Desiring God's Presence

Often times, we as the people of God experience a lack of God's presence.  While this might be due to our own sin, in other instances the absence of God occurs in the life of a believer who is walking faithfully with the Lord.  When that happens to us, what are we to do?

In Psalm 42.1-5, the writer of the Psalm expresses a yearning desire to be near to God.  Humans experience thirst, yet the Psalmist chooses to use the image of a deer.  In Hebrew, the yearning is one of movement.  The deer is not merely standing still, but he is turning his head and moving to where the water can be found.

The Psalm when read in its full historical context does not point to some inward spiritual conflict, but to the writer's actual problem of getting to the temple.  He wants to go to the temple to experience God's presence where he has known it before.

When we loose sight of God, we should not simply sit and focus on ourselves.

As Christians the Holy Spirit IS with us.  God's presence is always with us in a way more real than the author of this Psalm could imagine.  But simply attempting to revive the Spirit within us can lead to manipulate our own emotions or feelings.  Pretty soon, we equate knowing God's presence with a feeling or emotion.  And this leads to an unhealthy measure of God's presence in our lives.

Rather, when we do not feel God we should get up and go to where we have experienced God before.  We should visit places where we know God has been active in a movement among his people.  Once we arrive, I believe that we will realize that our experience of God's absence has been an experience of his presence.  Our missing Him has led us to Him once again.  And we will know even more surely that though our emotions fail, His love has never failed.