Growing Through Encounter

In the last two posts I've outlined two things needed for a person to grow in Christlikeness. The first was education, the second was experience and the third one I want to look at now (also begins with an 'e'!) is encounter. Everyone who wants to grow in their faith needs to encounter the living lifechanging God we worship and to do that on a regular basis.

When you look through scripture and reflect on the lives of people in our Church it is clear that an encounter with God can (and should) change lives. There are those who say that we shouldn't be basing our faith on 'experiences' or events that could have an emotional content. They would say that these things can lead people astray and of course they are right. However, when encounters are balanced by education and experience then they have perhaps even more potential to encourage growth.

When I think of some of the things I have struggled with personally over the last few years I find that I have only really found some level of victory over them when I have encountered the power and the presence of God. This year, during the New Wine Leadership Conference in May, the presence of God was powerfully at work amongst everyone there. It was there in the presence of God that he changed something in my life that I had been struggling with. I hadn't asked the Father to do it, I wasn't even aware of what he did at that time but in the encounter I had with him then he did something that I couldn't have done myself.

Unfortunately, we cannot program in the time and place were we can encounter the powerful presence of God. It is something the He, in his grace, decides to do. There are two things that we can do that make it more possible to meet with God in that way. Firstly, expect that God will change you and that it is his desire and his will to change you. We need to create an ethos in which people believe that God can and will act at any moment in time. We need to teach them to understand it means to be a child of God and to live every day in His presence. There are too many people in St Andrew's who know that God can change lives but they don't trust Him to do it to them! Underneath it all, the underlying belief system at work in their hearts is that God doesn't love me enough to do anything in my life.

Secondly, we can create as many opportunities for God to act as possible. This is something we are pretty good at in St Andrew's. Every opportunity is given to receive prayer and to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit at work amongst us on a Sunday morning. Perhaps we need to do more work on this in cell groups and other meetings we have. Someone in Church once complained to me about the times we have when we invite the Holy Spirit to come. They, quite rightly, said "he is here all the time isn't he so why pray that prayer". The fact is that in asking the Holy Spirit to come in that way we are asking him to work in us in a more specific and powerful way. We are putting ourselves in a place where He has full access to our lives to mould us and change us into the likeness of Christ.

I believe that these three; education, experience and encounter, form the basis of our growth in Christ and provide the structure for discipleship to take place in the Church.