Thursday, July 1, 2010

Practicing the Presence of Christ

THis was so good I had to pass it along:
 Exactly how do we "turn on" our receivers and "tune in" to God? The answer is what the ancients, and specifically Brother Lawrence, referred to as "practicing the presence of Christ." That is, developing a conscious and habitual communion with the person of Christ in such a way that we slowly drop the habit of merely talking to him and slowly embrace the habit of being with him. Over time our relationship with him begins to take on the dynamic language of intimacy: we share a meal at a table for just two, we exchange glances and secret expressions of love, we return each embrace with one of our own, we dance the night away in each others' arms, we take turns playing the roles of pursuer and pursued, for we both love to find the other and to be found by the other.
 
I'm convinced that it is possible to practice the presence of God in all facets of life, even in the most routine and mundane moments. Once our spiritual sense organs begin to function in a robust manner, everything we encounter becomes spiritual. No longer is there a sacred-secular dichotomy. Christ is present with us when we pull an all-nighter preparing for an important presentation, or when we clean our kitchen floors for the third time that day, or when we cool down from our physical workout, or when we throw our graduation caps in the air, or when we cut our wedding cake, or when we cut the umbilical chord in the delivery room, or when we pace the floor through a sleepless night, or when we grimace at the number of gray hairs going down the shower drain, or when we exhale our final breath. The merely secular becomes the profoundly spiritual when the focus of our heart becomes essentially eternal. Tozer sums it up nicely, "A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. God Himself is here waiting for our response to His presence."  
He gets practical about practicing the presence of Christ when he says that, "This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality." But first he wants us to understand what he means by reckon and reality. He begins with the word reality. Reality as Tozer defines it is "that which has existence apart from any idea any mind may have of it, and which would exist if there were no mind anywhere to entertain a thought of it. That which is real has being in itself. It does not depend upon the observer for its validity."  
It is obvious that in this day and age, that definition has become the minority view. We can observe the denial of objective reality in the Pantheistic foundations of Buddhism, or in the philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment, or in the various New Age pseudo-religions, as well as in the current postmodern trends. It no longer elicits a raised eyebrow when someone declares that something is real only as it exists in the mind of someone. Having removed all the absolute points in the universe, the relativists are free to arbitrarily pick any point from which to start, and from which the relative truth of anything can be determined. 
 
And what do these relativists think of us Christians? Tozer describes them as those who, ". . . smile down upon us from their lofty intellectual peaks and settle us to their own satisfaction by fastening upon us the reproachful term ‘absolutist.'" By that term they mean to convey contempt toward our naïve commitment to something that doesn't change. They loathe our prehistoric view that truth claims must be either right or wrong. But the ultimate insult for them is not just that we believe that something is absolute, but that we believe that Someone is absolute - that God is the unchanging center of all that is real and from which everything and everyone derives meaning and reality.  
Ultimately for the Christian, all things that we see are anchored in the unchanging character and nature of God. He is not relative to us (i.e., open to being defined any way we choose), and he is not a relativist (i.e., arbitrarily defining his universe anyway he chooses). That which God is, he is absolutely. He is absolutely good. He is absolutely beautiful. He is absolutely holy. And therefore, what God created is absolutely defined by him. That is, because he is absolutely good, that which he creates derives its goodness from him. And because he is absolutely beautiful, that which he creates derives its beauty from him. And because he is absolutely holy, that which he creates must derive its standard of right and wrong behavior from him. 
 
In fact, the absolute nature of reality is so deeply built into the universe that no one can consistently live without acknowledging it. To hold a view which says, "What is true for you is not true for me" may sound appealing in the abstract, but when your banker tells you that your checking account is overdrawn by thirty thousand dollars, try convincing her that, "That's true for you but not for me." The patent absurdity of the view becomes obvious to all. The God of the universe does not change and therefore has ordered reality in such a way that no one can escape its gravitational pull. Therefore, in God's world we find that every heart seeking to worship him does not begin by creating the object of its worship. Rather God begins by creating us as objects of his affection and then seeks us out and bids us come and worship him. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the present past and present future of this moment. And only when we submit to that reality do we discover the truth concerning ourselves, our world, and him.
 
After nailing down the meaning of reality, Tozer proceeds to define the word reckon. The word comes from the field of accounting and means to "regard something as true." Having laid a foundation that sees reality as absolute, you are ready to begin ordering your behavior around that reality. In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul uses the word reckon in telling every Christian to, " . . . reckon yourself to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus." That is, you begin to order your mind around the fact that you are no longer held captive by sin, but are now free to pursue God and his righteousness. The act of reckoning is totally independent of how you feel, or what your immediate or past circumstances tell you, or what you hope will become true for you if you just act. Thus we see that its meaning is light-years away from the notion of pretending as if something were true so that you can make it true for you. Rather, it is intentionally embracing a truth that you know to be actually true. Reckoning is related to faith in that faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.  
THE SIMPLICITY OF QUIET SERVICE

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