Contending for the Presence of God

The Holy Spirit is speaking loudly and clearly these days through many voices from many different directions, summoning God’s people to pay attention to His agenda at this time in history. We have heard His voice clearly in our own personal times in prayer as well as through the urgings of prophetic declarations from many sources, literally around the world. 

His agenda? He desires to be present among His people in manifest power and authority, beyond what we’ve seen or heard about. There is a yearning in the heart of God to fully be Who He is among His people, fully released to bring His own kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy through the Holy Spirit.

One of the main ways He is capturing – even forcing our attention is by the presence among us of people who desperately need an encounter of the healing and restoring power of God. Because we have seen His hand at work in other times and in other places, we can no longer look past those in our own midst who, without an intervention of God’s healing and delivering power, face a future filled with pain, sorrow, and even death.

In those situations we are forced to admit that our current experience of God’s presence is lacking something. We need and want more, and so we make up our minds to sing a little louder, pray with more intensity, and contend with more seriousness for His manifest presence to come. It’s not sufficient to merely know the lyrics of a song like “When You Walk Into The Room, Everything Changes”. We need the lyrics of that song to become our norm, the reality of God’s Kingdom being manifest on earth as it is in Heaven.

Recently, in an early morning prayer meeting at SOZO Church in Belfair, Washington, I sensed the Holy Spirit say something to me that shifted my perspective on the matter of contending with God for His move among us. I sensed Him say that my emphasis had been on “CONTENDING with God”, as though He is an adversary that needs to be won over, and that I needed to shift that to “contending WITH God” as my Father and friend, partnering with Him in His desire. I sensed Him say to me that there were some realities He needed from me in order for Him to be present like He desires to be present, and I felt the weight of Heaven pressing down to earth, God’s yearning to be with His people in an unhindered way.

Isaiah 66:1 quotes the LORD saying, “Heaven is My throne, and earth is my footstool. What is the house that you will build for Me, and what is the place of My rest?” I believe that what is meant there is God asking, “Where is the place where My will can be carried out without resistance?” The reality He needs from me is to be in full agreement with HIS desire to come in power, with nothing in me that would stand in His way or resist the movements of His Spirit.

How about where you are? Is God contending with you so that you will contend WITH Him, that His will might be fully accomplished where you are? May it be so! Amen.

The Motivation of Seeking Righteousness

Why is this pursuit of righteousness so important in our lives? Because it simply means that we can become everything God intended us to be. I appreciate the Armed Forces of the United States, and it is with due respect that I say they cannot fulfill their promise to their recruits to “Become all that you can be.” The power to make us all that we can be rests with God alone, and is released only to those who find their craving for righteousness satisfied in God.

It really goes back to this most basic thing. God has a design for each of us that is perfect, and that will fit in perfect harmony with His design for the rest of His creation. Our happiness, the full realization of God’s blessing in our lives, is dependent upon that craving being satisfied. The release of power to bring healing, deliverance, and salvation to the people we love and to the nations of the earth depends upon His righteousness being formed in us. To try to find our fulfillment apart from that design is to live frustrated, empty, and unfulfilled.

There is a fascinating passage of Scripture recorded in Psalm 112 that speaks to the quality of life reserved for those who are found to be righteous. Consider these things that God says concerning this group of people (Psalm 112:6-12, taken from the New Living Translation):

·       Those who are righteous will be long remembered.

·       They do not fear bad news.

·       They confidently trust the Lord to take care of them.

·       They are confident and fearless, and can face their foes triumphantly.

·       They share freely and give generously to those in need.

·       Their good deeds will be remembered forever.

·       They will have influence and honor.

·       The wicked will see this and be infuriated. They will grind their teeth in anger; they will slink away, their hopes thwarted.

This amazing list of blessings is promised to those who hunger and thirst for all things to be conformed to reality. They will be fully satisfied, satiated with righteousness! They will see all things become as they should be, and that reality will literally last forever. We’ve decided that we want to be part of this group. Our hope is that you do as well.

Righteousness: The Source of Ultimate Gladness

Another dimension of Jesus’ commitment to righteousness is revealed in Psalm 45. The writer of this beautiful poem is singing a hymn of praise to the King, a love song that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the person of Jesus. Under the leading of the Holy Spirit, the writer makes this declaration about Jesus that points with boldness and clarity to the benefits of loving righteousness:

Your throne, O God, is forever and ever;

A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom. 

You love righteousness and hate wickedness;

Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You

With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.

(Psalm 45:6-7, NKJV)

The rulership of God through His Son Jesus is revealed here as eternal. His authority is rooted in righteousness, and every decision will be made in line with how things really are. Now here’s the wondrous point: because Jesus loves righteousness and hates wickedness, God has anointed Him with the anointing of gladness more than any other man.

Do we get this? There is a direct correlation between the passionate pursuit of righteousness and the realization of gladness in our lives! To the degree that righteousness becomes our passion, we will live in the experience of joy. Do we see that righteousness cannot mean a suffocating system of external practices that are superimposed upon an uncooperative human nature? Rather, righteousness can only mean a deep conformity to the reality of how things are in God’s heart. As we are transformed by the love of Jesus, and become like Him by the power of the Holy Spirit, loving and pursuing righteousness and hating the perversion of it, we will find ourselves being flooded with gladness “more than our companions.”

This is why Jesus says we must hunger and thirst after this condition. The pursuit of righteousness must become the fundamental passion of our lives if we truly desire to reach our power potential. In the Sermon on the Mount, just a few phrases after He has spoken the Beatitudes, Jesus uses language that speaks of the intensity of hungering and thirsting after righteousness:

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, NKJV)

Jesus is saying here that nothing matters as much as doing what it takes to be conformed to God’s character. So what if we lose something that seems really important now? In the end, we get it all back and more! Sometimes we count the cost of obedience and feel distress over what we will miss if we really get serious about God and His Kingdom. But Jesus is inviting us to consider what we will miss if we don’t get serious about what He is saying here. God is offering us full blessing and happiness, more power and authority than we will know what to do with, and we’re worried that we might miss out on some silly temporal pleasure. We forfeit an unimaginable and eternal inheritance of power and authority for the sake of something that is ultimately worthless! Oh, Beloved, we must get hold of this truth deep in our hearts!

Hunger and Thirst in the Life of Jesus

If we are to come into our full inheritance of authority on earth as it is in heaven, it is also essential that we perceive that Jesus is the model of each of these character traits. It is Jesus to whom we are joined in the true marriage covenant, and it is He who gives full expression to each of the Beatitudes. Therefore, to embrace the Beatitudes as our lifestyle is to cooperate with the process of conformity to His image, which is our destiny.

It is a compelling thing to consider that in the person of Jesus, God gave full expression of His desires for mankind through this one true Man. As a man full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus knew the heart of His Father, and lived His life in complete agreement with His Father’s will. This truth helps us to comprehend one of the more startling events in Jesus’ life, recorded for us in the Gospel of John:

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” Then His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.” (John 2:13-17, NKJV)

Jesus came into Jerusalem filled with understanding from His Father gained in the place of intimate communion and prayer. He was fully aligned with the Father’s character, and therefore saw all things from the Father’s perspective. He knew what the Father had in mind when He called the nation of Israel into existence. He knew that the true identity of this people could only be realized in conformity to the Father’s vision for them. Therefore, Jesus had chosen His disciples based on the Father’s leading, seeing in them the destiny of apostolic authority even while they were immature and carnal. Jesus understood that the Temple was intended to be a prophetic window into God’s desire to have a dwelling place with His people. It was to be a place of communion and intimacy, a place of full access to all who would come, a place of mercy and grace where people would be invited into the empowering presence of God.

The spiritual leaders of the day, however, had turned the Temple into a religious bastion, a stronghold of legalism and oppression that served more to separate the people from God than to open the way to Him. The presence of the money-changers in the courtyard revealed a pollution at the core of the system. When Jesus encountered the situation He was blasted with the discrepancy between what was in His Father’s heart and what was being expressed by those who were set in place to reveal the Father to the people. The Temple had been so overrun with empty ritual that God had long before withdrawn His presence from it.

The text in John 2 says that Jesus was consumed by zeal for His Father’s house. In other words, a deep passion burned in Jesus’ heart for God’s people to realize their destiny as kings and priests in the Kingdom of God.  He yearned to see intimacy between His Father and His people, to see the power of God released upon the nation in the way His Father had intended from the beginning. Therefore, when Jesus encountered a religious system that produced the very opposite thing, He was enraged. He experienced what can truly be called “righteous indignation,” where His anger was rooted in His passion to see everything conformed to His Father’s image.

In our day, most religious systems find themselves on the other side of the spectrum. Rather than being overly concerned with external behavior at the expense of heart reality, the religious systems of our day shy away from any call to righteousness. We prefer to speak about a sappy version of love that makes no demands, that issues no call to radical living, and leaves us in our unrighteous mess. The Christian church today is filled with all sorts of compromise, greed, broken marriages, and open resistance to the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures. For fear of scaring people away from the institution, we have dumbed down the Gospel to the point of impotence, and then we wonder why twenty-four million believers have left the institutional church to seek an encounter with God that will actually bring change to their lives.

But impotence is not only the scourge of the mainstream, seeker-oriented institution. The churches that claim the power of God are just as devoid of anything beyond bells, whistles, and the occasional testimony. Once again I want to quote Bob Sorge:

We live in an hour where there is a huge gap between the Gospel we preach and the level of our experience in the Kingdom. We preach a Gospel of power, of healing, of miracles, of signs and wonders, of the resurrection power of Jesus Christ; but what we actually experience falls woefully short of the fullness we proclaim. The demonized come to our meetings and leave with their demons; the handicapped come in their wheelchairs and leave in their wheelchairs; they come to the meeting blind and leave blind; they come deaf and leave deaf. The lack of power in the church, at least in America, has us living under a great shroud of reproach. 

This caricature of New Testament Christianity is appalling to Jesus in our day even as it was during His time on earth. He longs to come and encounter His people in power, to bring cleansing and purity, and to release the authority of His Kingdom to His people in unprecedented ways. When Jesus cleansed the Temple in the event recorded in Matthew 21, the result of the cleansing was that “the blind and the lame came to Him in the Temple, and He healed them.” Oh, how we need a breakthrough of the righteousness of Jesus in His Church today!

Gary Wiens

Confidence Before God is the Fruit of Righteousness

When righteousness is centrally established and becomes the goal and expression of our lives, there emerges a marvelous confidence that God Himself is our champion. We begin to realize that nothing can shake us from our place in His heart, and that He is the one watching over our every circumstance. King David was one who understood this principle to a wonderful degree. His writings reflect a deep confidence in the Lord his God who would protect him in the situations of life, and cause all things to be established in his favor. Meditate on this section of Psalm 7 that reveals the confidence of David’s heart before the Lord:

The LORD shall judge the peoples;

Judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness,

And according to my integrity within me. 

Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end,

But establish the just;

For the righteous God tests the hearts and minds. 

My defense is of God,

Who saves the upright in heart.

(Psalm 7:8-10, NJKV)

The confidence of David’s life was that he had made the righteousness of God the goal of his seeking. Therefore, because his life was in line with God’s righteousness, he could pray in an amazingly bold way – “Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity within me!” David comes to the solid place of trust where he can depend fully upon the judgments of God, because he knows that his own heart is upright – in other words, he is as fully aligned as possible with the righteousness of God.

By contrast, there also came a time in David’s life when he acted in profound contradiction to righteousness. The story is recorded in 2 Samuel 11, and concerns the situation in which David, as the King of the nation, should have been leading his troops in the war that they were fighting. However, he remained in his palace, where one evening he went for a walk on the roof of his house. From there he observed Bathsheba, the beautiful wife of Uriah, bathing in the open air of her balcony. David lusted after this woman, sent for her, and impregnated her. In order to cover up the situation, the King sent for Uriah, who was one of his military commanders. David tried to get Uriah to sleep with his wife, but the man was too honorable to enjoy the pleasures of home while his soldiers were fighting. So, in a fit of horribly wicked behavior, David arranged to have Uriah placed in the hottest battle zone, where he was killed. David then took Bathsheba to his palace, and claimed her for his wife.

This situation was deeply displeasing to God, and brought great displeasure upon the life of David and his descendants. God sent His prophet Nathan to confront David, who responded with deep repentance, and wrote Psalm 51 as his song of confession. In that Psalm is a profound phrase that grips me each time I read it. Verse six of that Psalm declares that God “desires truth in the inward parts.” This is the formation of righteousness in the interior of our souls – to have our inward parts, our thoughts, attitudes, and secret longings conformed to the desires and ways of God. It is this alignment that God is after so that He might pour out His blessing on His people.

The Importance of Agreeing with God’s Opinion

Since these things are true, the only thing that really ought to matter to me is the discovery of what God thinks about me. Once I begin to understand His definition of reality in general, and my life in particular, then I begin to have the hope of coming to some sense of fulfillment and power. Consider the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones as he writes of the ultimate importance of God’s priorities being established in our hearts:

We are not meant to control our Christianity; our Christianity is meant to control us. I am to be dominated by the truth because I have been made a Christian by the operation of the Holy Spirit within. I quote that striking statement of the apostle Paul which surely puts it so perfectly – “I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” He is in control, not I; so that I must not think of myself as a natural man who is controlling his attitude and trying to be Christian in various ways. No; His Spirit controls me at the very center of my life, controls the very spring of my being, the source of my every activity.

You cannot read these Beatitudes without coming to that conclusion. The Christian faith is not something on the surface of a man’s life, it is not merely a kind of coating or veneer. No, it is something that has been happening in the very center of his personality. That is why the New Testament talks about rebirth and being born again, about a new creation and about receiving a new nature. It is something that happens to a man in the very center of his being; it controls all his thoughts, all his outlook, all his imagination, and, as a result, all his actions as well. All our activities, therefore, are the result of this new nature, this new disposition which we have received from God through the Holy Spirit. 

Again, Jesus’ point in Matthew 6:33 is that the pursuit of God’s rule and the conformity of all things to His character is the most important quest of the human heart. When righteousness is the goal of our seeking, then God becomes involved in a profound way to add “all these things” to our experience. The things spoken of here are the physical needs of life – food, clothing, provision – the things that fill our hearts with worry when righteousness is not the goal. But when righteousness is the goal of our seeking, and when in the power of the Holy Spirit we conform our expressions of life to that righteousness, then everything else that concerns us comes into place according to the purposes of God our Father.

Receiving the Gift of Righteousness

The biggest mistake we make is when we attempt to be righteous by our own energy and strength. Instead of focusing on falling in love with Jesus, and allowing His Spirit to transform us, we try to “behave ourselves.” We try to act like Jesus without being transformed by His power first. We want to be good enough to gain God’s approval. This will lead us to frustration with absolute certainty. The Scripture is clear that with the single exception of Jesus there is no one who is righteous, not even one person!  If that is true, then we have a huge dilemma! How can we live up to the demands of righteousness if no one can do it?

The answer the Bible gives us is that because Jesus lived as a righteous man, we too can anticipate living in His perfection as a fruit of relationship with Him. We are told in Philippians 3:9 that righteousness does not come by our own strength, but by faith in Christ as a gift from God. When we acknowledge our failure to live as humans were intended to live, and ask for His forgiveness, God’s power changes us inside. He makes righteousness available to us as a gift. We are granted a new nature, a new kind of life in which righteousness is possible. Because of His sacrifice on the cross, He can impart righteousness to us as a gift, and then give us the strength to grow up into that reality.

The Bible speaks of a reality that is called “righteousness,” and it is the truth of how things really are, rooted in the character of God who created all things. There actually is a standard, an perfect reference point from which every particular thing takes its meaning. That standard is God, whose character is made visible and accessible to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Consider this passage from the writings of Paul:

He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. (Colossians 1:15-18, NKJV)

Your life is part of the “all things” that Jesus created out of His own desire for relationship with human beings. God chose you before He created the universe,  and designed you from the very beginning to look like His Son Jesus, in whose image you were made. You were His idea! Therefore, since God thought you up, there is only one definition of your life that can possibly be right, and that is God’s idea of your life! He has a complete understanding of who you are, and Jesus is in full agreement with the Father about you! He means for you to look just like Jesus, and to the degree that you begin to look like Him in your attitudes and actions, you will begin to touch righteousness. God knows who you really are, and He is determined that you will receive everything you need to be just like He designed you!

Jesus said in Matthew 6:33 that the most important thing is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. If we will do that, then everything else that can possibly seem important will be added to us as well. Nothing is more important that to come into alignment with how God designed us to be.