For if what is fading was came with Glory, what remains is even more glorious!
2 Corinthians 3:11

Last week we talked about the temporary experience of God’s presence that happens to Christians from time to time. Although this temporary experience of the overwhelming presence of Jesus is wonderful, Paul declares that even greater than this is the glorious presence of God that can be with us always.

Part of the New Covenant that Jesus provides for us is the indwelling Holy Spirit. All Christians have the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit has greater affect in some of us than in others of us. The reason might have less to do with how “spiritual” we are as much as how much we know and understand we are useless without God’s presence. Only those who know they can do nothing seek the Spirit of God earnestly.

The single biggest thing to deal with as we talk about the presence of God is to be in communion with God in the first place. We are sinners. But if we confess our sins God is faithful to forgive us (I Jn 1:9). Unconfessed sin doesn’t make us any less saved, but it dulls our capacity for God’s presence. It clouds us from being able to sense and enjoy God’s presence.

The more you and I are IN FELLOWSHIP with God in the first place, the more off-balance it puts us to be out of fellowship with Him.

“I can’t last another half minute with my sin not dealt with. I have to come to my God and acknowledge my wrong attitude, my lack of faith, my sin”. That is an attitude that is going to experience the presence of God more continually and consistently. Some Christians are so “poor in spirit” that they simply can’t abide another moment without a right relationship with Jesus.

No wonder Paul gloried in his weakness. It drove him to depend whole-heartedly on Jesus. To Christians like Paul, the presence of God is desperately missed when it is not there. Broken fellowship with God is intolerable to these people. Not because they are so pure, but because they know their own impurity so forcefully they can’t stand to stop inbibing God’s purifying presence even for a moment.

And the result of that is people who are pure. “The old is gone, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17).

I have often asked myself why a constant sense of God’s presence is not a more universal experience by Christians. I think it might be because we don’t know that God’s continuous presence is available to anyone who believes. After all, we seem as alive as the other Christians we know.

We measure ourselves by ourselves and the result is that few of us see ourselves as all that lacking in God’s presence in our lives… at least not all that much worse than anyone else (2 Cor 10:12). There is a great danger with this sort of thinking: It creates within us a casual attitude toward God and His presence in our lives.

Bottom line: We are tempted to think that people who seem to have a greater degree of the presence of God in their lives as being particularly pure, but often it is just the opposite. Not one of us is particularly pure, but some are more aware of their NEED than others… And that has nothing to do with how we “rank order” the badness of sin — it’s all bad– as bad as can be.