Entering His Presence

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Text Transcript

Hebrews 4:16 Let us, therefore, approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we can take hold of mercy and discover favor to help us when we need it. [GBMV]

1 Thessalonians 5:16 Rejoice and continually be glad at all times.
17 Be in prayer continually without stopping.
18 Be continually grateful in all circumstances, for this is what God wants for you in Christ Jesus. [GBMV]

Luke 6:22 Blessed are you, when men will hate you, and when they will separate you [from their company], and will reproach [you], and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.
23 Rejoice and be glad continually at that time, and leap for joy: because your reward [is] great in heaven: for their fathers did the same to the prophets. [GBMV]

Psalms 100:4 Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, [and] into his courts with praise: be thankful to him, [and] bless his name. [GBMV]

As we continue in our series Practicing His Presence, we looked last time at the power of bringing the presence of the Lord into our circumstances.

Now we’re going to be looking at this subject in a lot more detail as we continue in this series. But before you can bring His presence, you first need to know how to enter His presence. And so, that’s what we’re going to cover in this lesson.

The Royal Palace

Now, I want you to consider the royal palace. The palace of a king or a queen. There’s not many of those available still these days, except in England.

And for the longest time, there was a queen, but now we have a king again. And usually, the monarch resides at the royal palace. And if you look at the palace, you’ll find that there are three main sections to a palace.

This may have changed over time, but originally, you had the outer court and the gates, which are the entrance to the palace. Then, as you come into the palace, you have the inner courts, which are several large rooms. And finally, there’s one special room, which is known as the throne room.

And that’s where the throne of the monarch is. That’s where the king sits on his throne. Now, as we look at locating the presence of the Lord, we need to think of God as being the ultimate king.

And so, I want to use the palace as a bit of an allegory to help us understand what is involved. Now, where do we find His presence? Well, we know that God is omnipresent. He’s everywhere.

So actually, you cannot escape His presence. We are in His presence automatically, but we need to have a way of locating Him personally and making contact with Him. Now, He lives inside of every believer.

You Are Like a Palace

And like the palace, we have three parts to our being. We have the body, which is the outer part, the soul that lives inside the body, and the spirit that is at the center of our being, which also is inside the body. So, we as human beings actually kind of make up a palace in ourselves.

Now, let’s look at the three sections of the palace. We have the perimeter and the gates, the inner courts, and the throne room. And if we’re going to find and make contact with the king, we’re going to have to go through all three of these sections.

Entering The Gates

The gates of the palace, they limit entry from the public. Not anybody can just walk in. You’ve got to go through the main gates to get into the building.

And so, the first step in making contact with the king is to come in the gates. And if you think of it, our body, in a sense, is like the gates. They’re the outer partwhere God lives.

The Courts

The courts of the palace, there are many large rooms in the palace, and each of these has specific functions. In fact, they often have specific staff that are involved in carrying out the functions of that courtroom. So, there are several courts in the palace.

The Throne Room

But then, finally, there is that one special room where we’re going to find the king sitting on his throne. The Bible tells us that Jesus is seated on the throne of heaven. Ephesians 1 verse 19 says, And what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places?

The Throne of Grace

Jesus is seated on the throne of heaven, and His throne is known as the throne of grace.

And we saw scripture that said we can come boldly to the throne of grace in our time of need. So, let’s see how we go about entering God’s throne room. We must begin with the gates.

Then we must go through the courts, and then we must look to find the throne room. And there’s a transition involved as we move between these.

Thanksgiving and Praise

How do we enter the gates of God’s palace? David gives us a very good example in his Psalms, and he said we must enter His gates with thanksgiving.

Once we enter the gates with thanksgiving, we move into His courts with praise. So we start with thanksgiving, and we move to praise. And then when we enter into the throne room, we enter into a deeper expression, which we call worship.

So there’s several stages we must go through before we come to that place of interacting directly with the King. Let’s start by looking at the subject of giving thanks. Our starting point should always be gratitude.

Giving Thanks For All Things

If you want to make contact with the King and enter into His presence, your starting point should be to give thanks. Give thanks for what? Scripture says in everything give thanks. In everything.

Well, you know, I can give thanks to the Lord for all the good things. Thank you, Lord, for the things I own. Thank you for my wife and my family.

Thank you for my health. Thank you that I have eyes that can see and ears that can hear. Thank you for the senses.

Thank you for the wonder of life. But what about the things that we’re not happy about? What about the things that go wrong in our lives? What about things that affect us physically and emotionally and socially, things that we’d like to just get rid of if we can? The Scripture says give thanks for all things. Okay? Now, that’s a little bit more difficult for most people.

Prison to Praise

Some years ago, a guy by the name of Merlin Carothers went through some experiences while in the military, and he got saved and eventually became a chaplain to the military,. God gave him a revelation, which he began to share with the world. And that revelation was we’ve got to learn to praise and thank God for everything in our lives, the good and the bad.

At first, a lot of people misunderstood this whole concept, but he proved in experience that when people began to thank God for the bad things, it somehow released the presence and power of God into those circumstances to bring change.

And he wrote a wonderful book which is still available today. Although Merlin has now left us and is in the presence of the Lord in heaven, his book, Prison to Praise, I think is still very much a bestseller in many places, but it’s not as well-known today as it was years back when he first published it. Well, that book was published during my early experiences in the Lord while I was learning, and it had a very profound effect on me and in my relationship with the Lord.

If you’ve never read Prison to Praise, I suggest you get your hands on a copy of it. It’s just a small little book. It tells the story of how he ended up in prison as a soldier by doing bad things, how God saved him and changed him, and how he then began to minister to the whole world this concept of praising God for everything.

It was the first in a series of books. He published a lot more books after that, Power in Praise, and some books that just gave examples of people who applied this principle and how it changed their lives. He actually shares some of these in Prison to Praise.

So if you’ve never read Prison to Praise, I’d highly recommend that you get a hold of it and have a read. You can get it on Kindle, on Amazon, so you don’t have to necessarily go and buy a physical book. Now, the key principles which Merlin brought out were some of the things we saw in the Scripture yet where it said that we should be rejoicing.

Learning To Rejoice

Rejoice and continually be glad at all times. Be continually grateful in all circumstances. Well, it’s not such an easy thing to do, is it? Because some of our circumstances, the last thing we want to do is give thanks for them.

But Merlin showed that when we do that, we acknowledge that God is in control of our lives and that he’s taking even that bad thing and using it as a tool. According to Romans 8.28, God causes all things to work together for good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Okay.

Joy is a commandment. Well, you know, joy is one of those things that are very difficult to turn on and off. And the reason is joy is often seen as an emotion.

The one thing we cannot do is turn our feelings on and off. Well, there are ways to do it, which we’ve taught, but generally I can’t, at the drop of a hat, decide to have joy. But there is a way of creating joy, and that’s to choose to be glad and to rejoice at your circumstances.

When I’ve got pain in my body, I find it very difficult to be glad or to rejoice or to smile. Normally I’m groaning and complaining. But you’ve got to make a choice.

You’ve got to make a choice to say, Lord, I thank you that even this thing is being used by you for my good and is going to lead to some wonderful blessing. Our choice to rejoice and be glad must never be based on our feelings or on our situations. We have to bring his presence into everything, and this is the first step that you must take, thanksgiving and rejoicing.

Don’t try to figure out a solution, but trust him to work it for your good. You hand the responsibility over to him. He’s got more available to him to bring changes than what puny little you has to change things in your life.

The Power of Words

And so the first tool and the main tool that we have to tap into the presence of God and to release it and to bring change to our feelings and our circumstances is the power of words. Now we know that words come from our spirit. Animals cannot speak words because they don’t have a spirit.

Only beings that have a spirit have the capability of speaking words. Now when we take those words and we add praise to the words, we add his presence to our speech. And when we do that, we bring the power of God into the situation to go out and to actually handle our circumstances.

Now we can bring his presence to others as well. All we do is speak words that contain his presence. And again, we can choose how we speak.

Paul, in writing to the Colossians, says this,

Colossians 4:6 Let your speech always be gracious, made tasty with seasoning, so that you may see clearly how you must reply to every one. [GBMV]

It means we cause God’s power to go out through our words and to touch others. Now these words flow.

Effects in the Soul

They come from your spirit. They flow through your soul. And so your soul is also affected by it.

Now lying in the soul is your mind, your emotions, and your will. So the words that you speak affect your thoughts, they affect your feelings, and they affect your choices. Now that means we’ve now got to make a choice to use those words, to enter into his presence.

Thanks For Bad Things

It starts by words of thanksgiving, thanksgiving. Well, you know, it goes against all logic and all human thinking to say, Well, this pain in my back that I’m really suffering with, I must thank God for it. No, no, God is not the source of pain.Satan is.

So why could we thank God for it? I’ll tell you why, because it takes your eyes off the problem and puts your eyes onto him, who’s the only one who can solve the problem. Sometimes we try to get into warfare and fight the enemy and make him flee, and yes, the scripture says we must resist him steadfast in the faith, and he will flee.

But sometimes when you attack the enemy, because of what you’re experiencing, the experience gets worse. The pain in your body doesn’t go away, it gets worse. Because you see, you cannot bring light into a room by taking out the darkness.

You Cannot Take Darkness Out

Man, it’s so dark in here, why don’t we just get the darkness out of here? If we could just get all the darkness out of this room, we’ll be able to see clearly. That’s impossible, because darkness means the absence of light. And the moment you bring light into the room, the darkness flees.

So if we keep trying to attack the darkness and to overcome, what is going to replace the darkness? Unless we bring light. That’s why we must turn our attention away from what Satan is doing. By all means, we must rebuke him and tell him to leave.

But that’s not enough. We must now bring the light into that darkness. And only God’s power can heal.

Only God’s power can bring financial provision. Only God’s power can solve problems in relationships. Getting rid of the person caused all the problems.

Satan Does Not Take The Problems With Him

It may cause the problems to not get any worse, but the problems are already here, how do we get rid of them? See, when Satan leaves, he’s not going to take his problems with him. He brought them to you and he dumped them on you, and now you’re stuck with them. So you tell him to get out, and he says, OK, I’m out of here.

But he left the problem behind. It’s going to take more than that to solve the problem. It’s going to take the problem solver, which is the Lord Jesus himself.

It Takes Word and Actions

So we have got to go through these three stages in order to get to that place where we are tapping into the very presence and power of God. And you cannot do this just by meditating and thinking. You’ve got to take two things which always release spiritual power, and that is words and actions.

Well, words are the most powerful, and so you must start with words. And the best words to start with is giving thanks. Try to include some joy and gladness in the process.

How do I get excited about something negative in my life? How do I get excited about evil? Well, I’m not excited about the evil. I’m excited about the fact that God is going to do something with that evil, and he’s going to turn it around. You see, the moment you add joy and gladness, you know what happens.

Your feelings begin to change. You start feeling depressed and morbid and negative. See, if your emotion is negative, then you need to give thanks until a stir begins to take place deep within you.

Now, words have this power because they affect the soul. When you build positive pictures through words, your feelings change. It’s not easy just to think positive thoughts.

Words Create Positive Pictures

If you have a pain in your body, how do you visualize the pain gone? See, if I’m visualizing pain, I’m seeing pain. How do I visualize no pain? No pain doesn’t have a picture, and that’s the problem. But if I speak words, words create an image that fills our soul and changes everything.

And as our mind gets filled with those positive words, something happens. Until then, Satan is attacking me. I feel I’m a victim.

I feel I’m being picked on. And, Lord, where are you? Lord, Lord, where are you? I pray and I cry, Lord, please. Lord, please.

Bringing His Presence

And it’s like he didn’t hear because you are taken up with the problem or with Satan who’s causing the problem that you left the Lord out of it completely. See, when you begin to move to thanksgiving and praise, you bring his presence into the problem. And now, for the first time, something can happen to solve the problem.

Releasing Spiritual Forces

Okay? When you do that, you also cause a release of spiritual forces from within your spirit. Now, in our Way of Blessings series, we teach you in detail how to tap into the forces of the spirit, which are faith, hope, and love. Now, you have in your spirit a lot more than you realize because God’s Holy Spirit’s living there.

So you have in you all the power of heaven at your disposal. And when you begin to praise and thank the Lord, you begin to reach deep down inside because those things are coming out of your spirit and you’re speaking positive words out of your spirit. What’s happening is you are actually tapping into some of those inner resources and causing them to flow out.

Releasing With Words and Actions

And so faith, hope, and love come out of your spirit, and they flow through your soul, and then they are released into the world through your body, through words or actions. Words are the most powerful. So as we speak those words out into the air, and here Satan has shot his biggest shot at you, he’s hit you, and you’re wounded, and instead of you crying out or wallowing, you begin to praise the Lord.

And I can see he gets that confused look on his face.

“You know, I hit him with one of my big babies. That should have done damage, bad damage.

And he’s got a smile on his face. He’s glad, and he’s rejoicing, and he’s praising. In fact, it’s driven him closer to God.

It’s the last thing I wanted. I’ve been trying to convince him that actually God caused this problem, and actually God doesn’t care because he didn’t do anything about the problem, so I can make him get bitter against God, and then I’ve won.”

See, praise is foreign to Satan.

Tapping Your Inner Resources

When you use it, you disable his power immediately. Not only that, but you begin to tap into the very presence of the Lord that is resident inside of you, and with him is all the power and the forces of heaven. You have the Creator living inside of you, and he’s able to create whatever you need.

When you turn your attention away from what Satan’s doing to the one who can solve all of it, you then begin to release the light to dispel the darkness. You begin to release his power to go to work on your circumstances and to change your life. Now, this can affect other people, too.

You can speak words that will also bring his presence and his power into the lives of others. In fact, when unbelievers see you rejoicing and praising God right in the middle of all hell being let loose in your life, they actually get a bit confused. They think, you know what, I would really hate a God who allowed that to happen in my life.

You say,

“No, God is not the cause of this. But I’ll tell you what, he’s going to take this attack, and he’s going to turn it around, and he’s going to turn it into something far greater in the positive than what that thing was in the negative.”

See, that’s our confidence in him, that he’s going to work it for our good.

Romans 8:28 And we know that all things are working together towards something good for those that love God, who are the called according to [his] purpose. [GBMV]

Now, the moment you do that, you begin to release his power into your life because you begin to acknowledge that he’s there. He’s right there inside you, ready and willing and waiting to bless you in abundance, to bless you far greater than what this curse is doing. It comes from the enemy.

We Try To Do It Alone

Don’t you know what we tend to do? We put God aside and we say, okay, Lord, I’ll handle this. I’ve got authority over the devil. I’m going to use my authority over Satan, and I will overcome this thing by myself.

And you know what? Yes, you do have authority in Jesus’ name, and Satan will have to flee. Like I said, he’s not going to take his sickness with him. He’s not going to take his poverty with him. He’s not going to take strife in your relationships with him. He’s going to leave that behind.

If you want to get rid of that, you’ve got to go to the one who destroys those things with his power.

So right now, you have a lot of attack going on in your life. The enemy has been attacking your finances. He’s been attacking your relationships, and he’s been attacking your health and your body.

Doctors Sometimes Help The Enemy

And then he tells you that you’ve got something serious, that you’re going to die. Sometimes the doctors are a great help to Satan’s cause. You go and see the doctor, hoping the doctor’s going to say, oh, it’s nothing serious, but inevitably they’ll say, oh, that sounds serious.

This could kill you if we don’t deal with it. Satan’s laughing all the way to the bank. So while you’re listening to Satan and to this world system, which is controlled by Satan, instead of listening to the creator that’s living inside of you who has unlimited power, turn to him for thanksgiving.

Get Taken Up With His Presence

Lord, I thank you for this pain in my back. I thank you, Lord, that you are able to even use that pain for my good because that’s how wonderful you are, Lord. You can even take the very attack of Satan and turn it around and transform it into something wonderful.

So I’m giving you thanks, and I’m giving you praise. And you know, if you become taken up with him enough and with his presence, you’ll find the symptoms eventually may even start to subside and disappear because you are now releasing from your spirit the forces of faith, hope, and love. And they can go into your body and heal it.

They can go into your financial circumstances and change it. They can go into your relationships and transform them into wonderful, happy relationships with other people. No matter what the enemy has brought in your life, don’t be so taken up with him and giving him the glory for your problems.

You know, we glorify the devil more than we realize. Sometimes we spend more time rebuking Satan than we do praising the Lord. And we wonder why we’re not experiencing the power of God in our lives to change it.

The Throne Room is in You

So you want to enter his presence. Where is his presence? Well, he’s all around you, yes, but where is he personally present? Deep inside you there, in your spirit, that is where he’s at. That is where the throne room sits.

And the Lord’s allowed me to see this in vision form and to come into his throne room and to see him seated there on the throne. And usually there’s a whole lot of people all around him. And that’s what used to happen.

The king would sit on his throne. He would come to the king with petitions and ask for help. And when I come into his throne room and he’s seated there on the throne, I see the Lord Jesus look up and point at me.

He knows me. He cares. He’s interested in every little detail of your life.

Taking His Presence With You

And if you’ll spend a bit of time there in the throne room, worshiping him, telling him how much you love him and how important he is in your life, you will enter his presence in a very special way. And when you finish there and you walk out of the throne room, you’ll take his presence with you into this world. And you can take his presence then to other people to bless them, but you’ll take his presence into your life and into your circumstances.

And everything’s going to change because he’s walking by your side at all times. And if you hit a problem, you just stop and you turn to him and you say, Hey, Lord, what do I do here? Lord, this is over to you. And you’ll hear him say,

“I’ve got it. Just relax and trust me. I’ve got it.

I’m going to turn this thing around for your good.”

You’re going to look back at it and say, “Wow. You know, perhaps it was a good thing that that happened to me because it caused me to go in this direction. It caused me to trust him more. It caused me to spend more time in the word and in prayer and becoming more aware of his presence.”

These are the simple stages of entering into his presence.

Adding Music to Words

In the next lesson, we look at how you can add music to your words and use music along with praise and worship to move into a realm which we call the realm of glory. And the glory is basically the radiation, the radiance of his presence. When you do that, you can get into the throne room very quickly.

Thanksgiving may take a bit of time, but if you come into his presence with music and praise and worship, it can happen very quickly that you transition through the courts straight into his presence. Then when you’re in his presence, you want to stay there forever because it’s such a wonderful experience. If you haven’t experienced this yet, go through all the lessons in this series and you will learn how to do it.

Once you’ve learned how to do it and you’ve practiced it and you got good at it, then go out and take his presence into this world and go and teach other believers how to do the same thing that you’ve been doing so that eventually we can all crowd into that throne room. Do you know what? It’s big enough to hold everyone. And he’s always there.

Accessing The Throne Room of Heaven

When I first entered the throne room, I saw it in vision. And after that, I said, Lord, how do I get back into your throne room if you don’t give me a vision? Where exactly is the throne room? Well, the throne room is in heaven, isn’t it? Because that’s where Jesus is seated, the right hand of God. How do I get up there? And he said to me, the throne room is within you.

All you need is to step down into your spirit where I live and you’ll have full access to the throne. And he brought to my memory that scripture that said we can come boldly to the throne of grace for help in time of need. Do you have a need right now? Have you been crying out to the Lord in prayer and saying, Oh, Lord, Lord, I’m tired of this suffering.

Lord, I need your touch. I need you to intervene. Well, start with thanksgiving and praise and transition into that inner place where the king is sitting on his throne.

He’s ready there waiting to meet your needs, to answer every desire and every prayer. You don’t have to get ready or good enough for it. That’s why it tells us in the book of Hebrews that because of the blood of Jesus where our sins have been purged and cleansed, we don’t have to come into his presence with guilt and fear expecting him to condemn us.

We Come Boldly Into His Presence

We come boldly to the throne of grace. You don’t crawl in there with your head bowed and say, Oh, please, I know I’ve been terrible. I know I’ve been such a sinner. But please.

No, uou come with your head held high and you say, Hi, Dad. So good to see you. So good to see you. I love you. Have that love relationship with him.

Every believer has that possibility. But if you don’t enter into the throne room, you’re going to be like most believers who stand outside the gates of the palace looking longingly in and saying, Wow, I wish I could go in there and meet the king. But you can.

Because you can enter those gates. Starts the thanksgiving and praise. You can go through the courts and enter into the throne room of the king of kings.

And he’ll be there waiting for you. And he’ll meet with you personally. Sometimes we feel that, you know, the Lord is so busy that he’s like an important person where you’ve got to make an appointment to get there.

You Get Personal Treatment From Him

And when you finally get there, you’ve got to stand in line for a turn to speak to him. See, that’s the beauty of having him living inside of you by his spirit. You have access to him at any time.

And he’s available at any time. It’s going to take a little bit of effort on your part to stop complaining and moaning and groaning and pleading and saying, Why me, Lord? Thank you, Jesus. I know you’ve got it under your control.

I know, Lord, you’re going to take this very thing that I’m facing right now, and somehow you’re going to turn it into a blessing. And I trust you that you’re going to do it. I’m going to stop trying to work it out myself.

I’m just going to rest in you and let you do it. And you just keep speaking those words over and over again, praise and thanksgiving, and then worship. And miraculously, miraculously, his power goes to work in your life.

And he does the impossible. What to you seemed impossible, he can do instantly with his power. All you’ve got to do is bring his presence.

Every Believer Ha This

Enter into his presence. Then take him with you wherever you go. And you’ll experience this in your day-to-day life.

This is available to every believer. Only if you’ve not committed your life to him, because it does not apply. If you’ve invited Jesus as your Savior into your heart, all of this applies to you.

And you don’t have to be in a very special place or be a favorite to start with thanksgiving. Move into praise. Then enter the throne room with worship.

And stand in his glorious presence. And you will find miracles will begin to unfold before you in your everyday life. I hope this teaching has inspired you to realize that you must stop waiting.

That there is something that you can do. You can start doing it right away. As you go out tomorrow, the next day, this week.

Instead of complaining about all the things that go wrong in your life. Instead of being so taken up with Satan’s attacks on you. Turn your attention to the King.

Thank you Lord, you’ve got it. Thank you Lord, you’ve got this. Thank you Lord, you’re going to do something with this.

I give you praise. I thank you for what Satan is trying to do. He’s turned it for bad.

You’re going to turn it for good. And watch him go to work in your life. Watch the miracles begin to take place.

Amen.