| Dear Central Members & Friends
I want to start this note by thanking you for your prayers and support during our recent trip to Egypt!! Your thoughtful prayers were instrumental in the sustaining grace that God provided for us during this spiritual journey. The trip to Mount Sinai was truly a transformational moment for me; I captured a glimpse of history and the majesty of God as He gave instructions to Moses to return to Egypt and lead the children of Israel out of bondage.
God inspired me to start a new series on “Understanding the Manifest Presence of God” as a result of this trip. There is so much for us to learn about the manifest presence of God and how God wants to reveal Himself to us in such an intimate and significant way!! This will require me to spend several weeks on this study series and you don’t want to miss these transformational lessons.
We discovered from our lesson on Sunday (John 14:21) that God will manifest Himself to the sincere believer who loves Him and seeks Him. We spent time understanding the difference between God’s omnipresence and manifest presence on Sunday. As you are aware God’s omnipresence is His attribute of being everywhere at once. He is omnipresent even when we do not experience His presence; He is here even if we do not recognize Him. However, God desires to be more than omnipresent in our lives. He wants to manifest His presence and will do so if we truly enhance our relationship with Him as noted in John 14:21.
If we truly are believers, we can never lose God’s presence in reality, but we can lose the sense of His presence. There is never a time when God is not present with us, but there are times when God is not manifestly with us. Sometimes His presence is not clear or obvious to the human eye or the human spirit. That’s why we are called to “live by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). God’s omnipresence can exist without our awareness; God’s manifest presence cannot. The whole point of God’s manifest presence is that our awareness of Him is awakened!!
I pray your awareness of God is awakened during this special study series and you encounter God like you never have before. May you be richly blessed during your personal devotional time as you review and study the attached sermon slides from our Sunday service.
Grace & Shalom!!!
Pastor Perry
(07-22-18) Understanding The Manifest Presence of God
Understanding the Manifest Presence of God: Part I