Encountering God

There is no substitute for encounter.

Encounter is the essence of faith for it is where faith leads us and from whence it comes.

Encounter is meeting God and meeting God is what the fear and reverence of God are about - melting in the presence of God, unveiled face, beholding glory, being reshaped and refashioned.

Encounter is where the senseless make a different kind of sense.

Encounter is where the lights come on.

Encounter is that place of fear that extinguishes fear and makes us fearless, dis-empowering all thoughts that dis-empower us.

Encounter is where we see God with wide-eyed spiritual awakening.

Encounter is where we come to peace with questions and doubts and with the frailty of our own capacity to figure it all out.

Encounter is the place of awe where we, according to the next verse, "despise" ourselves and "repent in dust and ashes.

And .. in that despite, come to see ourselves as beloved, not because of anything within ourselves that we have manufactured and not because of any self-righteousness we possess, but just because we are!

It is a repentance, a turning, and transformation.

It is the grand crescendo of the life of Job from which a new movement of life begins.

"And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning."

Encounter!

May we encounter Him today!

 

 

 

 

Prequel:

 Job 42:3New International Version (NIV)

You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
    Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me to know.

When we are done arguing. When all that can be argued has been argued and every case for every conclusion has been made. When we have spoken all that is on our hearts until we have emptied ourselves and then ... when God has spoken out of the whirlwind, we come to the place where Job was.

"I had not idea what I was talking about."

It is a good place to be.