Have you enjoyed God today?

One of our greatest privileges is to encounter the God of the Universe and enjoy His presence. What’s more, we can come boldly into His presence because His throne is called grace.

When you boil it all down – creation, the garden, sin, the generations that have lived and died, the kingdoms that have come and gone, and God’s interaction with them all – He desires one thing: relationship with you and me. He wants to be enjoyed…and he enjoys us, and being with us.

Whenever I don’t understand something that happens in the world, I like to go back to the garden of Eden to understand God’s true intent for mankind. There he created a perfect environment complete with all the food you could eat, perfect companionship, and no worry. But the icing on the cake, and maybe the cake itself, was the fact that God came into the garden in the cool of the day to engage with Adam and Eve. In fact, we see the same theme repeated in Leviticus 26:12 where God tells his people that he will “walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people” (see also Deuteronomy 23:14). And then, He actually becomes a man and walks for 33 years among us, as one of us.

But wait, there’s more! As Jesus’ time on earth is winding down He says that it’s to our benefit that He goes away because He’s going to send the Holy Spirit, who will “guide you into all truth“. And every day since Pentecost, God the Holy Spirit has been available to us to guide us. Not in some things, but in all things. That requires the regular, all-day engagement of God with man.

True…there may be things that stand in the way of your enjoyment of God. But that’s not His fault. He has made a Way. And its within our power to remove anything that hinders that enjoyment so we can walk in that Way.

I want to encourage us all to do just that – remove anything that stands in our way of enjoying God…and then engage Him while it is still called today. Today is all we are guaranteed, after all.

“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” (Hebrews 3:12-15, NIV)