Encountering God

Encountering God is not merely a practice of waiting for a "sense" of His presence, but it includes recognizing that God reached toward you through His Son, Who in turn reached toward you on the cross and by filling you with the Holy Spirit, Who in turn reached toward you by convicting you of sin, providing comfort, and illuminating the truth.  Encountering God starts with the decision to reach back through a lifestyle of worship and praise manifested in, at times, exuberant corporate worship gatherings.

Encountering God is a pursuit of what has been provided.  We know that physical healing has been provided through the strips that Jesus suffered during the passion week.  We know that our Father is sovereign over all authority and power.  We know that as He created all things material, and He sustains their continued existence.  We can trust that we, His children and witnesses, can expect the necessary provision for what we are called to do.  We know that He put His Spirit in us, who are created both with natural bodies and inner spirits, and placed us in the world as His witnesses.  So, we can expect the "normal" will be defined by the intersection of the "spiritual rhelm" and the "material rhelm".  We can expect that God will be present and "inturupt" the natural order that He created as He sees fit.  And we pursue this understanding by an effort, by the power of His Spirit, to allign with the truth of His provision.  It is true that we cannot expect something if we do not know that it is ours.  So, first in knowing what can be expected through provision we can then allign our understanding with the truth, and then experience the reality.    

Encountering God is an expectation.  We expect that God will be present, because He said He would be.  We expect to see His "evidence" in the lives of those around us.  And we can expect the manifestation of His prsence, because He is already in the midst of everything.  This is so because all things exist within Him, as in Him we live, move, and have our being. (Acts 17:28; Rom. 11:36; Col. 1:17)  

What else does "encountering God" mean?