Quotes about God's presence

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

My feelings of God's presence — or God's absence — are not the presence or the absence.

Never live as though God does not exist." Or, stated positively, "Always live in awareness of God's existence.

Sometimes God seemed as close as his wife or children. Sometimes he had no sense of God's presence, no faith to lean on. God is wild, you know, he wrote. We're not in charge.

I cannot imagine a greater motivation to pray than that God enjoys having me in His presence. He enjoys my company. He delights in listening to me! He doesn't get bored with my repeated requests. He doesn't moralize me if I get it wrong in what I ask for. He doesn't laugh at me if I put out silly, even impertinent, requests. He never makes me feel stupid. There is no rejection, only total acceptance.

We are never intended by God to stop short at an experience, a doctrine, a revelation, or a blessing. Thank God for every one of those things that we receive, but we cannot rest in them. Each one of them, in a sense, is somewhat impersonal and impermanent. What we need, in the last resort, is a person. And every true doctrine or revelation we receive will always lead us in the end to the person of God Himself.

Worship puts God in focus. When the Almighty is in view, our giant's power over our thinking begins to flicker and fade.

Jesus' sacrifice eliminated the sin nature separating man from God's presence since the fall of Adam.

Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.

It is when people do not allow God to show up through them, she realized, that the world collapses in on itself.

If we are called to attention by God's Life and Holy Spirit, then the 'spiritual life' is not a pleasant option we might like to pursue when we have space and time; it is that which is now creating its own space and time within us, and to neglect it is to lose ourselves.

the fullness of God is tucked into the sacred places within them. The full taking in of God is their soul oxygen. It's not that they don't need people. They do. God created them for community. But the way they love is from a full place, not from an empty desperation.