Directionally Challenged

How are you with directions?  I am not talking about instructions for making a pie or building a bird house.  I am referring to your ability to visualize spatially where things are.

Take for instance where you are sitting, lying, or standing this moment.  Are you facing north? Do you know which way to move if you were asked to walk to the nearest grocery store? Can you point toward the continent of Australia?

Allow me to ask one more question to see if you are directionally challenged.

When I mention the name of God, which direction do you think of Him being?  My guess is you are like me and the first thought was Up.  If you did then you are directionally challenged.

Tozer pointed this out to me in his book, The Pursuit of God, when he wrote this:

What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as near to God from any, place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other person is.

These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us.

“In the beginning God.” Not matter, for matter is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause. Not law, for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had to be planned, and the Planner is God. Not mind, for mind also is a created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God, the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.

Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible: he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” And he knew that God’s being and God’s seeing are the same, that the seeing Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee: how much less this house which I have builded.” Paul assured the Athenians that “God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”

I would add that Paul also wrote the following words in his letter to the Philippians, “The Lord is near!”

I was challenged by these thoughts today when I looked for the application of these words from both scripture and a wise man.  If I get my directions straight and realize that God is not Up but Here, how would that impact the way I live?

How would it impact the way you live?

Tozer wrote these words to go along with these thoughts:

Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.