January 31, 2021

Recapture the Presence

Speaker:
In Church, Faith, God
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Recapture the Presence

 

Recapture the Presence (Exodus 33 and 1 Kings 8)

  • Today as we begin to talk about recapturing biblical church, I want to talk about the Presence of God
    • The real sustained presence of God.
    • The people of God entertaining the presence of God verses the church entertaining the people.
  • Exodus 33:11-18

Verse 16 Moses understood how important it was to have the Presence of God be their identity.

  • Moses understands that the distinguishing mark must be the Presence of the Lord.
    • Not just the miracles, Because the Egyptian magicians could do “miracles,”
    • The distinguishing mark of the Church should be His Presence,
  • This verse must be the cry of this church. And for each of us individually.
  • 1 kings 8-1:11

Verse 10 This is our goal, this is what we want. This is what church is supposed to look like.

  • And now that the veil in the Temple has been torn and the HS sent, this should be even more available to us.
  • This is actually a prophetic vision of what the NT church will look like when we no longer need Priests and we have the Holy Spirit.

Let’s start be asking some why questions. First, why is this important?

  • Why is it important to have this level of God’s presence?
  • It is widely reported today that church attendance in America is in a steady decline.
    • One of the reasons given is that people have more choices today.
  • The hard facts of the matter are this, people view church as just another form of entertainment.
    • One form of entertainment is just as good as another.
  • This is because much of the church has become centered on man, programs and events, rather than on God’s presence. To recapture biblical church, we must realign church to be about His Presence.

So now let’s ask the question why did the presence come here in 1 Kings like it did?

  • I see two very important factors here as to why the Presence came.
  1. Preparation, God was responding to their preparation, praise, worship and honor.
    • A quick survey of the chapters leading up to this scene shows us.
    • Solomon did the right thing by building the Temple first before his palace
    • Look at all the preparation that goes into this scene and the scene before this passage.
  • It wasn’t Solomon’s adornment of the temple that invited God’s presence, it was the posture of his heart that led him to adorn the temple and sacrifice wildly that invited the presence.
  1. The second thing I see here that lead to this level of Presence is Thanksgiving
    1. It says they sacrificed so many sheep and cattle that they could not be counted.
      1. This was all done in Thanksgiving to God.