The Practice of the Presence of God


The king shall joy in Thy strength, O Lord. Thou has given him his heart's desire. Thou makest him glad with joy in Thy presence. Through the loving kindness of the Most High he shall not be moved.--Ps. 21: 1,2,6,7).

Strength, satisfaction, joy, stability--these resulting from the sense of God’s presence. Living habitually in the realizing sense of the Divine Presence--therein is the secret of unfailing strength, of abiding satisfaction, of perennial joy, of conditioning steadfastness.

“Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy presence from the pride of man: Thou shalt keep them from the strife of tongues” (Ps. 31: 20).

Why do we have so much “pride of man,” so much “strife of tongues”? Is it because we have lost the consciousness of God’s presence? In the presence of God the pride of man is lost in the contemplation of His glory. When “times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord,” tongues of strife become tongues of praise.

We are living in an age that magnifies the material above the spiritual. The material side of things is so near and so constant that somehow “the bloom has been rubbed off the flower of faith.” We are moving so strenuously and hurriedly in the pursuit of worldly gains and pleasures, that we have no time to think of the heavenly riches and joys; we hardly have time to become acquainted with ourselves, much less to learn the secret of communion with God.

“If I were a preacher,” writes a layman, “I should above all things preach the practice of the presence of God.” Without question, what we need above all else is “a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.”

Because we do not practice the presence of God, the light is gone; we do not see life in the light of the eternal. And the joy is gone. We have little satisfaction. We lack sureness and stability. We make ourselves miserable in “the pride of man,” in “the strife of tongues,” in the pursuit of things that can never satisfy us.

The antidote to our blindness, weakness, failure, dissatisfaction and joylessness, lies in the practice of the presence of God. We would soon have a different story to tell of our lives, if we would learn to live habitually in the realizing sense of God’s calming, sustaining, steadying, satisfying presence.