Not long ago I was reading an article about how a man, who viewed himself as a “secular Jew”, came to faith in Jesus. While the entire article was quite interesting there was one line in it that has set me to thinking. As he was sharing about the household he grew up in, about their traditions and celebration of the Jewish holidays he wrote “God had no living presence in our family”. Since reading that line the first time I’ve thought through it often. What is a living presence? How do we establish God’s living presence? Am I establishing His living presence in my household, for my children? We could be theological about it and say that God’s “living presence” is the Holy Spirit indwelling in all who are in Christ. We could be mystical about it and say that God’s “living presence” is the “Shekinah glory”, the visible and tangible presence of God that filled the temple that Solomon built in II Chronicles 7, a cloud so thick that the priests couldn’t even enter the building. We could even be traditional about it and say that God’s “living presence” is how we live in our homes, family devotions, praying together, attending church together, or establishing a religious way of life. As I’ve thought over these things they have all fallen short. I don’t want to establish nor do I believe that God is asking me to establish something that can just be believed in or explained, felt or ordered; His “living presence” must be something more, but what is it?
One of the facts that I think we sometimes miss is that when Jesus humbled Himself to take on flesh, be incarnated and to live on earth as a human being, much of what He did was simply what others had also done. Jesus lived like us, He got hungry and ate, He got tired and slept, He needed to pay the rent and worked, He did chores and obeyed His parents, grew up and moved out; He was an infant that became a toddler that became a teenager that became a man. If we pass these off as the mundane parts of Jesus being human and believe that they don’t matter one way or the other, then I will answer that even most of the “spiritual” things Jesus did were things that others had done and were doing. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist He was joining with hundreds if not thousands of others. When He went into a synagogue, opened the scrolls and taught he was doing what someone did in every synagogue on every Sabbath. Even many of the miracles were things that others had done, there had been healers that touched people and saw their diseases disappear and exorcists who had cast demons out of the possessed. Jesus didn’t merely come doing different things, He came doing things differently.
When Jesus taught, it was “as one with authority”, which doesn’t mean that He was a better teacher than the scribes it literally means that He taught like He was the originator of the lesson rather than someone that taught a lesson that someone else had taught to Him. When He healed, He did so without fanfare or calling attention to Himself, in fact, often when He healed He told the recipient of the miracle to be sure not to tell anyone of what had happened. When He cast out demons He did it with a calm, confidence and by simply telling the demons to leave. Much of what Jesus did had been done before, but He did it differently than anyone that had come before Him. Jesus was God and, yet, He pushed glory away from Himself as the Son and focused all His attention on God the Father who in His own words, had sent Him. He spoke powerful things and then told everyone that He didn’t ever speak of His own opinion, intellect or interpretation, He only said what His Father told Him to say. He worked powerful miracles and then said that He, as the Son, had no power to do anything by His own will or desire, He only watched His Father work and whatever He saw His Father do, He did the same. Jesus didn’t come to reveal Himself, He came to be the revelation of His Father. Colossians 1:15 says that He is “the image of the invisible God”. He came to teach us who God truly is, His heart, His character, His ways and His desires, He came to teach us that God is, in fact, our Father and that we can and were meant to be His children. To use Jesus’ own words, He came to do the will of the One who sent Him and to seek and save the lost because the will of God has always been and always will be to find the wandering, embrace them in His love and redeem them to His house. He created sons and daughters and His heart is to redeem enemies back to being the sons and daughters they were created to be.
Jesus being “the image of the invisible God” means that He lived in a way that revealed God to man. God doesn’t just look like Jesus, Jesus showed us what God looks like. This means that Jesus was God’s “living presence”. He lived for God, He lived from God and most of all He lived like God. Again, Jesus was divine, but like Philippians 2 teaches us, He took on a mindset in which He lowered Himself, He humbled Himself, He thought more highly of others than Himself, became obedient to the point of death, but understand His obedience was not to death, His obedience was to the Father. What Jesus taught and teaches us is that we establish the “living presence” of God when we make God’s desires greater than our desires. Jesus said that He came to do the will of the One who sent Him, that His food and His drink were to do the will of the Father, He prayed in His last hours, when the weight of His obedience was at its heaviest, “Not My will but Yours be done”. Jesus established God’s “living presence” by revealing God’s character by spending Himself for God’s desires.
What does God desire? God’s heart today is no different than it was when Jesus was born, lived, died or rose again, He still “desires all men to be saved” and “is not wishing that any should perish”. The desire of God is the salvation of souls, the restoration of the lost, the forgiveness of sins for the redemption of men. I establish the “living presence” of God in my home when I pray and hope, live and believe for the salvation of all people and each person. I establish the “living presence” of God in my community when my opinions bow to God’s desires, when my offenses have less grip on my heart than God’s grace and when my frustration, disappointment, anger or outrage get fewer of my thoughts and my words than my intercession. I establish God’s “living presence” in my heart when I can watch the news and rather than wonder how the refugee crisis might affect me or my children I can weep for God to break into the hearts, of men, women and children, reveal His love and save their souls. I establish God’s “living presence” when I can reject fear, hatred and anger and during a contentious election plead with God to save the souls of the candidates before I even begin to ask Him to set in place the candidate that He desires to use in this nation in this hour. And if I may add to that, that I would pray that God would set in place the candidate that won’t merely establish our nation, but that God will use to establish His kingdom in our nation no matter how He chooses to establish it. God raised up Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus to do different tasks that served the same purpose, redemption; may He do the same today, raise up whomever must be raised up so that He can bring redemption.
There are many things I would like to establish for my children. I want them to work hard and be grateful for everything they have. I want them to give to the poor, celebrate differences and seek to be challenged when they face adversity. I want them to be safe and know that they are loved. Above all though, I want my children to know that God desires for all men to be saved. I want my children to know that God loves them because God loves all of us. I don’t want them to bask in God’s love, I want them to be amazed by it. I don’t want them to settle for enjoying the goodness of being loved by God, I want them to take up the mantle of sharing God’s love. I want my children to believe one thing about every person they ever encounter, that Jesus died for them because the Father loves them. When my children are raising their children, I want them to be able to say about the household they were raised in, we learned to desire what God desires and we did that by praying, loving and believing that no one that entered our home, crossed our path or even shone through our TV screen would perish, but that they would all come to repentance. I believe that is how we establish the “living presence” of God, by making what God desires what we live for. That’s what Jesus did and that’s what I am setting my heart to do.