Practicing the presence of the Lord deepens your intimacy with Him. Spending time with God is fuel for the engine of your soul that drives you to know Him (hunger), to walk with Him (faith) and to worship Him (love).
Remarkably, He gives you the hunger, faith and love to walk with Him. The most valuable thing you and I have to give is our time. When you give God your time, something amazing happens: as the presence of the Lord manifests because of time spent with Him, the Word of God suddenly takes hold of your soul.
As you give the Lord your time, the Holy Spirit captures you with His Word. You find that when you read the Word, it comes right off the pages and takes hold of your heart. You are drawn into it like never before. Your hunger and faith explode to new levels, and this explosion creates new levels of spiritual growth.
Because you give your time, the Holy Spirit uses His Word to draw you in. When that happens, it’s like an ignition that revs up your soul with combustible power. You are taken into a world you didn’t know existed. When you open your heart and open your Bible, you unlock the exciting new universe of God’s Word.
His Word begins to govern your thought life as everything in you begins to come into alignment with God’s purpose and plan for your life, found on the precious pages of God’s written Word. Something begins to happen to you spiritually as you are pulled into the depths of God and His Word.
When hunger, faith and love begin to manifest in your life, they trigger the Word in you at a deeper level than before. That’s what Paul meant by “the power that worketh in us” (Eph. 3:20, KJV). It triggers the Word. The Word ignites communion and fellowship. In turn, communion ignites worship. The three ignitions of the Christian life are the Word, communion and worship. Once they are activated, they intensify, being ignited by each other. This combustion begins a kind of chain reaction in your spirit, reigniting again and again as you remain in the presence of the Lord.
Once that anointing begins to ignite, the spirit man starts to experience the abundant tangibility of it. You have probably experienced the first stages of this without realizing it. If you go a little deeper, here’s what could happen: when you go into the depths, the ignitions become very powerful. Suddenly you find yourself going into deeper layers of the Scriptures.
How many times can you read about Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah and the ark, Joseph and his brothers, and Moses? These individuals and events can sometimes be stored in our minds as mere information. But something significant happens the second we discover Jesus in the pages of our Bibles.
This ignites power!
The ignition doesn’t begin when you’re in the historical layer. The ignition doesn’t take place when you’re discovering God’s plan for the nation of Israel and the church. But the second you go deep—and you cannot go deep without the Holy Spirit showing it to you—that is when you discover Jesus in the revelation of Scripture.
The Bible is not just about history or poetry or prophecy. The Bible is a revelation of one person: Jesus, the Son of God. Seeing Jesus on every page of the Bible is what transforms us into His image.
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