Practicing the Presence of God #abideinChrist

Over the 40 days after His resurrection, Jesus trained His disciples to practice His presence.
He was with them . . . then He wasn’t.
They were alone then He appeared.
Sometimes they saw Him physically and sometimes they did not recognize Him until He did a familiar action, like break bread or pray, but they began to realize the relationship they had with Jesus would be practiced differently.

He told them He was leaving and sending the Holy Spirit to be their counselor and comforter. He promised always to be with them even if they couldn’t see Him. “Don’t be afraid, Surely I am with you always.” God’s commands are often tied to God’s promises to encourage and strengthen us.

Jesus last two visual teaching moments were about a vineyard and a fishing net but they symbolized the same great truth. Abide with me and I will bring a harvest (of fruit) and an overflowing net (full of fish). Cooperate with me and I will take your willingness and weakness and add it to My will and supernatural power and bring about God’s fullest blessing of influence, responsibility and opportunity to make a mark for the glory of God.

Abiding is the practice of saturating ourselves with God’s word and being in the continual fellowship of God’s presence.  When we fail to abide, a believer becomes captive to his circumstances where thinking is based on emotions of the moment and his actions are based on the impulses of his old nature. Apart from Christ habitual sins easily consume us until they are compulsions repeated addictively that give us a name- greedy, gossip, angry, worried. When our gazes glance away from Christ we get distracted by the things of this world and become afraid by the things we can’t control. And when we realize where we’ve ended up…awareness hits, we’re ashamed and we hide when we really need to turn quickly and return to our loving God.  I love the encouragement from Brother Lawrence in his magnificent little book “The practice of the Presence of God,” and include three things he said about abiding.

On knowing himself and know his God he confessed: “I regard myself as the most wretched of all men, stinking and covered with sores, and as one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his King. Overcome by remorse, I confess all my wickedness to Him, ask His pardon and abandon myself entirely to Him to do with as He will. But this King, filled with goodness and mercy, far from chastising me, lovingly embraces me, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the keys of His treasures and treats me as His favorite. He talks with me and is delighted with me in a thousand and one ways; He forgives me and relieves me of my principle bad habits without talking about them; I beg Him to make me according to His heart and always the more weak and despicable I see myself to be, the more beloved I am of God.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

On the love of God he gave this truth: “The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them – through faith or unbelief – that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.

Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

On Prayer and meditation he gave this encouragement: “When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth.

I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before God. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man’s gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

I say three but I mean four, on abiding he clarifies: “He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

To order this Christian classic follow this link:

The Practice of the Presence of God

And watch for how the Fury practices the presence of God in the FURY series books by J.L. Kelly to see abiding in action in a Christian Character.