Presencing the Person of Jesus

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Joshua 1:7–9 (NIV) “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” CONSIDER In all these readings and reflections on courage and encouragement, I hope a few things have become evident. First, we are not talking about worldly encouragement. We are talking about the courage of God. Let’s remember who is speaking these words to Joshua: “After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ aide” (Josh. 1:1). All of these words we have gathered around began here: “the LORD said to Joshua.” It is so easy to shift from the main thing to all the things. It is easy to slightly and slowly shift from “the LORD said to Joshua,” which is the main thing, to getting our focus on all the things of studying the Bible and reading, ruminating, and rememberizing and trying to pray more and then trying to be less busy and hurried, and then someone says we need to be having a Sabbath day every week, and then we get convicted about doing justice and caring for the poor and starting a discipleship band, and before you know it, we have just traded one set of habits and activities for another set of habits and activities. Then someone comes along and says we should read Brother Lawrence’s book, The Practice of the Presence of God, and it then becomes less about all those things and more about just trying to think about God in all the things you are doing all day long and how this is what “praying without ceasing” means. It sounds good, but I’m not sure this is true to Brother Larry’s work. We don’t have to throw out all the things, but we must ever and always be bringing it back to the main thing. So what is the main thing? Jesus. But it’s not Jesus as an idea or an ideal or a set of teachings or miracles or sayings or doctrine or theology or paradigm or practices or habits or disciplines or T-shirts. Just Jesus. The beautiful person of Jesus. I’m not talking about Jesus without the Father and the Spirit, but without Jesus, we have no idea of the Father or the Spirit. Yes, I'm talking about New Testament Jesus; Jesus of Nazareth—the Word from before the beginning of the Bible, who is its inspiration and author, its fire and fulfillment, and to whom every page points—the Word made flesh. Jesus, our God. Courage is not the absence of fear, discouragement, or despair. Courage is the presence of Jesus. Jesus is all the courage of God in a human person. The main thing, my friends, is the right here, right now presence of the person of Jesus. It is not so much about practicing the presence. It is about presencing the person of Jesus. The LORD said to Joshua . . . What did the Lord say? “Be strong and very courageous.” PRAY Father, thank you for sending us Jesus, without whom we would have no idea of you. And thank you for sending us the Spirit, who makes Jesus known to us and brings him closer than our breath. How thankful we are to know you. Come, Holy Spirit, and help us to lift our hearts to Jesus, to set our minds on Jesus, to fix our eyes on Jesus, to focus our gaze on Jesus. He is our courage, and to be with him is to be encouraged. Orient all the things into the thing of knowing Jesus, of presencing the person of Jesus—for our good, for others’ gain, for your glory. In Jesus’s name, amen.