How to Understand the Manifest Presence of God

To back up a little and flesh out what I wrote last week, I’ll explain what I mean by the manifest presence of God.  God is everywhere, all the time.  This is one of the special attributes of God.  There is nowhere that God is not.  David declares in Psalms 139:7 “Where shall I go from your Spirit, or where shall I flee from your presence?”  It’s quite easy to say that and even to really believe it, but it can be a sort of “God’s out there somewhere, but he isn’t really impacting my life right now.”  It’s like oxygen.  We are always breathing oxygen and in fact we can’t live without it, but often we are not consciously aware that we are breathing oxygen.

The fact that God is everywhere should radically reshape our awareness of the world.  Yet somehow it often doesn’t.  Jacob experienced this in Genesis 28.  He has a vision of a ladder to heaven and after the vision he woke up and declared “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” (Gen 28:16)  Is this not our dilemma?  How do we find God when it doesn’t seem like he is around?

To realize personally that God is present we have to find his manifest presence.  God’s manifest presence is when we are actively aware of God and sense the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in an immediate personal way.  God is always around, but that doesn’t mean we are always aware of him and communicating with him.  Perhaps we can think of it this way.  I can know that my wife is in the room next to me, but we aren’t communicating at the moment.  However, she steps into the room where I am and asks me a question; now we are interacting.  I always believed that she existed when she was in the next room but we weren’t interacting.  Believing someone exists and actively interacting with them are very different things.  It’s like this with the Holy Spirit.  We can believe that the Holy Spirit exists and is around us, but it is very different to be actively interacting with him.

Coming to a realization and awareness of the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit has the potential to radically reshape our concept of the Holy Spirit and his active presence and influence in our lives.  For me this was a major revelation and it is right up there in the most important moments of my life.  Stay tuned next week as I examine how to cultivate awareness of the manifest presence of God.