David Zimmer: Hello and welcome to the Sound + Doctrine podcast. My name is David Zimmer.
Bob Kauflin: My name is Bob Kauflin. And we are in part two. We don’t try to do too many two-part episodes because we noticed that no one watches the second part. But hopefully you are tracking this and listening to the second part. We’re talking about manufacturing, marketing, and minimizing God’s presence. And if you haven’t heard part one, you should go listen to that. Manufacturing and marketing God’s presence. We began with just how God’s presence is His intention for His people ever since Adam and Eve to the new heavens and the new earth where He will dwell among His people and how it’s all throughout Scripture and how it is one of the distinguishing marks of the people of God. And today, in this episode, we want to talk about the tendency of some churches, some handful, maybe more than a handful, to minimize God’s presence. I mean, I said in the last podcast, it is cause for continual wonder, awe, and amazement, shock that the God of the universe would dwell with us, that He desires to do that. It’s not like a mistake, a blip, like, oh, yeah, I might as well be with you guys.
Bob Kauflin: He wants to. He created us that He would dwell among us. He delivers to indwell. But does that make any difference? And is there a potential, a possibility of just kind of brushing that away and not even thinking about it? I think that there are some of us, whether we’re leaders or just church members, I should say just church members, whether they’re leaders or church members, we would be shocked if anything happened in our meetings that was unusually either demonstrative or emotional or someone lifted their hands or someone shed tears of conviction or someone laughed for joy or knelt down in awe. I was at a conference not so long ago and I was in the front and we were seeing something and I knelt down. And I had a guy say to me afterwards, I was so affected when you did that. I said, well, I just felt like that was the most appropriate place for me to be with what we were seeing. I experienced the presence of God in that moment. Do we ever expect that kind of thing to happen ever? Or do we take pains to make sure it doesn’t happen? Yeah. I’ve known of churches that say, “no applause in this church.” Which I understand the implications behind it. No emotional expressions. I mean, I don’t know if they’d say that, but you get from the leaders that it’s just not a good thing. We’re going to keep it up here in our heads.
David Zimmer: Yes, totally. And I think like even the example that you gave, a couple of the examples you gave, of you kneeling and someone observed that, it’d be so easy for someone who isn’t expectant that God’s going to do something like that on a Sunday to say, well, that’s distracting. And like the clapping, let’s minimize distraction. Let’s minimize distraction. Minimize all the distractions. To where it just becomes, okay, quietly sit and listen, look one direction. And the preacher looks one direction and we all, that’s how it goes. You preach, we learn, we talk, we leave.
Bob Kauflin: Yes, yes. Don’t even really need the other people around you.
David Zimmer: Yes. Yeah, right, and it’s just me and God. Yes, we talk about that a lot. So I just think this is such a pertinent, important conversation.
Bob Kauflin: And we did a whole series on physical expressiveness, three parts. So we’re not going to get into that, but these are signs, these are marks that the Holy Spirit is active. And it’s not always physical. You can’t always see it. When the church gathers, God is present to bless and to guide and to speak, to convict, to strengthen, to illumine, to build up that we might more profoundly and more consistently glory in Jesus Christ.
David Zimmer: Yeah. Amen.
Bob Kauflin: That’s because we worship a risen Savior. He’s a crucified and risen Savior, not a dead historical figure. If we’re talking about Abraham Lincoln, if we’re talking about George Washington, if we’re talking about somebody in the past who was a great leader, well, we don’t expect him to show up in the room. And to start talking to us.
David Zimmer: And it doesn’t evoke worship.
Bob Kauflin: No. Well, that’s for sure. Yeah, but here we’re talking about Jesus Christ who has poured out His Spirit so that we might know God truly dwells in our midst. It is amazing. And whether your church is 20 or 200 or 2000, it is the same Holy Spirit who dwells among us. And isn’t that amazing?
David Zimmer: Yeah, incredible. Yeah. It is.
Bob Kauflin: It’s just so great. We’re never just singing songs. We’re proclaiming and meditating on life, transforming realities that God uses to change our perspective, fill us with fresh faith, and open our eyes to see His immeasurable glory and goodness and greatness in Jesus Christ. We’re joining, Hebrews 12:22 says, “We’re joining in with the myriads of angels and saints around the throne who unceasingly praise the Lamb and the one who sits on the throne.” Revelation 5 talks about that as well. “We are joining in with the song around the throne.” It’s incredible. We’re never just hearing a sermon. And how often do we approach the sermon that way? Never as the preacher, hopefully. If you’re the pastor, the preaching pastor, you’re not thinking, oh, another sermon. I mean, when I have the opportunity to preach, I feel, I just get so excited that I get to proclaim God’s word. I don’t know if everybody who hears feels that way, about the message they’re going to hear. Well, another sermon.
Bob Kauflin: Listen to… I mean, I’ve listened to hundreds of sermons. I’ve been a Christian over 50 years, thousands, I guess. I would say. More than hundreds. God himself is speaking to us in His word. He’s faithfully, carefully, thoughtfully, and persuasively proclaiming to us, I am with you. I am your God. The spirit is seeking to soften hearts, open eyes, reveal sin, impart faith. God’s present. And he’s working in our hearts. It’s just, there’s so much going on. And we can tend to criticize the pastor, the preacher. I don’t like this. I don’t like that.
David Zimmer: Well, and I also think we can criticize each other too. What’s not how I want it to be. It’s not as good as I want it to be. It’s not how… It doesn’t sound like the conference I just came from.
Bob Kauflin: Oh, I see, yes.
David Zimmer: We have those hearts that are quick to do that. I also think an important element in all of this is that it’s a job for a lot of people.
David Zimmer: It’s your job to prepare sermons and preach them. Oh, if you’re, yes. It’s your job to pick songs and lead them. It’s our job. And honestly, our hearts are there. We made that choice to serve our churches and go down that career path. But even that, you need fresh eyes to see that this isn’t a job.
Bob Kauflin: Oh, my.
David Zimmer: You need fresh eyes to see that this isn’t a gig. This is, there’s eternal work getting done.
Bob Kauflin: Yes, and if you are doing what you do simply as a job, whether that is as a pastor or a musician, I think there are many musicians who just go and serve at different churches and it’s their job. God has something so much greater in store for you. And that is being planted in a local church where you just are over… You’re just overjoyed that you can be a part. And whether or not your gift gets used, well, that’s another thing. He does want to use our gifts. God does want to use our gifts to bless people, to point to Christ, to bring him glory. But if you’re doing it just because you make money from it, you’re missing out on the meaning of the church, on what Christ redeemed us for, and the fact that our names are written in the book of life. That’s what brings us so much joy. And we did a podcast, I think a few years ago, on Should Churches Pay Their Musicians. So I won’t go into all that right now.
David Zimmer: No, yeah, but maybe take a break. Maybe take a break to realign your view of Christ, your
Bob Kauflin: Priorities.
David Zimmer: Priorities.
Bob Kauflin: So we’re never merely meeting with each other. We are meeting with God in the presence of God. At his invitation to celebrate the gospel and enjoy the miracle of being his adopted children through Jesus Christ. It’s a family gathering. There’s joy there. There’s excitement. And many Christians will acknowledge times in corporate gatherings. This would be in charismatic churches, non-charismatic churches. But when we’re physically or emotionally affected and God seems present in an unusual way. And that’s in line, I would say, with many examples in scripture where one or more individuals become experientially aware that God is in their midst. Do we pursue those times? That’s kind of what we’re asking the question. Are we missing something or experiencing less than the kind of presence that the spirit makes possible? Presence of God that spirit makes possible? How do we seek experiences of God without either manufacturing or trying to market them?
David Zimmer: Yeah, that’s a big one.
Bob Kauflin: That’s what we want to talk about. We don’t want to minimize God’s presence. There is no indication in scripture that God manifests his presence routinely in a way we can feel. God does reveal himself in dramatic ways in different times, but the Christian life is lived by faith and not by sight. We live in the already, but not yet. So we can’t say that God’s… Well, some of the things I read in the last podcast about how in eight minutes, you can be sure of God’s presence and never doubt it. No, I find as an older Christian, I am more aware of God’s presence, but it’s never routine. It’s never predictable. And there are things that go into that. But we are exhorted numerous times to seek God’s presence, to expect God’s presence, to treasure God’s presence. How do we do that without getting drawn into emotionalism or mere experience? So we’re going to talk about three ways of thinking about God’s presence that I’ve found helpful through the years, learned from others, that will kind of help us sort through this. Because I’ve heard leaders talk about the presence of God in ways that just are unhelpful. It remains vague.
Bob Kauflin: It’s an experience we kind of pursue. Is it there? Is it not? Some people say, really excited, but you know, that’s not God’s presence. Other people, they’re very sedate, and you think, well, they’re experiencing God’s presence. How do we think about it? So three categories that we need to think about God’s presence. And the first is God’s promised presence. Well, I should say omnipresence goes before that. We’re not counting that as a category. Saying that God is everywhere. Okay, great. Well, that doesn’t really help us. Because we know something happens in these different contexts. So first is God’s promised presence. God has promised to be with us at certain times, whether we feel it or not. God is present when his word is faithfully preached. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 3, I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. My speech, my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power. God’s with us when we are gathered. 1 Corinthians 5:4, “When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus.” God is present with us when we are sharing the Lord’s Supper. 1 Corinthians 11, “Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks on himself.” That is why many of you are weak and ill, but some have died. We are experiencing God’s presence when we are singing in Ephesians 5. “Do not get drunk with wine, but that is debauchery, but be filled with the spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” We can experience the presence of God, should, God is there, let me put it that way, when we serve 1 Peter 4, verse 10, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s very grace.”
Bob Kauflin: Whoever speaks is one who speaks oracles of God, whoever serves is one who serves by the strength that God supplies. And then the passage in 1 Corinthians 12, where we’re told that there are different kinds of gifts, different kinds of service, different kinds of activity. In 1 Corinthians 12, varieties of gifts, the same spirit, varieties of service, the same Lord, varieties of activities, the same God who empowers them all and everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good. That’s all to say that at those times, we know God is with us, empowering what we do. And it seems like every generation is tempted to value and pursue experience over faithfulness. So these things are things that we’re told to do, and God says, I will be with you.
David Zimmer: Yes, well, and even to take a step back from even what you just said, I find myself more tempted to think about what I’m doing versus what he’s promised to give me the strength to do. So maybe you’re listening to this podcast and you go like, well, I’m not seeking those experiences, I’m not. But maybe like me, you’re thinking, I do err on the side of self-sufficiency more than I do on a dependence that the spirit is going to do something.
Bob Kauflin: Great point.
David Zimmer: And that he’s gonna use me in my weakness.
Bob Kauflin: Yes, yes. And the other kinds of Christians who equate elevated passions to encountering God, and so they think if I don’t feel something, something doesn’t happen, well, God’s not really been here. And we’re kind of disappointed.
David Zimmer: Oh, yes.
Bob Kauflin: I mean, some Sundays will be like that, just kind of, it was a good Sunday. We did everything right, nothing was really bad, but we’re disappointed. What we forgot is, no, God was really there. He was still there. And the temptation is to make secondary means like technical, skill, lights, videos, arrangements, primary in engaging people’s minds and hearts
David Zimmer: Totally.
Bob Kauflin: And being over-impressed with unusual manifestations. When we make the secondary things the main thing, it’s not gonna end good because God is with us whether there are unusual things happening or not because of all the other things that we went through before. God’s people are together. His word is being preached. We’re celebrating the Lord’s Supper. We’re singing to the Lord. So if the people I lead are more excited about the latest move of God than the fact that Jesus Christ came to die for our sins and to rise from the dead to reconcile us to God, then I’m responsible to lead them back to what’s of first importance, which is the gospel.
Bob Kauflin: Remember at the end of the ’90s, I would frequently do spontaneous songs, sing spontaneous songs. And I began to sense that people were more looking forward to that kind of thing than they were about the fact that Jesus Christ has come and lived this perfect life and died a subsidiary death and risen from the dead. And I thought, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to. So I scaled back what I was doing and just put more of an emphasis on what God has already done for us in Christ. So we need to have faith in his promised presence. We may not feel something. We might feel something. But he is with us and we know that. So that’s the first category. It’s exciting, maybe in a different way than we might think, but it is true. It’s the promise of God, I will be with you.
Bob Kauflin: Second way to think about God’s presence, though, is God’s experienced presence. And this is what I think people are usually thinking about when we talk about God’s presence.
David Zimmer: It is.
Bob Kauflin: His experienced presence. So let me read a couple of quotes. This is from J.I. Packer, his book, Keep in Step with the Spirit. He says, the spirit makes known the personal presence in and with the Christian in the church of the risen, reigning Savior. He empowers, enables, purges, and leads generation after generation of sinners to face the reality of God. And he does it in order that Christ may be known, loved, trusted, honored, and praised. The distinctive, constant, basic ministry of the Holy Spirit under the new covenant is to mediate Christ’s presence to believers. That’s J.I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit. Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology, says, one of the Holy Spirit’s primary purposes in the new covenant age is to manifest the presence of God, to give indications that make the presence of God known. I think those quotes point to the reality that the Holy Spirit is not contained in the pages of Scripture. He wrote the pages of Scripture. The pages of Scripture are authoritative over anything that happens in our gatherings or in our lives.
Bob Kauflin: What the Holy Spirit wrote in Scripture is sufficient for our faith, for life, for guidance, for all those things. But none of that is to say that the activity of the Holy Spirit is exclusively contained in the pages of Scripture. The Holy Spirit can make God’s presence known. He does give spiritual gifts. He does heal people. He does lead people in certain ways. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s the experienced presence of God. And I came across a quote years ago by a man named Graham Harrison in the UK, who wrote an article for Banner of Truth called Worship in the Presence of God. He was speaking to those who certainly weren’t charismatics, certainly weren’t continuationists, were kind of from the stock of, we know there’s a Holy Spirit, we don’t quite know what he does. But we know he renews our hearts and converts us and displays the love of God in our hearts. But we’re not sure beyond that. This is what he wrote, encouraging, exhorting his fellow pastors to this end, to pursue the experienced presence of God. There can be no substitute for that manifested presence of God, which is always a biblical possibility for the people of God.
Bob Kauflin: When it is not being experienced, they should humbly seek him for it, not neglecting their ongoing duties nor denying their present blessings, which those two phrases are gold. Not neglecting their ongoing duties, keep doing what the Lord has told you to do. Not denying their present blessings, don’t seek some experience because God hasn’t given you enough. But recognizing that there is always infinitely more with our God and Father who desires fellowship with those redeemed by the blood of His Son and regenerated by the work of his Spirit. I was so moved when I read that because I don’t want to be… I mean, I would call myself a continuationist in line with what D.A. Carson wrote in his book, Showing the Spirit, or Max Turner in the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts, or the Sovereign Grace Statement of Faith. But I always need a reminder, always, that God desires to make his presence known among us and that it’s more than maybe we could ask or think. So in thinking about that, I’ve thought of three attitudes I want to have that we want to have. The first would be dependence. We are those who worship by the Spirit of god, glory in Christ Jesus, put no confidence in the flesh, Philippians 3:3.
Bob Kauflin: We’re dependent. If the Spirit empowers our meeting, then we should be dependent on him. And that’s shown primarily through prayer, through asking God to do what only he can do. It’s shown certainly in prayerful preparation. We’re asking God to work through the things we’re going to do, but we need him to do the work and we put no confidence in the flesh. It’s not a perfect liturgy that made everything happen Sunday morning. It was the Holy Spirit. And there is no perfect liturgy, by the way. So there is a dependence on the Spirit. If we want to experience presence of God, we need a dependence. We need an expectation. And that’s faith. We need to believe God does want to act powerfully when we gather. And David, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Wouldn’t you say there are some churches where it’s almost like the goal is to keep stuff from happening? I mean, we’ve been in them.
David Zimmer: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s like going back to that minimizing distraction thing. I think that can feel so man… It can be mislabeled as man-centered. Yes. And I think when you’re talking about the experienced presence of God, I think the response from some of our more reserved, reformed brothers and sisters, I think the response is, well, we don’t want to do anything that’s man-centered.
Bob Kauflin: Yes. Yeah, that’s a good point. And we don’t either, by the way.
David Zimmer: You don’t. You don’t, obviously. But what we’re saying is, when someone is visibly moved by something that the Lord is revealing to them by the power of the Spirit, or there’s an emotional response that happened with the truth that just happened, there’s a physical response with the truth that just happened, or there’s a sense that we need to repeat this to ourselves, or we need to stay in this because the Lord is doing something. That can be mislabeled as experiential, man-centered emotionalism. And so what then happens, I think, is you just, well, let’s throw it all away. Let’s stuff it all in the closet. And what you’re saying, what we’re attempting to say in these two podcasts is, guys, we’re reading our Bibles. We’re growing. We are singing the truth. We’re seeking to be theologically rich and deep and Christ-centered and gospel-saturated. Yet, I think we’re making the wrong assumption that this is a man-centered approach. When we’re saying the same thing, we’re just like, we just want to… This other camp is just saying, well, we want to minimize all those distractions, and almost, not to say it crassly, but we have a schedule to keep. Yeah. It almost feels like that, as well, of like, we are tied to our liturgy.
Bob Kauflin: Plans to follow.
David Zimmer: Our liturgy works. Our plans work. These things work. And it’s begging the question, to what end?
Bob Kauflin: Yeah. Oh, my God.
David Zimmer: To what end are they working? Oh, my goodness. So I think this is just a great conversation for us to be having. Maybe a basic question is, are you asking the Lord to work, to do something? And are you asking the Lord to give you eyes to see that He is?
Bob Kauflin: Yeah, and that’s the promised presence.
David Zimmer: That is the promised presence.
Bob Kauflin: He’s already working. His presence is, He is present with your church. Do you see that? But then going on and saying, are you asking Him to do more? Oh, that’s so well said. So yeah, that’s the expectation. Who knows what God wants to do in your church? I love the passage, 1 Corinthians 14, verse 24. If all prophesy and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all. He is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed. And so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you. Now, you may be in a church and say, well, we don’t prophesies, nobody prophesies in our church. Well, God’s present with you. God’s present through care. He’s present through faith. He’s present through love. He’s present through the teaching. He’s present through serving. He’s present in all these ways. Someone can still fall down on his knees, have the heart, the secrets of his heart disclosed, called to account by all, and say, God is really with you.
Bob Kauflin: Don’t we want that? I think we do. So dependence, expectation, and then responsiveness. That’d be the third thing. If we are serious about pursuing, so we enjoy God’s promised presence. We pursue his experienced presence. If we’re serious about that, then we want to respond to the Spirit’s leading. If in 1 Corinthians 14, no one was prophesying, no one was responding to the move of the Spirit in their lives, well, the unbeliever wouldn’t have been called to account. He wouldn’t have had the secrets of his heart exposed because there was no opportunity for him to do that, because there was no one responding to the leading of the Spirit. If I don’t step out to pray for someone who just came to mind, I may be missing seeing God work in a powerful way. That might be before and after the meeting. It might be during the meeting where I sense, oh, we just sang this line from a song. There might be people here who that was particularly relevant to. I remember that happened on Sunday, not too long ago. Experience harm and hatred for his name. And as we sang that line, I just thought, there are people here at their job, in their families who experienced that. So after we sang that song, I just said, I think there are people here, you’re experiencing that right now. I didn’t have them raise their hands. I just prayed for them. And heard later from someone who said, yeah, that’s me. And I know there were others. But that’s just responding.
David Zimmer: Yeah. So I think this is good. And I know we’re running out of time.
Bob Kauflin: You think? I want to know it’s good.
David Zimmer: I know it’s good.
Bob Kauflin: We have plenty of time.
David Zimmer: Okay. Good. Because I think this is a good place to give the common counter to what you just did. There are a lot of people who would say, well, you don’t need to share that. God’s going to do that. The Holy Spirit’s going to do that.
Bob Kauflin: Just do it on his own.
David Zimmer: Yeah. And you can say… I think a good response to that is your prompting from the Holy Spirit…
Bob Kauflin: To draw attention to that.
David Zimmer: To draw attention to that. Was inspired by the Holy Spirit, not by Bob, if it’s in line with God’s word. And that is showing your dependence on the Holy Spirit.
Bob Kauflin: Yes, absolutely.
David Zimmer: In the same way that if you said that and I was affected by that uniquely, and my wife wasn’t, I also can respond in a way that’s, well, that’s general. And lose, listen, an opportunity for me to humbly say, that was for me. And I know that the Spirit is using that to cut deeper to cause me to love him, to cause me to be more dependent upon him. But so often that is the response, which I think silences us in our church. And I think it perpetuates our thinking that I just do it. I just preach. God does the work. I just sing. God does the work. And to not be an active participant in what the Spirit is doing.
Bob Kauflin: That was so well said. I just couldn’t agree more. And it points to the fact that it’s not just leaders who need to expect the Spirit to lead during the meeting, to do things during the meeting, it manifests God’s presence. But it’s the people who are the congregation. I need to come to the gathering thinking, I wonder what the Lord’s gonna do. And you could say, well, He’s gonna… Promise presence. The Word’s gonna be preached. We’re gonna sing. We’re gonna pray. Maybe share the Lord’s Supper. I mean, how often do you do it? We’ll greet one another. Those are things. Well, you know, God’s a big God, and he may arrest you as you’re passing someone in the hall. And they come up to you and say, hey, you came to my mind. I just received a text. This doesn’t have to be a Sunday meeting, but I received a text the other day. Hey, someone I don’t interact with regularly, just was thinking about you guys this morning. Sense that there’s something serious you’re facing, and the Lord brought you to mind. And I’m just praying. I want you to know the Lord’s covering you in His care. And doggone it, if there wasn’t something significant that had just happened in my life. So I sense that as the Lord’s care. I didn’t say, wait a minute.
David Zimmer: Whoa, hold on.
Bob Kauflin: Wait a minute. This is just you. Or it’s general. How many of these texts did you send out? Like 100? But I need to anticipate that the Lord will speak to me. Now, this is to be distinguished from… Oh, we’re getting into so many sidebars here. The kind of mentality that says, oh, the Holy Spirit tells me everything. Like I was looking for a parking place this morning, and I was saying, which parking place? Spirit, would you open up a parking place? And there wasn’t one appeared right there. It was just so great. And I just asked the Spirit, what time should I wake up tomorrow morning? Should it be 7:32, 7:35? The Spirit said 7:38, which kind of surprised me, but we’re not talking about that. But we are saying that the Lord is looking for all kinds of opportunities to bless his people and to display his love, secured and proven, shown at the cross of Jesus Christ, the love from before the foundations of the earth. That’s why Jesus died for us. That’s why he came. That’s why he died. That’s why he rose, because he loves us. So we’re not starting something new at the cross. It’s always been there. But we are not, I think, expectant enough. So often we don’t think God’s gonna tell us things. Now, that’s different from the attitude that says, oh, come Holy Spirit, fire fall down, send the rain, show us your glory, endlessly repeating those phrases as thinking that, well, if we just say it long enough, it’s gonna happen.
David Zimmer: Yeah, to stir. And that’s where that emotionalism comes from, where you’re just stirring that. I think as we’re talking, we’re talking to probably the majority of people that listen to this podcast or like Sovereign Grace music. We’re not on the radio. We’re trying to talk about God’s justice and our sin and our rebellion against him and his wrath towards us. And it’s just like, we’re talking to people who have probably been in the church for a really long time. And that’s the people we’re talking to. But yeah, there can be a… Like we said on the previous podcast, there is such an abuse of what we believe the Holy Spirit’s work is. And we’re clearly grounding it in his ability, his desire to show us Christ.
Bob Kauflin: Yes, and that’s, yes, the Spirit comes, is with us to edify the body and to build us into Christ and appoint us to Christ. That’s His work. And if we spend… So expecting God’s experienced presence and responding to it, that’s different, as I mentioned, from just asking the Spirit, please come, come, come, come. Can you ask the Spirit to come and do the work that He does? Yes. But don’t feel like you have to repeat it endlessly. That can leave people with the impression that we just got to do one more thing. We got to do one more thing.
Bob Kauflin: I don’t know if I share this on the podcast or not, but there’s a conference once where we had the meeting the night. The next morning, the leader got up and said, a doorway to heaven was open to us last night, and we almost went through it, but not quite.
David Zimmer: Bummer.
Bob Kauflin: It was a bummer. It’s like, [0:35:58.3] ____ what did we do? That’s so unhelpful. It’s so unbiblical. It’s so wrong. Leaves people confused, dissatisfied, more impressed with our pursuit of God than His pursuit of us. And that’s what we want to remind people. Isn’t it incredible that the Son of God came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many? He came for a bride, not because of anything in us, not because of anything we’ve done, not because of anything we promised to do. He came because He chose to set His love upon us. That is humbling. That is mind-boggling. That is eternally joy-producing. And that’s the third way we want to think about God’s presence. Oh, this is so good to talk about this stuff. We’ve talked about God’s promised presence. Enjoy it. God’s experienced presence. Pursue it.
David Zimmer: Expect it.
Bob Kauflin: Expect it. Pursue it. God’s unveiled presence. Anticipate it. So that’s the third way we want to think about God’s presence. No experience on earth will rival what we will experience in the ages to come. Nothing. Nothing. That’s why Peter encourages us in 1 Peter 1:13, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. I don’t want to set my hope fully on what’s going to happen next Sunday. I want to be expectant. But I don’t want to set my hope fully on that.
David Zimmer: Yeah, good.
Bob Kauflin: Or a conference. I can be thankful. We can be thankful for experiences of God’s presence here without making them the goal, the foundation of my relationship with him. That’s what’s so unhelpful when we so emphasize God’s presence, God’s presence, God’s presence. We’re just not going to experience it here to the degree that we will experience it there. And it’s in the Holy Spirit’s hands how much we experience it. We can be assured of it. We know that God is present with us. And we can experience it at various times and in different ways. And maybe as we grow as Christians, we’ll experience it more. But nothing compares to what it will be like when we see him face to face and we see him as he really is and we become like him. And we will experience that joy inexpressible and full of glory that Peter talks about in a way like we never have. That’s our hope. And no leader should ever communicate to people, no ministry leader, no pastor, no worship leader should ever communicate to people in some sense that the presence of God is going to happen when we sing like it’s never happened before. That’s just what we want to do. We want to just be in the presence of God. People talk about a lot of that. I hear people say that often. We just be in the presence of God. You’re always in the presence of God.
Bob Kauflin: Do you realize that? Do you recognize that? And then do you appreciate that at these different times that God has promised to be with us in a unique way? And then that there are also times when we will experience his presence and we should ask him for that to show us his presence, to reveal his presence to us in all the many ways that he does that. And then do we realize that one day there will be no hindrance? You know, the veil has been lifted in terms of our being able to see Christ in the word. But one day, I don’t know how to express it. One day in glorified bodies, we will be in the presence of the Lord. We will be with him forever. Psalm 16 talks about how there are eternal pleasures at God’s right hand. And in Christ, we are seated at God’s right hand. In Christ? Yes, Jesus is… Someone corrected me once on a YouTube comment. Yeah, yes, Jesus is at God’s right hand. It is. It is. But guess who’s in Jesus? We are.
David Zimmer: Amazing.
Bob Kauflin: It’s unbelievable. So I don’t know, you have any more thoughts? Just keep on talking about this.
David Zimmer: We’ll probably keep talking when the cameras are off. But Bob, just thank you for your thoughtfulness. And I’m just so thankful for… Yeah, what Sovereign Grace Music is also attempting to do, just to give people songs to sing that help them see Christ, and that our Sunday gatherings are not ordinary. They’re extraordinary when we gather to be with God’s people because He is with us.
Bob Kauflin: Amen.
David Zimmer: And we are in Him.
Bob Kauflin: Incredible.
David Zimmer: So thank you for thinking through this and thank you for joining us. If you haven’t heard the first podcast of this two-part series, we encourage you to do that, but thank you for listening.
Bob Kauflin: Amen.
