The Presence of God In People Essay

Years later in this process of growth, I was blessed with a summer internship at a larger congregation in Dallas, Texas. Although I grew from my relationships and from the mentorship I received, I also observed that the bulk of the ministry meetings focused on changing and adapting our church’s corporate worship to be more and more “seeker sensitive.” The thought was that corporate worship was something malleable that could be altered into something more like the culture of the surrounding neighborhood, so people would want to come. “After all,” so the thinking went, “scripture provided only a rough guideline as to what the church is to do when coming together and there is little-to-no reason to keep intact what past generations did or passed down.” In essence, we sought to form our corporate worship for the purpose of evangelism. I believed that the important thing to focus on is love of God, love of neighbor, and piety. Something in the line of reasoning that insisted on changing the community worship ritual to reflect the world didn’t feel right to me, yet I could not articulate what it was. Several months later I visited an Eastern Orthodox Church as part of a course on Christian spiritual development and after a didactic

Practicing the presence is ‘to develop a continual openness and awareness of Christ’s presence living in oneself’. It involves turning your mind to a Christward direction, constantly being thankful and doing everything for God. This reflective essay will cover numerous aspects of the spiritual discipline of practicing the presence, including my original understanding, a significant Christian historical figure, and denomination comparison. Furthermore, different personal experiences of practising the presence, specifically individual, group and corporate, as well as a reflection on my original ideas and closing with ways to encourage practising the presence in ones daily Christian walk.

1. Examine the strengths and weaknesses of the argument for the existence of God based on religious experience. (18) 2. ‘The argument merely indicates the probability of God and this is of little value to a religious believer.’ Discuss. (12)

in this world, and they are effects derived from a cause. The effects in turn

“Worship is the believer’s response of all that they are - mind, emotions, will, body - to what God is and says and does.” Warren Wiersbe

Mark R. McMinn’s (2011) Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling establish a way to bring Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality to Christian Counselors. He introduces a replica of how to integrate the three disciplines in the counseling office. The purpose of the book is to instruct counselors how to integrate categories of Psychology, Theology and Spirituality into Christian Counseling. McMinn (2011) contends that many challenges both professional and personal face Christian Counselors on the frontier of intradisciplinary integration. (Intradisciplinary integration is the new emerging frontier for Christian Counselors).

In this text, Hungry for Worship, authors Frank Page and L. Gray write about the hunger for worshipping God that all leaders should possess. In chapter 1, both authors begin the text with the concept of how the body has fallen in love with the method of worship and not the actual act of being in the Presence of God. They

The relationship that God has in our life as a saved Christian is authority. God has authority over our life because he is sovereign and all-mighty. In Romans 12:1-2 we are told that we need to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God. That is also a form of worship, because God sent his son to die for out sins we need to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God. It can be easy as a college student to focus more on school then God. So while at college I should use my time as worship. The Bible says we are created as a holy temple, so while at college everything I do should be devoted to God. I often do things and think how can this be used to glorify God? I am studying right now to be a teacher and through these studies one day

We think the only time or place to minister is in a typical church atmosphere . Look at Paul, No, padded pews, no, carpeted isles, No, stained glass windows, not even a

moment of encountering a Macro-God. Many churches have diminished God by their traditions and by an abbreviated theology. As Christians realize the grand scope of God’s initiative in pouring out grace to nonbelievers, they become excited about God including them in his plan. Grace is active, enabling them to witness. Worship, it’s all about God.

a) Christians believe many different things about God’s nature; due to the huge spectrum of Christians that there are. However, as a general rule they perceive God as being one of the following four things:

If our vertical relationship is not maintained and kept healthy then it only points to one major problem and that is we are out of fellowship with God. Jesus knew that people could see the difference whether people were sincere or not. That’s why he stressed the importance of a right relationship with God so that when we do good works or witness people will know we are sincere. Wheeler and Whaley write; “Our daily actions toward all people, believers and non-believer should reflect a commitment to life style worship evangelism.” The size of our churches and budgets due not matter in winning souls for Christ. We must understand that if people know that we love God and love them we then can have a great opportunity to share the gospel. The authors write; “worship and witness are best demonstrated in how we react to, reach out to, treat, manage, talk with and pray for people.”

Verse 4 “who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God.”

Through out history, as man progressed from a primitive animal to a "human being" capable of thought and reason, mankind has had to throw questions about the meaning of our own existence to ourselves. Out of those trail of thoughts appeared religion, art, and philosophy, the fundamental process of questioning about existence. Who we are, how we came to be, where we are going, what the most ideal state is....... All these questions had to be asked and if not given a definite answer, then at least given some idea as to how to begin to search for, as humans probed deeper and deeper into the riddle that we were all born into.

The existence of God has been questioned since the beginning of time. Religions thrived on answering the unanswerable questions of the universe and people were able to find solace in the answers. As science has expanded and been able to answer these questions with natural, as opposed to supernatural answers, many people stopped looking to God and religion for the causes of things and started looking towards science. God was dead, according to many scientists and people of all professions. Many philosophers, however, have different conclusions.