Thought Exercise on God's Omnipresence

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Taking Seriously the Possibility of God’s Guidance

Author

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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Born with Limits (Unlike God)

Author

Jen Wilkin

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 40:28, Job 11:7-9, 1 Kings 8:27, Romans 11:33, Psalm 145:3, Ephesians 3:18-19

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me inscribed my birth records with a firm hand: seven pounds, eleven ounces, twenty-one inches. It was the first legally attested evidence that I was no...

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Home is Three Persons

Author

Jen Pollock Michel

Keywords

Scripture

John 14:23, Genesis 12:1, Psalm 139:7-10, Hebrews 13:14, 2 Corinthians 6:16

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home, Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel relates home to the Trinity, the ...

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Goodbye God

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 137:7-10, Matthew 18:2-4, Genesis 28:10-16, Matthew 28:20, Psalm 121:8, Proverbs 15:3, Isaiah 57:15, Jeremiah 23:24

A young girl was preparing to move with her family from New York to Dallas, and she couldn’t contain her excitement. That night, as she said her bedtime prayers, she ended with her usual, “God bless M...

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I Can’t Be Lost

Author

King Duncan

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 23:4, Deuteronomy 31:8, Isaiah 41:10, John 10:27-28, Psalm 139:7-10, Joshua 1:9

An elderly gentleman was out walking with his young grandson. ‘How far are we from home?’ he asked the grandson. The boy answered, ‘Grandpa, I don’t know.’ The grandfather asked, ‘Well, where are you?...

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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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#Blessed

Author

Uche Anizor

Keywords

I have a nagging sense that when we read the word blessed , we either feel indifferent or suspicious. Both of these responses are likely the result of the way the term is (over)used in our day-to...

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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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A Consuming Fire

Author

John Starke

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 24:17, Deuteronomy 4:24, Hebrews 12:29, Isaiah 6:5

“Holy, holy, holy.” What are they saying? Have you ever wondered that? What does that mean? Many people have tried to understand what God’s holiness means. Some describe it as his perfect morality. Go...

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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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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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If God Wanted to Remain Silent…

Author

Michael Kendrick

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 19:1-2, Romans 1:20, Isaiah 6:3, Job 12:7-9, Colossians 1:16, John 1:3

If God wanted to remain silent about His existence, He wouldn’t have bothered creating the stars; He wouldn’t have made the Milky Way, or Betelgeuse. In fact, He wouldn’t have made the majestic Rocky ...

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The Aseity of God

Author

John Piper

Keywords

God's Existence

Scripture

Psalm 50:10-12, Revelation 4:11, Colossians 1:16-17, Acts 17:24-25, Isaiah 40:28, Psalm 90:2, Exodus 3:14

Aseity refers to God’s self-existence (a—from, se—oneself). God exists ‘from himself.’ God owes his existence and completeness as God to nothing outside himself. . . . God’s act of creation was not c...

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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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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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Did God Do This?

Author

William Paul Young

Keywords

Scripture

Habakkuk 1:, Habakkuk 2:, Habakkuk 3:, Romans 8:22, 2 Peter 3:9

I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Orlando, Florida, having a conversation with my friend K, from Germany. Her world-class young athlete friend was recently paralyzed as a result of an on-camera stunt ...

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The Hound of Heaven

Author

Max Lucado

Keywords

Scripture

Jonah 1:1-4, Genesis 3:8-9, Hosea 3:1, Luke 15:4-7, Psalm 139:7-10, Acts 9:3-6

In 1890 Francis Thompson, a Roman Catholic poet, described God as “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him,...

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God’s Self-Revelation

Author

Vaughan Roberts

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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Ascribing Worth

Author

Mike Cosper

Keywords

The word worship comes from the Old English weorthscipe, which combines two words meaning “ascribe worth.” The Trinity can be said to be always at worship because the three persons of the Godhead perf...

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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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All His Ways are Beautifully Fatherly

Author

Michael Reeves

Keywords

Fathers

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God “does” being Father as a day job, only to kick back in the...

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Is God an Object?

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:1-4, Isaiah 49:1, Ephesians 1:4-5, Romans 8:29-30

We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop in...

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The God of the Commonplace

Author

Peter Marshall

Keywords

If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can’t take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the he...

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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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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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Elevated to the Third Degree

Author

R. C. Sproul

Keywords

Holiness

Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy...

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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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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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Presence in the Universe

Author

David G. Benner

Keywords

Scripture

Ephesians 4:4

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

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God Has Written Himself into Our World

Author

Timothy Keller

Keywords

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay…called “The Seeing Eye,” and in it he argued that if there were a God, we would not relate to him the way a person on the first story of a house relates to a person on the se...

thought exercise on God's Omnipresence

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