Experiencing God

I think our desire for more of the voice of the Lord type guidance reflects our longing for a more experiential relationship with God. I recently thought that the essence of what I am trying to do with Leavened Lives is to have God be more real for people in their work lives. And God being real is something that is experienced. But, are we always going to want a more experiential relationship with God than we get this side of heaven?

When I look at my journaling over the years, there is a constant theme of expressing frustration with God. Why are you so subtle? Why are you not more obvious? Why are you not more real? So I took notice when Dallas Willard said this in an interview with Lucy Shaw. “This goes to a very deep issue that we really do need an answer to, or our faith will not make much sense. That is the question: ‘Why isn’t God obvious?’ We would think he could be.” That has been one of my points with hearing the voice of God. God could speak to us in an audible voice all the time and the fact that He chooses not to is significant.

But I first want to wrestle with a related question, if we are not going to have the experiential relationship with God that we desire this side of heaven, then how experiential is our relationship with Him supposed to be? What should we expect it to be like? Greg Koukl questions the validity of hearing the voice of the Lord. In Does God Whisper Part 2 he explains one of his concerns, “many Christians actually feel spiritually sub-standard and defeated because for them the heavens have been silent. This can be debilitating, and it’s profoundly unfair to them if their only shortcoming is entertaining a false expectation of what a relationship with God entails.” If I want God to be more real for people in their workplace, what are the proper expectations of what that will look like?

If people expect too much, then they will be disappointed and discouraged, feeling like God is absent or they are failing to connect with Him, when in fact He is present with them in the way that He chooses to be. But since they have the wrong expectations, they are unable to benefit from an awareness of His presence. Because they are not on the same page as God, in their minds either God is failing to be faithful or they are failing to be worthy of His faithfulness.

If people expect too little, then they settle for a relationship with God that is much less than what they could experience. This is quite a dilemma. And there is a wide variety of approaches to this in the church. Another way to characterize this is what people expect a relationship with the Holy Spirit to be like.

I became a follower of Christ with Christians for whom the Holy Spirit played more of a background role in the Christian’s life. The emphasis was on spiritual truths and godly conduct. I later encountered the Vineyard movement that focused more on the detectable ministry of the Holy Spirit. The experiential aspect of this focus was attractive to me and other conservative evangelicals. But, in the circles we were interacting with, it did feel like sometimes we were trying to experience something that was not really there, or not there as consistently as we wanted it to be. In our desire to hear from the Holy Spirit, I think we were making it up at times.

So what is a relationship with the Holy Spirit supposed to be like? How experiential should it be? Next blog I will look at answering this question from what we see in the NT about the early church.