[b]Having An Encounter With God
By Henry Blackaby
[i]The following is edited from a message given at the Midwest Prayer Conference of Harvest Prayer Ministries, in October 2006 at Maryland Community Church in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The theme for this conference is very significant – "Praying for a Change." Most of those in the Scriptures who had an encounter with God were immediately and forever changed. When we are in the presence of God, He brings about a radical change. We see this all through the Scriptures, but somehow we don’t understand that the God of the Scriptures is the One who is encountering us. Our primary purpose for coming into the house of God ought to be to have an encounter with God. We can say that we are in the presence of God, but there may be no transformational change that indicates that we are.
The moment of God’s encounter with you is determined by God and not by you. It may be through a Scripture. Suddenly the Spirit of God takes the Word of God, and like a two-edged sword, pierces the soul and spirit and joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of your heart (Heb. 4:12). It exposes you fully to God. When God encounters you, you will know it because He will stir every ounce of your being. God knows the timing and He comes in the fullness of time.
[b]Isaiah’s Encounter with God
In Isaiah chapter six we see a remarkable encounter Isaiah had with God. God knew exactly where Isaiah’s problem was, and so God matched the encounter with the need for radical change in Isaiah’s life. Suddenly Isaiah was in the presence of the holiness of God. Some people talk about being in the presence of the holiness of God, and we sing about the holiness of God, and yet somehow we’re not experiencing the holiness of God. If we got into the presence of the holiness of God I would guess that a number of us would have to respond with Isaiah: "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips" (Isa. 6:5).
The presence and holiness of God always expose the specific need in your life that is keeping you from a deeper encounter with God. God’s immediate response with Isaiah was to deal with his lips. Something had to come from the altar of God and that is a life-transforming moment. Coals from off the altar touched his lips, and an amazing thing happened. When his lips were cleansed, his ears were opened. God didn’t touch his ears; He touched his lips. That was what was keeping Isaiah from hearing. God had been speaking all along, but for the first time Isaiah heard God saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" Because of the encounter and because of the radical change, there was a spontaneous response from Isaiah: "Here am I! Send me" (v. 8).
Could that encounter happen to you? Do you suppose God has someone to whom He wants to send you? Do you suppose that the unreached multitudes around the world have not been on the heart of God but rather, He has been trying to find someone who will hear Him say, "Who will go for Us?" and He has yet to remove from our heart that which is keeping us from hearing and responding to Him? Maybe this is God’s fullness of time for you. Maybe for weeks or months there has been a holy restlessness in your heart, and you are saying, "Surely God has more for my life than just attending services and religious activities. Surely there is something else." God would say, "There is and there always has been, but you have let the culture of the day get you into religious activities and out of the intimate relationship with Me." Maybe at this time is God’s special moment like He had with many in Scripture. Maybe this is the time of your encounter!
The key is not Isaiah. The key is the God of Isaiah, just as the key was not Abraham but the God of Abraham. The same God who encountered them is the same God who is here to encounter us. Are you ready? Are you anticipating a life change in you as has happened to so many in the Scriptures that give us an understanding of what’s in the heart of God?
[b]"Praying for a Change" in Our Nation
I have been deeply involved across our nation and across the world. I think God in His grace has granted me a sensitivity, an insight into what is happening, and at least a measure of understanding why some things have happened the way they have.
Think about this conference theme – "Praying for a Change." My mind and my heart have said, "Whatever we have been doing or have not been doing has brought the nation to where it is." Our nation is in terrible shape, and there are hundreds of directions that the nation is taking to go down and down and down.
The questions come, "What kind of praying have we been doing that has not made a difference in the nation? What kind of praying are we doing that has left the nation in the condition it is in, knowing that God has said that all heaven is moved in answer to prayer? One person with passionate praying can turn a nation around! Why then is the nation not being turned around if we keep saying that we’re praying?"
Do we not need to be praying for a change in what is happening around the world? Some of you may receive the magazine called, "Voice of the Martyrs." I read a copy sometime back and there was a young Chinese pastor who had been given a 3-year prison sentence and a large fine for printing "Experiencing God." Of course, there has run through my mind that what I have done has brought about great persecution to some of God’s children who have printed my book.
I thought to myself, "How then should I pray for our fellow believers in China?" My uncle and aunt were missionaries in northern China during the great Shantung revival. God added that as part of my heritage and that has profoundly affected what I have been doing in my life. When I read about the Chinese pastor, I said, "What kind of praying have I been doing?" The Lord brought me under an indictment about the qualitative difference in my praying that must take place. We don’t need more praying as much as a qualitatively different relationship with God. Are you ready for God to take you into a qualitatively different relationship to Him when you pray? Do you want to be the kind of person God could call on to pray because He knows the quality relationship you have to Him and that through your praying huge changes would take place in the nation and around the world? Think about your own personal walk with God and about your own personal prayer life and what kind of changes need to be made in your life so that God could work profoundly through your life.
[b]Moses’ Prayer Life
Look with me at some praying that was done by Moses and what was at stake. The God who invited Moses to stand in His presence and hear from his heart what is on the heart of God, literally broke Moses’ heart and set him in motion to stay in prayer before God for forty days and forty nights. What he had heard from God was so significant that he neither ate nor drank anything for forty days but was in agony of soul. Moses stood between the sinning people and God, and pled for them, even asking God to take his name out of the book of life but to spare theirs. According to the Scriptures, the prayer life of Moses changed the heart of God.
When was the last time you went to pray and God laid His heart over your heart and it broke your heart? In Romans 8:26 Paul says one weakness we have is we do not know what to pray for as we ought. What is God’s provision for our inability to know what to pray? Paul says that God has granted us the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit who knows the mind of God and the heart of God and knows the immediate activity of God, will guide you so you will know what you ought to pray. When was the last time you got on your knees to pray, and you had to cry out, "Lord, I don’t know what to pray as I ought! What should I pray for my president? What should I pray for the upcoming elections? Our nation is being shattered. How then shall I pray?" And if God were to lay over your heart what you ought to pray, would you passionately pray consistently until you knew that God had heard and answered?
We are about to get the kind of nation we are willing to pray it to be. But we may have the kind of nation that results when we fail to pray. Your prayer life and mine and your church’s prayer life and mine can determine the course of history and certainly can turn the corner on many of the destructive forces that are so debilitating in our nation today.
Our nation is experiencing an incredible breakdown in family life, in ethics in high places and in other unprecedented ways that we never dreamed we would ever even hear about, but which are now commonplace. Where is the praying of God’s people? God intends that a nation become the product of the praying of His people. Right now, as I’ve seen in hundreds of prayer times, our nation is the result of careless and casual praying and God’s people no longer believe that when they pray, God can powerfully affect the nation.
Moses was one who knew God well enough to know that he could persist in his praying. He had learned what was on the mind and heart of God. Here is what Moses says in Deuteronomy 9:8: "You provoked the Lord to wrath…." God’s people, the ones whom God had called to Himself and had assigned to them such an intimate relationship to Himself that they would always know what was on His heart and mind, had a tendency to depart from Him. They no longer had intimacy with God. Do you know what happens when the people of God no longer have an intimate relationship with God? It provokes Him to anger, because God knows what is at stake eternally when His people do not function in a relationship to Him. So Moses said, "…you provoked the Lord to wrath, so that the Lord was angry enough with you to have destroyed you."
But do not look at the Israelites now. Look at the God of the Israelites. If you are a spiritual leader of any kind, and if you are a parent you are one, remember God’s people can provoke Him to anger where He would destroy us. Of all the times in history when this nation can be destroyed, it is now! Only the mighty hand of God will prevent it.
Many ask me about the end times. I’m not a student of the end times, but I am a student of the Scriptures and I do know that in Matthew 24 Jesus gives one evidence of the increasing nearness of the end times. He says there will come a time when there will be such tribulation that if God did not intervene, no flesh would survive. Then He adds that for the elect’s sake, for the sake of God’s people, He will not let it happen.
I’m very much aware that we live in an unusual time when there are countless multitudes of terrorists who are willing to expend their life if only they could take the lives of others. Now we have the potential of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons, and from time to time we hear word of a substance so deadly that if it were ever released, we have no antidote for it, and it would be an endless chain of death. Do you realize we live in a generation when the potential of tribulation if unchecked, is that there would be no flesh survive? But there is a moment when God will intervene, and I’m grateful for that. But I’m saying, "Lord, in the meantime, what kind of relationship do You want me to have with You?"
God told Moses He was so angry with His people because of their sin that He was going to destroy all His people, and begin all over again with Moses. If you were on the mount and God said that to you, what would you do? It would depend on your track record in your prayer life. How well do you know God and how well do you know God’s invitation to stand between Himself and men on behalf of their survival? In Deuteronomy 9 and 10, Moses describes to God’s people that he went into the presence of God, and there he pled with God for forty days and forty nights, and he did it twice. And the God who said that He was going to destroy every one of His people, as Moses prayed with persistence and with passion and from his heart – that God heard and did not destroy His people.
[i](to be continued...)