Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 4
July 2, 2006
W. Gregory Pope
THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD
Ephesians 6:10-20
We’ve been spending some time these days in the letter of Ephesians talking about Christian Spiritual Formation. Today we skip ahead to the end of the letter and read about what we need in order to prepare for God’s work of forming us in the image of Christ.
Paul reminds us that the struggle between being conformed to this world and being transformed into the image of Christ is a serious struggle not just within ourselves, but with forces of evil - Paul calls them principalities and powers - that seek to hinder our transformation. It is a struggle, a battle, for which we need to be prepared.
It is a battle we must not fight in our own strength. Paul says, “Be strong in the Lord’s power.” Christian Spiritual Formation is God’s work and it will be done in God’s strength. We are required to stand firm and to put on the whole armor of God.
Using the analogy of a Roman soldier clothed in the Spirit of Christ, Paul says we must:
Put on the belt of truth. Don’t listen to the lies of this world; know the truth and wear it; live it.
Put on the breastplate of righteousness. Gird yourself with right living in right relationships with God and others.
Put shoes on your feet that will enable you to proclaim the gospel of peace. Do not walk in hostility toward others with barriers between you. Talk peace. Live in peace.
Put on the shield of faith, trusting God to do the work God is seeking to do in your life.
Put on the helmet of salvation, of wholeness and healing; no longer living a divided life, but an integrated life, redeemed and made whole by the grace of God.
And carry the sword of the word of God to guide you and keep your paths straight.
With this armor of truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God, Paul says “Pray in the Spirit at all times.”
It is this theme of prayer that I want to guide our thoughts for the next three weeks, hoping for some honest dialogue during our talk-back sessions following worship about this central spiritual practice in Christian Formation.
I have a friend I met in seminary. He graduated college with a business degree then felt called to seminary. His fear was that seminary would be a place where the only thing people did was walk around praying all the time. He said his fears were relieved when he met me.
What do you make of this idea of “praying at all times”? In other places within scripture we are told to “pray without ceasing.” It’s a phrase that has puzzled Christians for centuries. What does it mean? How can we do it?
I want to begin by offering two ways to hear this call:
First, I want us to hear this call to “pray at all times” as a word to the church. Following our culture’s lead, we have individualized so much of faith that we forget that so much of scripture is not addressed primarily to the individual, but to the faith community, the church. I cannot help but think that one meaning of this text is a call for the church to always be at prayer.
This is one of the primary reasons for monasteries and convents: monks and priests and nuns all over the world insuring that somewhere in the world someone in the church is praying at all times.
It is from the monastery that we find a second way to hear this text to “pray at all times,” and that is as a word to the individual believer.
It’s a word from an individual believer named Nicholas Herman born in 1611. He began his life as a soldier. Then at the age of 55 he entered the Carmelite Monastic Order in Paris as a lay brother. There in the monastery he became a cook, and adopted the name Brother Lawrence.
At the age of 18 he underwent a life-changing spiritual experience. It was a midwinter day when the sight of a dry and leafless tree standing gaunt against the snow caught his attention.
Thinking of the changes the coming spring would bring to that tree, he felt an overwhelming sense of the knowledge and love of God, and from there on endeavored constantly, as he put it, “to walk as in God’s presence.”
Brother Lawrence believed that the only business of our daily lives was to love and delight ourselves in God. Therefore he resolved to make the love of God the end of all his actions, and he found that his method of practicing the presence of God enabled him to do just that.
Brother Lawrence died at the age of eighty in 1691. One year later, a collection of Lawrence’s letters and conversations was published as the classic The Practice of the Presence of God. And for over 300 years, readers of his book have been inspired and guided in their search for true and lasting communion with God.
Brother Lawrence was no theological scholar. His one desire was for communion with God, and he sought God’s presence continually, whether he was worshiping in the sanctuary or working in the kitchen.
For Lawrence, prayer with other believers was important, but he didn’t think you had to be in a worship service to experience God’s presence. “It is not needful always to be in a church building to be with God,” he writes. “We can make a chapel of our heart, to which we can from time to time withdraw to have gentle, humble, loving communion with God.”
For Lawrence, the time of prayer was no different from the other times. “The time of business,” he said, “does not differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament,” Holy Communion.
For Brother Lawrence, prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God. To think of prayer as “the practice of the presence of God” helps broaden our understanding of prayer and has the possibility of changing the way we live our daily lives.
To understand prayer as “a sense of the presence of God” sheds light on Paul’s word to “pray at all times.” To pray at all times, we don’t have to be always talking or always listening. We simply live in the awareness of God’s presence with us. Robert Benson calls it “living a life framed by prayer.”
Lawrence believed we ought to live with God in the greatest simplicity, speaking to God frankly and plainly, praying for God’s assistance in the events of our lives as they happen. We often pray before and after the event. How often do we pray during a certain event in our lives?
Brother Lawrence was a cook at the monastery. And yet, he held a great aversion to the kitchen. But having accustomed himself to do everything for the love of God, praying on all occasions for God’s grace to do the work, Lawrence found a lightness to everything he did during his fifteen years there. He was pleased when he could take up a piece of straw from the ground for the love of God.
Believing by faith that God was present, he directed all his actions toward God, doing them with a desire to please God, leaving whatever would come of it to God. As he proceeded in his work he continued his familiar conversation with his Maker, seeking God’s grace and offering to God all his actions.
Practicing the presence of God helps us accustom ourselves to a continual conversation with God, an habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God. A disciplined practice of the presence of God enables us to recognize God intimately present with us so that we might address ourselves to God at every moment of our lives, no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
Praying without ceasing is to think of prayer as “breathing lessons,” a kind of breathing the breath of God as you walk with God, resting in God’s presence, fully aware of the divine love that continually surrounds and upholds you, God breathing life into you at each moment.
What about those times when God feels absent?
Brother Lawrence knew those times. All was not peace and joy for him. There was a period of four years when he was deeply troubled with the belief that he would be damned. And no one could persuade him otherwise. But his resolve was constant. In his words:
I did not engage in a religious life but for the love of God, and I have endeavored to act only for [God]: whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love [God].
There was also a period of ten years where he struggled daily with self-loathing and suffered deeply from guilt, only later to find a renewal of God’s love and joy. Listen to his confession:
I consider myself the most wretched of men. I confess to God all my wickedness, I ask his forgiveness, I abandon myself in his hands, that he may do what he pleases with me. And this King, full of mercy and goodness, very far from chastising me, embraces me with love, makes me eat at his table, serves me with his own hands, gives me the key of his treasures.
In those seasons when God seems absent, we practice the presence of God by faith, believing God to be present even though God seems absent.
How do we arrive at this faithful practicing of the presence of God in our lives?
First of all, we commit ourselves to set times of prayer. Brother Lawrence engaged in set times of prayer when he would do nothing else but think upon God. He said, “As for my set hours of prayer, sometimes I consider myself there as a stone before a carver: presenting myself in that way before God, I desire him to make his perfect image in my soul, and render me entirely like himself. I seek after nothing but to become wholly God’s.”
We all need those set times of prayer when there are no distractions from others or from work or any other noise. We need quiet times alone with God. Those times will better enable us to practice God’s presence in the midst of our busyness. In practicing the presence of God we open ourselves to a continual transformation of our lives into God’s image. So we begin by committing ourselves to set times of prayer.
Secondly, practicing the presence of God includes a hearty renunciation of everything which does not lead to God. It is important to guard our hearts from anything that dulls or steals our hunger, thirst, and love for God. Walking continually in God’s presence help lead us to renounce all that does not lead us closer to God. It helps keep us from doing anything wilfully that displeases God.
Brother Lawrence believed mischief began with useless thoughts, and that we ought to reject and drive away such thoughts, and return to our communion with God. He believed the practice of the presence of God can bring change to our hearts.
When we practice the presence of God, renouncing everything that does not lead us closer to God, we are more likely to live an integrated life, making impossible the separation of the life of faith from the life of work, family, school and recreation. The presence of God becomes the air we breathe and the clothes we wear - like a breastplate of right living, and a belt of truth, and shoes that guide our feet in the ways of peace. Everything about us reflects God’s presence when we live our lives in the full awareness of God with us.
A third thing is to consider all the things we do every day that take no real thinking, things that are rather automatic, and use those moments to practice God’s presence. For instance:
What were you thinking about when you showered this morning, or when you relaxed in a bath tub one night this past week?
What were you thinking about when you shaved yesterday or this morning?
What were you thinking about when you waited in line this week at the grocery store, the bank, the department store? Or when you were put on hold whole on the telephone? These are great opportunities for momentary prayer. Rather than brood over this wasted time, worship God! You will find yourself in a much better mood when someone finally begins talking to you.
What were you thinking about when you waited for your computer to start up each day this week? Suppose you decide that every time you turn on your computer, or wait for a website to appear, you will spend a moment worshiping God. For those of us who spend most of the day in front of computers, such a practice could revolutionize our lives?
Or how about on your next car trip alone, consider having what one writer calls “red light worship.” Every time the light changes from green to red and you have to stop, spend the time worshiping God. (But keep your eyes on the light or your worship will soon be interrupted by car horns!)
The father of Hudson Taylor, the legendary missionary to China, taught his son to pray and worship each morning as he got dressed. He knew that this was a task that he would do thousands of times for the rest of his life.
The list could go on and on, but you get the idea. We would benefit greatly if we would closely examine our lives, searching for those times of waiting and vegetating that could be turned into time for simple prayer and worship, practicing the presence of God.
Gerald May says that “what God wants, and what our hearts most deeply seek, is for us to live every moment, do every act, breathe every breath in conscious immediacy with the One who is all love.” (Gerald May, The Awakened Heart, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, 211)
Brother Lawrence writes: Were I a preacher I should above all things preach the practice of the presence of God. For there is not in this world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.
We are called to pray at all times, to think on God by day and by night, to adore God continually, to live and to die in God’s presence, to practice the presence of God.
SO LET US PRAY. O God, you are everywhere all the time. You are the air we breathe. You are nearer to us than our own breath. And yet, we sometimes confine you to one hour, one place, one area of our lives, when we could breathing in your presence day and night. Teach us, O God, to look for the sacred in the ordinary. Help us feel your presence in our daily living. Help us see your face in our children, our parents, our spouses, our friends, our enemies. Help us in the living of our days to turn from all that does not lead to you. May we fill the earth with your presence as we leave this place and embody your love. We pray in the name of Christ, who brought your presence to us in the flesh, and continually abides with us through your Spirit. Amen.
feed back to Greg
return to Sermon Index
CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
We would like to hear from you.
Return to oldsite Home page
Return to newsite Home page