Experiencing God's Glory Amidst Life's Chaos

The Bible tells us that the glory of God fills the entire earth. And I don’t know how many times I’ve read that in the Scripture, but every time I read about the glory of God filling the earth I scratch my head a little bit. When I look outside, I don’t see a whole lot of the glory of God. [00:00:06]

I’m talking about those special moments – those weighty moments – when you feel the almost palpable sense of the presence of God so overwhelming, so overbearing that you can’t ignore it and you become intensely aware of His glory. And of course one of the most intense moments like that that I have ever had was when I became a Christian. [00:01:15]

I had gone to bed for the evening but I could not get to sleep and I tossed and I turned and my mind wouldn’t shut down and finally I had this overwhelming sense that I had to get up out of bed and get out of that dormitory. And I looked at the clock and it was 10 minutes to 12. Ten minutes before midnight. [00:02:28]

I walked into the narthex of this . . . of this chapel and when the door closed you could just hear it clang against the wall and the floor was stone. And I walked then into the sanctuary. Now I was in that chapel every day. We would have chapel – required chapel – every morning. [00:04:43]

And I got on my face, literally, in front of the communion table, and was overwhelmed by the presence of God. And my experience that night was not the same as my experience of my conversion to Christ but what happened to me that night that I will never get over was that I had this overwhelming experience of the presence of God the Father. [00:05:29]

Augustine said the only description that Scripture gives as to the how of creation is that it speaks about the power of God’s word. In the beginning when the worth . . . when the world was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, the Scriptures say, that what changed all of that was a command from the mouth of God where God said, “Let there be . . . “ and instantly there was. [00:08:21]

The power that is unleashed when God speaks brings things out of nothing and life out of death. And I said, “That’s . . . that’s the character of God the Father.” Now that wasn’t the first time I had . . . had thought about that because the previous year at the time of my conversion – which I said happened in that same school and in that same room that I had moved out of that night – that when I became a Christian I was so turned upside down that I read the Bible through in two weeks. [00:10:00]

I can remember in that first two weeks of my Christian experience walking up and down the halls of the dormitory at three o’clock in the morning pacing like a caged lion because of what I had been reading in the Old Testament. Because even though I grew up in the United States of America and had frequented churches for social reasons and all the rest, I had never heard of this God that I was reading about in the Old Testament. [00:11:07]

Jesus makes reference to it in the New Testament when Nathaniel meets Jesus for the first time and Jesus sees Nathaniel coming and he looks at him and He says, “Behold an Israelite in whom there is no deceit, no guile.” Nathaniel said “Wait a minute. How do you know anything about me? I’ve never met you before.” [00:16:59]

Jesus says to Nathaniel . . . He’s saying, “Hey, Nathaniel! You read that story in the Old Testament about Jacob where Jacob had this ladder that bridged the gap between heaven and earth, between the transcendent realm – the holy place of God – and this place here of dirt and of dust. That we don’t seem to be able to make a connection between heaven and earth?” He said, “I am that ladder. I am the bridge between heaven and earth.” [00:17:44]

I cannot remember a single time in my whole life where I was more acutely aware of the absence of God than that. I no more felt like preaching than flying. And everything was flat to me. It just wasn’t cutting it. In fact, when I was finished I wanted to find a hole in the ground where I could jump in it and pull it in after me, and the last thing I wanted to do at the end of the service was go to the back of the church and shake these people’s hands because I had this overwhelming sense that I had completely let them down. [00:20:47]

Two things: From that day forward I said, “I’m never in the rest of my life going to depend and rely upon my feelings to determine whether God was present. Rather, I’m going to trust that God says He will be with us, He says He will be with me, He promises He won’t leave me, He promises He’ll be there when I need Him, even if it’s in the valley of the shadow of death. And it doesn’t matter if I feel Him.” [00:22:01]