Quotes About Presence

If we believe God is present in our worship as He promises to be,20 then we must frame all language of worship as to Him and not merely about Him.

The joy of following Jesus is the fellowship of living in His strength and knowing His presence as a moment-by-moment reality.

Acting like a man means developing a non-anxious presence that sees the big picture, remains calm in a crisis, and won't cave in under pressure. Godly men respond; they don't react.

Wayne Grudem, my friend and seminary professor, put it well: "God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with His whole being, yet God acts differently in different places."19

From the furnace of manifest presence, born of unashamed adoration and unapologetic preaching, comes an army of worshippers unafraid in their witness, determined to see others discover what they have found in the LORD.

Eventually everyone vacates church where God is not obviously present and working. Getting people back to church is pointless unless God comes back first—that's what Vertical Church is all about! Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church, emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church.

Times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord (Acts 3:20).

I've never seen the Holy Spirit, but I've seen His powerful wind blowing through people's lives.

Noticing helps you realize that your life is already suffused with the presence of God. Once you begin to look around and allow yourself to take a chance to believe in God, you will easily see God at work in your life.

Paradoxically, admitting your own powerlessness can free you from the need to fix everything and allow us to be truly present to the other person, and to listen. A cartoon in The New Yorker had one woman saying testily to her friend, 'There's no point in our being friends if you won't let me fix you.

But it is always God who takes the initiative and who surprises us with his presence, as God did with Mary. When

FOR IGNATIUS AND HIS friends, finding God often meant noticing where God was already active in their lives. And we can notice God not only in peak moments, like the ones we just discussed, but also in daily events where God's presence is often overlooked. God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing.

being present." Once you are present to what you are saying, you express it differently, and as a result it sounds different

examen." Essentially a review of the day, it helps you see where God is active in your daily life.

Then, when you sit in the chair, you're reminded, often in a surprising way, that God is gazing upon you and is with you in your prayer.

Pay attention to physical feelings as well. Recently, I chatted with Matt, a young Jesuit in training, who had just directed a retreat for a group of young adults and spoke with them about how to listen to God. In addition to feelings of peace and comfort, and even inexplicable and incommunicable feelings, Matt added bodily feelings, another indication of God's presence.

Before you begin, as in all prayer, remind yourself that you're in God's presence, and ask God to help you with your prayer.

God wants to be with you. God desires to be with you. What's more, God desires a relationship with you.

It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.

You have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

Mary was still thinking in terms of a dead body when Jesus confronted her with His living presence.

Just as infinite players can play any number of finite games, so too can they join the audience of any game. They do so, however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that they are audience. They look, but they see that they are looking.

The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.