirit came, they experienced it – heard something like wind, saw something like tongues of fire, something happened inside that sent them out of the room into the streets and empowered them to talk in other languages – it was an experience.
Christianity is an experience – it is the experience of knowing God. Now this is eternal life that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. John 17:3
Xianity has a set of beliefs – contained in Scripture, creeds and confessions – the gospel but that is not what it is
Xianity has morals – 10 commandments – all valid but that is not what it is
Xianity has observances, ceremonies etc but that is not what it is
A relationship with a personal God - Father, Son and Spirit and with his people. A relationship is not something you believe – but something you experience.
Christianity consists not in knowing about God but in knowing God.
Preaching for months about love of God – point is to lead you into an experience of it – the deeper experience of Romans 5:5 – Spirit brings a spiritual awareness /experience of the love of God – what experience is this? How may we find it?
I want to tell you a few stories today about experiences people have had of God. These types of experiences cannot be sought; much less can they be produced by any technique or effort on our part. Like Saul on the Damascus Road God meets each one differently. But I tell them because my aim today is to stimulate within you first a fresh realisation that Christianity is about experiencing God; and second to awaken within you a renewed desire to seek a deeper personal, experience of the living God and his love.
God’s love comes in various ways
1. His regular blessings and joys, creation and daily experience – comes home to our heart when our hearts are made thankful and our eyes opened to see their origin in the goodness of God
2. through other people – see God behind them, them as a channel – blessings mediated indirectly and enlightening us to see God at work
3. God brings home his love as we meditate on his love in Christ – as we engage in spiritual exercises that cause us to reflect on that love eg as we sing, pray, hear Scripture, sermons, Bible study, literature, praise etc – the heart is touched.
4. In special mercies such answers to prayer, feeling God very close to us, his peace and strength in trials, or working all for our good in providence.
But there is another aspect to Christian experience. Romans
Read the testimonies on the attached sheet. We cannot dictate to God how he will reveal himself to us but we can seek him through the means he has given. Spiritual treasures and depths are found by those who seek and seek earnestly, diligently, persistently. Scripture, meditation, prayer, sacraments, private devotions, corporate worship, fellowship, prayer ministry, Christian service, obedience – longer periods of seeking God also. Jeremiah 29:13
Invite you to move forward, stop standing still – move beyond religious observances and going through the motions – move on into contact with God, encountering God, experiencing his empowering and transforming presence
Confess your hindrances, doubts, fears, problems, slow progress, questions, reluctance, seek with diligence and pray earnestly that the Spirit will do this work to touch your heart, your innermost being with the felt awareness of his presence.
Why run from God who is your life? Why come to God’s house and hide from him? Why say you believe in him but not seek his face? Why say he is good and make no effort to taste of his goodness? Why lament the coldness of your heart and not seek his holy fire to warm it again? Why come to the swimming pool all your life, sit in a deck chair by the poolside and never plunge into the water? Why make the trip but keep missing the adventure?
The Spirit came at Pentecost not to fill our minds with the idea of God but so that we might enjoy fellowship with God and experience his power changing us and equipping us to serve him. This is normal Christian experience. If it is not yours then ask God today to draw you into it now.
Thomas Aquinas is the most revered theologian in the history of the Catholic Church. After spending his life demonstrating that man has no direct contact with spiritual reality Aquinas shortly before his death had such an overwhelming, direct experience of God that he wrote no more. Urged by a friend to complete his great work The Summa Theologica, he answered “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and now I await the end of my life.”
John Flavel one of the great Puritan writers had an astonishing experience of God one day as he sat by a well. He many years after called that day one of the days of heaven and he professed that he understood more of the life of heaven by it than by all the books he ever read or discourses he ever heard about it.
John Wesley’s Journal for lst January 1739 reads “ We were present at our love feast in
Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest European minds ever, when he died they found this note (excerpts only) sewn into his shirt. This day of grace 1654 from about
The evangelist D.L.Moody wrote 2I began to cry as never before for a greater blessing from God. The hunger increased. I really felt that I did not want to live any longer. I kept on crying all the time that God would fill me with his Spirit. Well, one day in the city of
Many other such experiences could be read out from all centuries and kinds of men and women. Revelations of God directly to the soul of his glory, power, presence and love. Do you desire to know God in this way?
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