Experiencing God

John 14:23-29

The cover story of the April 15 edition of Time magazine was entitled “The Latino Reformation: Inside the New Hispanic Churches transforming religion in America.” It explored the change in Hispanic religion from predominantly Roman Catholic to Protestant, and particularly to evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. It said that the desire to experience God personally is one of the driving forces behind this transformation. Experience – personal experience of God - is the focus of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. I think that this is true of all forms of Christianity. I think everyone wants to experience God. I think it is the same drive that is behind the “spiritual but not religious” movement of the last decade, and the increase in the so-called “nones” (spelled NONES), those who in surveys do not identify themselves with any particular religion, but would nevertheless consider themselves spiritually inclined. I think it was the force behind the New Age movement of the 1980’s and 90’s and its successor, the Pop Spirituality of today. People want to experience God. That is what religion and spirituality is all about. That is what set me on the spiritual path back in the 1960’s and 70’s and what led me ultimately to Christ. I think it is still what pulls people to investigate spiritual matters.

Most people do not rules or rituals, dogma and ecclesiastical structure for their own sake, but only insofar as they can help bring them into an experience of God. This is what is important to me. There are two things that are most important to me in religion. One is community – being part of a caring community of faith. The other is communing with God. I am not saying other aspects of religion aren’t important – doctrine is important and ethics is important - but these are the two most important aspects. Today I am going to talk about communing with God – experiencing God – using this passage in John’s gospel as the framework for my remarks. There are three aspects of experiencing God mentioned in this text.

I. The first is experiencing the Love of God. Jesus starts off our passage in verses 23-24 saying, “Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me.” This tells us that we experience the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Without the story of Jesus, the love of God is just a fuzzy feeling. Feelings come and go. That is why marriages fail so often. People mistake the feelings they have for one another as love. So when the feelings change, they think that the marriage is over. The Love of God is not a feeling – neither our feelings for God nor God’s feelings for us. Love can be expressed in feelings, but it is not based in feelings. Love is based in the nature of God. And the nature of God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. This is why the gospel story of Jesus is so important. Christianity is not primarily a philosophy or a worldview or an ecclesiastical structure. Christianity is the story of God expressing his love for us in history in the person of Jesus Christ. John, the apostle of love, wrote: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  Love is God sending his Son. Love is incarnated in action. God’s love was enfleshed in Jesus Christ, and especially in Jesus laying down his life for us. You can say you love someone all you want, and it may or may not be true. But when you lay down your life for someone, that is when love is revealed as genuine.

Our love for God, if it is real, must be more than feelings for God. That is why warm fuzzy feelings for the Creator when walking in the woods are not enough. It is nice and it is real, but it is not love. That is why Jesus says in our passage, ““If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words….” God’s love is manifested in action towards us, and our love for God is manifested in action toward God and his Son – in keeping Christ’s word. In other words we will follow Christ. We will obey him, walk as he walked and do as he did and do what he taught. That is love. Anything less is just feelings and words.

I am talking about commitment here. Once again the analogy of marriage is helpful. So is the analogy of a parent and child. That is why we have the whole concept of God as Father and Son. That is why we have the idea of us as children of God. Parental love is more than feeling. Love of a child for parent is more than feeling. It is a deep commitment. A parent would be willing to lay down his or her life for a child. When a child experiences that type of genuine sacrificial love, then the response is one of loving gratitude. This is love. This is why God is more than a philosophical idea or a theological principle. That is why we say God is Person, because we experience God personally as personal love. And we respond in personal commitment and personal service to a personal Savior.

II. The second aspect of experiencing God is experiencing the Presence of God. We don’t just have a story to tell about a God who sent his Son 2000 years ago to a distant land. We have a living experience of God now. We call this the Holy Spirit. Jesus says in our passage in verses 25-26, “These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” Jesus, the Son of God, God incarnate, walked the earth for thirty years. Then he died, and he rose again and appeared to his disciples as the Risen One over a period of 40 days. Then he ascended to heaven. That is the story. This coming Thursday is Ascension Day on the Christian calendar, when Christians celebrate the day that Jesus made the transition from the physical to the spiritual state of being. The Book of Acts says that after another ten days God sent the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God with us and in us today.

When we experience God, we experience God in the Spirit. We talk about experiencing God in Jesus and experiencing God as our Heavenly Father. And this is true. But we experience God as Christ and Father through the Spirit. Jesus says in our passage, “We will come to him and make Our home with him.” That means that God as Trinity makes his home in us. We have God dwelling in us in the Holy Spirit. To experience the Holy Spirit is a powerful experience of the presence of God.

Christian theologians talk about God as omnipresent. That means that God is present everywhere. There is no place and no time when God is not. That means that God is here now. Do you sense that God is here now? Are you experiencing that? If you aren’t, let me help you experience God right now. I don’t want this to be a sermon about experiencing God; I want to make this a practical exercise in experiencing God. If God is omnipresent, then that means that God is present here now. If you are not experiencing God here now, then that means you are paying attention to others things instead of God. So what we are going to try to do now is set aside those other things just for a moment. If we put those other things aside, then the presence of God will hopefully come to the forefront for our awareness. Just pause for a moment.

First, let’s deal with all the inner noise that fills our heads all the time and masks the presence of God. Ignore your chattering mind for a moment – that endless fountain of thoughts that won’t shut up. I have a four year old grandson who won’t shut up. He talks continually. I love him very much, but his incessant chatter drives me nuts – just like my mind. I can’t stop my grandson or my mind from chattering away. I have tried it; it doesn’t work. What works is to ignore it. Don’t try to stop your mind from thinking; just don’t pay attention to it. Decide to pay attention to God for a moment instead. Also ignore your feelings for a moment. Along with our thoughts come constant feelings about the thoughts. Thoughts prompt emotional reactions. They take us mentally into all kinds of places that aren’t necessarily good places to go emotionally. Don’t suppress the emotions or fight them, just ignore them for a little while. The same with your body’s sensations. Just ignore your body’s aches and pains, hot or cold, or any other bodily sensation for a moment. If you can do this just for a moment, and be aware of that which is deeper than mind, emotions and body, what you become conscious of is the subtle realm of Spirit. What you experience in the Spirit is God. Just try it now for a few seconds ….. What we sense intuitively as always present with us everywhere we are is God. Try this throughout the day. Lean back and rest your soul in that Quiet Spacious Omnipresence. That is the Holy Spirit. The spiritual life is the daily experience of the Holy Spirit - living in the Spirit and walking in the Spirit – dwelling in that awareness of the presence of God, doing things based on what the Spirit says and how the Spirit leads.

In our passage Jesus says two other things about the Holy Spirit. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit, the Helper. This word is elsewhere translated as Advocate and Comforter or Counselor. We have divine help in the Person of the Holy Spirit whenever we need it. If God is truly omnipresent as we say he is, that means that we are never without God. We are never alone. We are never helpless. We always have the most powerful spiritual help available 24/7. All we have to do is step back and let God come to the forefront and guide us. Let the mind of Christ come to the forefront; the apostle Paul says we have the mind of Christ. Avail yourself of Christ’s mind. Let God take over the driver’s seat.

A little pamphlet by Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ, entitled the Four Spiritual Laws was popular years ago. Perhaps it still is. It was simplistic, but insightful. It had a series of little diagrams that showed Self (represented as a capital S) sitting on the throne of our lives. Consequently everything else in our lives was in disarray. Christ (represented by a Cross) is pictured on the outside of our lives. The Christian life is described in this pamphlet as deciding to dethroning the Self and allowing Christ to take his rightful place on the throne. We get out of the driver’s seat and let God take over. There was a film back in 1945 entitled God Is My Co-Pilot, based on the autobiography of fighter pilot Col. Robert Lee Scott Jr, who fought in the Pacific during World War II. The title of the book became a popular bumper sticker. But I like the newer bumper sticker that reads, “If God is your co-pilot, you are in the wrong seat.” God should be the pilot, and us the copilot.  We experience God as Lord of our lives when we put our Self in the backseat and let God – as Christ or the Holy Spirit – come to the front. When our self is in control, we tend to make a mess of things in life. But when God is running our lives, things naturally fall into place. He is our Helper. When we finally admit we need help, the Holy Spirit will take over.

In our passage Jesus also describes the Holy Spirit as teacher. “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” In the religious life people look for spiritual teachers or leaders. They look to gurus or popes or saints or famous pastors of big churches or the latest writer of a spiritual bestseller to teach them and guide them. We don’t need that. We have the Holy Spirit, the greatest Teacher in the Universe as close to us as possible all the time. Jesus said “But you, do not be called ‘Rabbi’; for One is your Teacher, the Christ,  and you are all brethren. Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. And do not be called teachers; for One is your Teacher, the Christ.” We have the Teacher, the Holy Spirit in us, who will teach us all things. “He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” He will teach us what the historical Jesus taught his disciples, because this is the Spirit of Jesus. He will not contradict the teachings of the historical Jesus, but confirm them. He will enlighten the scriptures for us as we read them. The Holy Spirit works in our human spirits through the spiritual faculties of intuition and conscience to guide us into all truth.

III. The third aspect of experiencing God mentioned in our passage is experiencing the peace of Christ. Verse 27 “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” We can experience the peace of God that surpasses human understanding. Whenever the risen Christ appeared to his disciple the first word he spoke was “Peace.” The apostle Paul wrote: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” The peace of God is our birthright as children of God.

A lot of people are troubled and worried and anxious about many things. Their minds are constantly torturing them with all kinds of troublesome thoughts about what has happened in the past – constantly replaying those mental videos – and then worrying about the future – playing all types of scenarios about what terrible things might happen. Their emotions take them on emotional roller-coaster rides every day. That is not necessary. You do not have to be slaves to your emotions, thoughts, or body. In Christ and in the Holy Spirit is perfect peace. It is not our peace that is earned by anything we do. It is the peace of Christ that is given: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you;” It is not a worldly peace, that is a temporary cessation of hostilities. Jesus say, “not as the world gives do I give to you.” The peace of God is entirely different. It is not dependent upon what happens in our lives. It is present within and underneath whatever happens. Just like God is always present, so is the peace of God always present in us and with us. It is just a matter of being present with it, and in it. Letting that peace be our present experience instead of all the fears and troubles that fill our hearts and souls. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

We can experience God. In fact it is the most natural thing in the world to experience God. We were created to experience God – to have fellowship with God. That is what God desires more than anything. God sent his Son so that we might experience God. We experience God through Jesus Christ – through the way opened up to us through him. In Christ we experience the sacrificial love of God and return that love in gratitude for what he does for us. We experience God as Holy Spirit – God present in us and everywhere present around us. And we can experience the peace of God that surpasses human understanding. I invite you to experience God.