Summary:

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Remember Jesus says in Matthew 6:6 NIV

“…When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”

Jesus wants you to imagine/envision a reality that you can’t see.

So in this moment, you’re entering into a quiet time to be alone with God. Biblical prayer is NOT just asking God for things. It’s a time to be particularly aware of God’s presence and to connect with his presence through imaginative meditation. Using your biblically guided imagination to envision and feel and experience God’s presence with you and within you in a way that replaces stress and anxiety and worry and anger with the calm confidence of God’s peace and joy and love. 

Sometimes as Christians we think our faith in Christ is mostly beliefs about the future. And certainly it is that. But the faith in Christ that the Bible teaches is about a real and experienced connection with God that is always in the present moment. He’s the I AM. His name in the Hebrew Scriptures is YHWH, an ancient Hebrew word for HE IS. His very name means he is always in the present tense — always present with us. 

When Jesus came walking on the water at night to the disciples in the boat, they were afraid, and he said…

Matthew 14:27 (NIV)

“But Jesus immediately said to them: ‘Take courage! It is I (just “I am” in the original Greek). Don’t be afraid.’”

This is Jesus‘s deliberate repetition of an often repeated phrase from God in the book of Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Hebrew scriptures.

The last words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew…

Matthew 28:20

“Surely I am with you always.“

He is the I AM. His name is HE IS. Always in the present tense, fully present with us in every present moment.

It is essential to your faith that you are able to imagine/envision God 100% present with you right now in every present moment. That’s what the Bible’s teachings are all about. Yahweh/Jesus present in every present moment.

And it is a presence in our very body, because the NT teaches that in this very moment Jesus by his Holy Spirit dwells in your body as his holy temple. 

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Our audio engineer is Diego Huaman.

This podcast is a ministry of The Crossing, a church in Columbia, Missouri, a college town where the flagship campus of the University of Missouri is located.