Studies on God's Nearness

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God’s Self-Revelation

Author

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:13-14, Exodus 6:2-3, Isaiah 42:8, Exodus 33:19, John 17:6, 1 Kings 18:36-39, Exodus 34:5-7

There are no vowels in the Hebrew (YHWH), which makes it impossible to know exactly what the word is. Some old translations say ‘Jehovah’. Modern scholars tend to speak of ‘Yahweh’. When the word appe...

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The Love of God Wrapped About Him

Author

Thomas Kelly

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 4:1-3, Psalm 30:5, Romans 8:28, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Psalm 34:18, Isaiah 43:2, Psalm 23:4, Job 1:, Job 2:, Job 42:, 2 Samuel 11:, 2 Samuel 12:, Genesis 37:12-36, 1 Kings 17:8-24, Daniel 6:, Psalm 34:18

The sense of Presence! I have spoken of it as stealing on one unawares. It is recorded of John Wilhelm Rowntree that as he left a great physician’s office, where he had just been told that his advanci...

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Taking Seriously the Possibility of God’s Guidance

Author

Dallas Willard

Keywords

Scripture

Acts 8:26-40, Exodus 3:1-10, 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Genesis 37:5-11, Acts 9:1-19

Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi has a scene set in South Africa where the young Indian lawyer and a white clergyman are walking together on a boardwalk, contrary to South African law at the time. ...

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To Be A Child of God Means Access

Author

Timothy Keller

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 8:4

To be a child of God means access. We know God is attentively listening to us and watching us. Think about what it takes to get in to see the president of the United States. Only people who merit his ...

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Recognizing Her Own

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 49:15, John 10:14, Luke 12:6-7, Psalm 139:1-3, 2 Timothy 2:19, Isaiah 43:1, Matthew 10:29-31, Psalm 91:4, Deuteronomy 32:11, Job 39:1-2, Luke 15:4-6

The guillemot, a small Arctic seabird, nests in dense colonies on the rocky cliffs of the North Atlantic and Arctic. Thousands of these birds gather in tight spaces, with hundreds of females laying th...

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He is With us in our Crying Out to God

Author

Wesley Hill

Scripture

Mark 15:34

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotla...

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The Spirit-Inspired Imagination in Church Tradition

Author

Gregory A. Boyd

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 28:10-17, Isaiah 6:1-8, Acts 9:1-9, Revelation 1:12-18 , Daniel 7:13-14 , Psalm 16:7

Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...

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Repentance: A Mental Revolution

Author

Lesslie Newbigin

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 55:6-9 , Jonah 3:1-10, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Mark 1:14-15, Romans 12:2, Psalm 51:10-12

Lesslie Newbigin, the great missiologist and missionary, shares a powerful analogy of repentance from his days serving as a missionary in India. I remember once visiting a village in the Madras di...

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Put Your Hand into the Hand of God

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

King George V of Britain, who was king during the tumultuous years of World War I, shared a New Year’s card with his friends that featured a drawing of an open gate. Below the image, he included thi...

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The Most Holy Place

Author

Vaughan Roberts

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 25:22, Exodus 40:34-38

The tabernacle consists of a courtyard and a tent inside, separated into two sections: ‘The Holy Place’ and ‘the Most Holy Place’ or ‘Holy of Holies’. Inside the Holy Place is a table that holds ‘the ...

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God’s [Perceived] Absence

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise, you will be welcomed wit...

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Feed My Sheep

Author

Dallas Willard

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 6:1-8, Exodus 33:12-23, 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Acts 9:1-19, Matthew 17:1-8, Psalm 16:11

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

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The Aroma of that Room

Author

Dallas Willard

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:1-6, Isaiah 6:1-8, Acts 9:1-9, Matthew 4:18-22, 1 Samuel 3:1-10

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

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Was that God?

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

1 Samuel 3:1-10, Exodus 13:21-22 , Matthew 18:1-5, John 14:25-27 , Psalm 121:

A little girl was traveling with her family on a long sleeper train. As night fell, she was put in the upper bunk and was reassured that God would look after her. When everyone started to doze off, th...

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See What Happens

Author

Charles F. Stanley

Keywords

Do you ever feel as if God is far from you? Be assured, He is steadfastly near. Do not be disheartened because you don’t see Him in your circumstances. I saw an illustration of this during a photograp...

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Putting us in our True Place

Author

M. Basil Pennington

Keywords

The fact is there is nothing that we are doing that God could not raise up a stone in the ﬁeld to do for him. The realization of this puts us in our true place. Though, lest we get too knocked down by...

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What Matters Supremely

Author

James I. Packer

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 49:15-16, Galatians 4:9, John 10:14-15, Matthew 10:29-31, John 17:9-10

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it- that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out o...

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Advent is God Coming to Us

Author

Austin Farrar

Keywords

Advent is a coming, not our coming to God, but his to us. We cannot come to God, he is beyond our reach; but he can come to us, for we are not beneath his mercy. Even in another life, as St. John sees...

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Teaching Us His Name

Author

Marlena Graves

Keywords

Wilderness

God uses the wilderness experiences in our lives to teach us his name. If we, like Moses, wish to see God’s glory, it will often be in the wilderness that we see it. The beauty of the desert experienc...

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Our God is Great as God is Good

Author

Gardner C. Taylor

Keywords

Scripture

Romans 5:8, Psalm 90:2, James 1:17, Psalm 145:3, 1 John 4:8

The great African-American preacher Gardner Taylor, preacher of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn for over 40 years, begins one of his sermons with a paean to the God revealed to us in the 66 boo...

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A Place of Revelation

Author

Marlena Graves

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:14-15, Exodus 33:18-19

On this earth, then, in our deserts, God personally reveals and names himself. When he does so, his pleasure floods our senses, his beauty engulfs us, and our God-misconceptions are devastated. He mov...

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God Speaks, God Listens Too

Author

Adam S. McHugh

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 18:22-33, Exodus 3:1-12 , 1 Kings 19:9-13, John 5:19-30, John 16:12-15, Psalm 116:1-2

The God who shares power is a listener. Listening is not something that becomes necessary for God only after the world is created. Listening is who God is. In God’s very being, communication does not ...

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The Voice of the Shepherd

Author

Richard J. Foster

Keywords

Scripture

1 Kings 19:9-13 , Exodus 33:12-23, Habakkuk 3:17-19, Luke 10:38-42, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 , Psalm 46:10

One evening I was taking a stretch break from study, walking out into the night. Soon I began speaking prayers of complaint . . . a little like the lament psalms in the Bible. I wasn’t angry, really, ...

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The Ministry of Absence

Author

Ruth Haley Barton

Keywords

Control

Scripture

Isaiah 30:15, Psalm 46:10, 2 Corinthians 4:18, Romans 8:26, John 14:26, 1 John 16:7

The other thing that helps me deal with my compulsion to control things through my direct involvement and my fear of missing out is what Henri Nouwen has called “the ministry of absence.” Jesus modele...

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God Believes in You

Author

Ann Voskamp

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 31:3, John 3:16, Ephesians 2:4-5, Romans 8:38-39, 1 John 4:9-19

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

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Where All the Provision is Stored

Author

Alexander MacLaren

Keywords

Alexander Maclaren writes about the importance of recognizing our dependence on God for all we have: Up to the very edge we are driven before He puts out His hand to help us. It is best for us that w...

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Suffering is Evidence of God’s Presence

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Scripture

1 Peter 4:12-13, 2 Corinthians 12:9, Psalm 34:18, Luke 9:23, Philippians 3:10

Suffering is not evidence of God’s absence, but of God’s presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic salvation work. There is a way to accept...

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God’s Glory and a Surpassing Beauty

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

God’s “glory”: the phrase means, no doubt, that when people eventually see God the sight is astonishingly bright and dazzling. But beyond that it also means that it is surpassingly lovely and beautifu...

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To the Prophet, God is Intimately Involved in Life on Earth

Author

Abraham J. Heschel

Keywords

To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and aff...

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Experiencing a New Reality with Disability

Author

Joni Eareckson Tada

Keywords

Scripture

Galatians 5:16-26

Many formerly active able-bodied people have had to learn a new pace in life after an accident or illness. Whether the condition is temporary or permanent, it isn’t easy. The memory and muscles still ...

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