The Manifest Presence of God

God is always there with you. No matter the problem you are facing whether in your marriage, job, career or life, He is always behind you making good plans for you. He is not being recognized because He doesn’t come the way we expect Him to come. one thing we should know is that our ways are not His ways. He has His own way of doing things so just trust and believe in Him.

I wanna submit to you that Jesus is there in this difficult moment in your marriage, in this trying moment in your finances, in this struggle, on your job, in this uh difficulty in this relationship, you’re rubbing corners with your boss or your spouse or this struggle you’re having on your university campus or in your high school campus this hard time that you were having He is there.
He just may have come in the package you don’t prefer.
And that oftentimes the fingerprints of God are not recognized, not because he’s not there.
It is just because the expectation we have set up about what he looks like and how he will speak and how He will move the prayer request, the solution that He will bring doesn’t align with the prayer requests that we have prayed.
We have boxed God into the way we want him to answer instead of believing that his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts as high as the heavens are above the earth.
That’s how high His thoughts are above our own.
And so we box God in when we say Lord answer my request in this particular way.
Do you know that you limit not God but you, I limit our experience of God when we say Lord answer my request.
Exactly this way I have learned to pray here, Lord is my request.
You said that I can make it known. Here’s how I would like to see you move in my circumstance.
Thank you Lord, that I can come boldly and make my request known. So I’ve made my request.
But at the end of that prayer, I’ve learned to pray, Lord, do it or do something better because do you know there are categories of options that our brain doesn’t even know, are available and accessible to us.
And if we limit God to what we can think and what we see as the way we have not even considered the categories of opportunity that this divine holy Almighty being has accessible to Him, y’all.
He’s not just thinking about you.
He’s thinking about your Children and your grandchildren and your great grandchildren and those that are to come and how his kingdom purposes are gonna be outworked in this generation.
And so on this occasion, the Messiah shows up and nobody recognizes him except somebody say, except except a guy named Simeon.
He had been told and promised just like we have that we he would see the manifest presence of God.
He’d been told it. He’d been promised just like we’ve been promised because of our relationship with God through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit in dwelling us that we will see the fingerprints of God working in our lives.
This is called the manifest presence of God. It is unique to omnipresence.
Omnipresence means that God is everywhere all at the same time.
I’m so grateful for God’s omnipresence because God’s omnipresence means that when I fly back to Dallas, where I live, when my new friends that I just met from Uganda, fly back to where they live.
Um That when you all fly back to where ever it is, you’ve come from whether all over different areas of California or afar.
It means that no matter where we go, he is as much with me as He is with you because He is omnipresent.
But if you’re anything like me, you’re grateful for his omni presence.
But you want more than that, you want the manifested presence of God.
I’m talking about where you can look back over your circumstances and realize that his fingerprints were all throughout that thing.
I’m talking about where you can see footprints in the sand as you actually recognize that God was walking beside you the whole way.
I’m talking about what other people call coincidence encounters.
You see the sovereign hand of God that was aligning your footsteps and setting you in the right place at the exact right time, the manifest presence of God.
I wanted to know what made Simian’s eyes open to recognize what nobody else in this scenario, did I figured whatever opened up his eyes might open up our eyes as well.
Are you ready? Three things that I wanna point out to you.
It says in verse 26 about Simeon, it says that it had been actually verse 25. I wanna start there.
There was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simian. He was righteous, devout looking for the consolation of Israel.
We could spend a whole lot of time in those three.
But here’s where I want to hear the Holy Spirit was upon him, the Holy Spirit was upon him.
It says that he came into the temple.
Verse 27 in the spirit, verse 26 says, it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.
Look at the presence of the Holy Spirit permeating this text.
Look at how the author has over and over and over again, highlighted the work of the Holy Spirit in opening up Simeon’s eyes to be able to recognize the manifested presence of God before him in the person of Jesus Christ Luke.
Here he is just in the second chapter of this book and by the way, just in these first two chapters, he has already alluded to the spirit 10 times.
The work of God’s spirit is so powerful and so needful to a fruitful experience in the life of the, of the believer that even before the book of Acts, even before Pentecost, even before the spirit has come.
Luke points out the movement of the spirit here in the life of Simian.
This shows you how important the spirit’s work is how critical it is to making sure that your spiritual senses, your spiritual radar is heightened so that you can detect the presence of God.
The Holy Spirit was upon him. Now, I want you to see the work of God’s spirit.
This is just the first uh characteristic of Simian.
But I wanna just, just take some time for just a few moments on it.
The work of God’s spirit is so important. We, it deserves a little bit of our attention. Here.
There are three ways that the Holy Spirit is described as relating to Simian in these few verses.
Just, just a few ways that the Holy Spirit relates to Simian in these few verses.
The first thing it says is that the Holy Spirit was upon Him.
Now, listen, I want you to know that if you have placed faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit lives on the inside of you.
Ephesians chapter one says that the moment you believe you received the Holy Spirit, you were sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise.
I want you to know that at the moment you became a believer in Jesus Christ, you receive the most incredible gift you will ever receive this side of eternity.
And that is the very presence of God living on the inside of you the Holy Spirit is not a ghost or a wind or a fire or a dove.
He is often symbol by those things but don’t minimize him. That ain’t who he is.
The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity.
Not third because he is least in value just third because he’s the last to be revealed to us in the pages of scripture.
But all of the power, all of the glory, all of the authority, all of the grandeur of God, the father is in the person of the Holy Spirit, which means if you’re a believer in the Holy Spirit lives in you, that means all of the grandeur and all of the greatness, all of the authority of God himself now lives on the inside of you.
So if you are a believer, you have the Holy Spirit, you are not waiting on more of the Holy Spirit, all of the Holy Spirit, you ever gonna get, you got the moment you got saved.
Now you do need to be filled by God’s spirit so that his influence in your life grows and grows so that you operate under the gifting of the spirit so that you can live according to the fruit of the spirit, that means living beyond your natural capacity.
It means when your patience runs out, you can still have more patience with that person.
It means when gentleness has long since left the building, you still find you got a little gentleness for that person.
When self discipline, I mean, you just don’t know, have no more self discipline in that area.
We need the fruit of God’s spirit.
So we need to be filled by the spirit as we yield the human obedience, we are filled, which means he influences us more.
Our mind is renewed and transformed. We are sanctified into the image of Christ Jesus.
So the Holy Spirit is in you.
But send me in his relationship with the spirit is not described in that way.
It doesn’t say that the spirit was in him.
It says that the Holy Spirit was on Him, which means there is a difference between the spirit being in you and the spirit resting on you.
Listen to me the gift of God’s spirit in you.
Oh This brings tears to my eyes, the gift of God’s spirit in you.
He will never leave you nor forsake you.
There is nothing you can do to work yourself out of a relationship with the Holy Spirit. OK?
But Him being on you, you gotta live a life.
I wanna live a life that is a magnet for the presence of God to rest on me.
We can sit in this conference and until we’re blue in the face and applaud the truths of God and say amen to the truth of God.
But if we leave this room and live in a way that is out of alignment with the truth of God, we will not have the spirit resting on if you want the mark of God’s presence on you.
I’m talking about where other people can see you operating in your gift moving about in the assignments that you have been given where they can just see there’s a unique favor on your life toward that particular task for that particular endeavor, where you are marked by something that gives you favor, that gives you His grace for a particular area of your life, then you must live.
I must choose to live in a way that honors God so that God’s presence can rest upon us because He will not force himself on you.
He offers you this resting of his presence and his grace upon your life.
If you will choose to live in a way that does not uh disturb his presence, that does not keep him from being able to be near you because you have chosen here.
It is to be holy.