presence

[excerpt from Andrew Murray]

The blood of Jesus is the greatest mystery of eternity, the deepest mystery of the divine wisdom. Let us not imagine that we can easily grasp its meaning. God thought 4,000 years necessary to prepare men for it, and we also must take time, if we are to gain a knowledge of the power of the blood.

Even taking time is of no avail, unless there is definite taking of sacrificial trouble. Sacrificial blood always meant the offering of a life. The Israelite could not obtain blood for the pardon of his sin, unless the life of something that belonged to him was offered in sacrifice. The Lord Jesus did not offer up His own life, and shed His blood to .spare us from the sacrifice of our lives. No, indeed but to make the sacrifice of our lives possible and desirable.

The hidden value of His blood is the spirit of self-sacrifice, and where the blood really touches the heart, it works out in that heart, a like spirit of self-sacrifice. We learn to give up ourselves and our lives, so as to press into the full power of that new life, which the blood. has provided.

We give our time in order that we may become acquainted with these things by God’s Word. We separate ourselves from sin and worldly-mindedness, and self-will, that the power of the blood may not be hindered, for it is just these things that the blood seeks to remove.

We surrender ourselves wholly to God in prayer and faith, so as not to think our own thoughts, and not to hold our own lives as a prize, but as possessing nothing save what He bestows. Then He reveals to us the glorious and blessed life which has been prepared for us by the blood. …

It is by this confident trust in Him that the blessing obtained by the blood becomes ours. We must never, in thought, separate the blood from the High Priest who shed it, and ever lives to apply it.

He who once gave His blood for us, will, oh I so surely, every moment, impart its efficacy. Trust Him to do this. Trust Him to open your eyes, and to give you a deeper spiritual insight. Trust Him to teach you to think about the blood as God thinks about it. Trust Him to impart to you, and to make effective in you, all that He enables you to see.

Trust Him above all, in the power of His eternal High Priesthood, to work out in you, unceasingly, the full merits of His blood, so that your whole life may be an uninterrupted abiding in the sanctuary of God’s presence.

Believer, you who have come to the knowledge of the precious blood, hearken to the invitation of your Lord. Come nearer. Let Him teach you; let Him bless you. Let Him cause His blood to become to you spirit, and life, and power, and truth.

Begin now, at once, to open your soul in faith, to receive the full, mighty, heavenly effects of the precious blood, in a more glorious manner than you have ever experienced. He Himself will work these things out in your life.

Dear God…what does it mean? Maybe I am one of those strange people. The unexplained occurrences happened at my work on a couple of occasions. I showed the paranormal investigator where it all happened. Please, not another rubber necker interview. Where did I sense the presence?, she asked me. Down the hallway and up to the intersection of another hall, I told her.

She ran her electromagnetic detector along the walls, the floors, the light fixtures, the electrical outlets. All was normal except for where I told her the presence could be felt. The detector registered a higher reading in that area. We never figured out what caused it except that it wasn’t coming from the electrical equipment. The higher readings continued across part of the floor to a wall. The readings on the other side of the wall registered at perfectly normal levels. The terrazzo floor lies at ground level with nothing running under it, as far as we could tell.

Ah…one never knows about such things. We never proved anything except that the electromagnetic field was strongest in that area and that I was not dreaming. Of course, it’s not the same thing as sensing the presence of God, but so many things pass through us on a daily basis. We aren’t aware of the half of what we know because we never stop to notice. But I am a dreamer and an adventurer perhaps, whose feet hang somewhere between earth and sky.

Sometimes I think that God also hangs between earth and sky like the mist of the sea. Perhaps I would never have noticed but for the salt water spray He leaves in His passing. I have scarcely doubted His existence in all my life. Some say a God cannot possibly exist because of the evil in the world. I have always believed that I am living proof of Him, for if I can imagine a better existence than this world, then surely the concrete world is not all there is to me. And if the limits of my physical existence can be questioned on the basis of my ability to imagine things unseen, then surely all I dream must be superseded by God who has greater imaginings than I. I have spent most of my life trying to understand His dreams and how to climb into them. If our minds can only be untwisted and if we can only stop thinking our own thoughts long enough, we might find a master plan greater than our own.

Someone sent me an email today about a barber who was cutting a client’s hair and carrying on about how there could be no God. After all, he said, if such a God existed why was there such evil and injustice in the world? The client paid the barber, stepped out the door into the street and saw a derelict with long, unkempt hair and a beard. He stopped, turned around and walked back into the shop. “Barbers do not exist,” he told the barber. “I can prove it. Look at that bum with the long hair and the beard. If barbers existed, there would not be so much uncut hair and unshaven beards in the world.”

I recall a special dreaming time in my life. (Why do the strongest dreams occur while we are in the most pain?) I was on my death bed, near a cardiac arrest. My entire body lay soaked in agony — my gut, my skin, my chest, my lungs, and I called out but there was none to hear and the words could scarcely reach past my own ears. I closed my eyes and it seemed I was afloat, tethered to a couple of places in my corporeal being. I felt ready to drift away at any moment, but the agony of each breath knotted me to the world. I could feel the pull of the physical to the spirit, as a dog feels a pull on his leash when he tries to run off.

It is so true that when you sail away from this body, the anger subsides and all you feel is the love you have for others. Sometimes I think that anger is rooted in the flesh, but love is rooted in pure spirit. I wish often that I were not so fleshy and prone to anger and wanting to smack people when I think my controls might fix something. (They never do.)

But on that night of dreaming, I could feel His breath. And so many times since then, I close my eyes at night and there He is again. I can be in the foulest mood, the deepest pain, the vilest guilt from sarcastic words spoken in the day — and in a second He appears again, almost as if I can see the wind in the day as it blows the leaves and the dust. No one can see the wind, but all can feel it and all can see its activity. So it is when you “see” God.

Is it only artistic, imaginative people who see these things? If only it were that simple, there might be reason to beat some sense into us. Spiritual experience would come down to a matter of temperament. But too many sensible people have also come to see God. No amount of beatings will change anything; we will only go deeper within to find solace. For me, such mental beatings have never driven God away; indeed, He grows stronger with each recovery so that I hear Him all the more.

It is said that God’s children sometimes hear the cries of souls outside their houses. It is true, but only because He has heard them first and lent us His ears that we may understand. The blind eyes and the deaf ears of the inner man are opened. Some look to the physical manifestation of healing as the ultimate proof of the power of God. If the concrete world is a temporal reality, then it must be far more difficult to commit fakery in the permanent unseen world. For the millisecond that our spirit is loosed to behold Him, our righteous indignation sloughs off and we are left in fellowship with His broken heart. We see the mercy that covers the earth because of His work of redemption, yet not all have received the grace to reach out for that mercy. How is it that all have a measure of faith, yet not all seek or ask or knock?

Outward evidence suggests that life continues as it always has. Nothing changes, but in a flash when the eyes close, there He is again — always encouraging, always strengthening us in our afflictions. His worth is incomparable like precious stones that are seldom seen. In our affliction and weakness — not our strength — we overcome all things in Him.