Desperate for His Presence
On the golden calf, Moses’ bold prayer, and whether the church still believes it needs the Holy Spirit.
Adapted from a sermon first preached May 8, 2022.
This week, on a Wednesday night, the Lord jolted my heart awake. I woke to find myself looking down a long, black tunnel with a light at the far end, and a sense of urgency came over me that I could not shake. All I could do was pray: “Lord, I am but a sinful man. I’m sorry. Forgive me of my sins.” And before His presence lifted, I prayed one more thing: “Lord, if we are going to move forward as a church, we have to be desperate for you. Help us be desperate for you.”
Then His presence lifted, and I went back to sleep. But early the next morning I came into the living room, opened my journal, and I have not been able to think about anything else since. One question has followed me all week: Are we desperate for God’s presence?
I wonder if it is safe to say that much of the church today has built a whole system of doing church that, in the end, requires little help, if any, from the Holy Spirit of God. We no longer fall on our faces and fast for the church to grow; we have marketing for that. We no longer bring people in through prayer; we pay others to do it for us. We talk about revival, but we are not always willing to show up to a prayer meeting to seek it.
J.I. Packer once said, “Revival is the visitation of God which brings to life Christians who have been sleeping and restores a deep sense of God’s near presence and holiness.” If that is true, then we cannot expect God to visit a people who are not asking Him to come and expecting Him to come. I’ve become convinced of something, and I don’t think it is an overstatement: the greatest hindrance to the advancement of the glory of God in the world today is the attempt of the church of God to do the work of God apart from the power of the Spirit of God.
So I have to ask, and I have to ask it of myself first: Are we dependent on ourselves, or are we desperate for His Spirit?
A tale of two men
Turn to Exodus 32. Moses has gone up the mountain to receive the tablets, and while he is gone, the people talk Aaron into building them an idol, the golden calf. Watch Aaron closely. Verse 5 says, “Aaron saw how excited the people were, so he built an altar in front of the calf.”
Did you catch where Aaron was looking? Not toward the presence of God, but toward the desires of the people. He was a people-pleaser, not a God-pleaser, and when he saw how happy the crowd was with what he allowed, he gave them more of what they wanted. That is always a terrible idea. As Lecrae has put it, “If you live for people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection.”
Here is the danger, and it is not only Aaron’s: a Christian who does not seek God’s presence will almost always end up seeking the approval of people instead. There are a lot of Aarons in our churches, people who mean well, who know a great deal about God, who even serve. But there is a difference between being a Christian by name and being a Spirit-filled Christian in desperate pursuit of God’s presence.
God knew what was happening at the base of the mountain, and He sent Moses back down. Moses interceded, and by grace the judgment was restrained. Then God said something staggering. In Exodus 33 He tells Moses: leave this place and go up to the land I promised, a land flowing with milk and honey. “But I will not go with you.”
Think about that offer. God is essentially saying, You can have the blessing without my presence. You can have the land, the promise, the comfortable religious life, apart from me.
How would you answer if God said that to you this morning? You can have peace. You can have a church that costs you nothing. You can have the blessing, but my presence will not be with you. Be careful how you answer, because I fear it describes the Christianity we have often settled for: pray a prayer, go to heaven, enjoy the atmosphere, and never actually live under His authority day by day.
Moses would not have it. “If your Presence does not go with us,” he says in verse 15, “do not send us up from here.” He could not take one step forward without the fullness of God.
Three reasons to be desperate
First, because we have a God we cannot fathom. In verse 18 Moses says something even bolder: “Now show me your glory.” This is a man who saw the burning bush, stood front row for the plagues, and had just come down the mountain. If anyone had seen God’s glory, it was Moses. Yet he asks for more, because once you taste the glory of God, it creates an insatiable hunger for more of Him. We say we want to pray more, read more, know Him more, and then confess we struggle to actually do it. Often we struggle because we have never truly been formed by Him. Prayer is what redirects the heart off of ourselves and back onto Jesus. It is the native language of the kingdom of God, and it is how relationship grows, because relationship only happens when we intentionally show up to be relational. If we only ever see the Spirit as a force, an “it,” we will always try to wield Him rather than yield to Him.
Second, because we have a family we cannot forget. In verses 15 and 16 Moses is not only praying for himself; he is pleading for the people. For weeks our church gathered on Sunday nights to pray, and on those nights we prayed for you. We are a family. Galatians 6:2 says, “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Prayer unites us under the lordship of Jesus and lightens the load each of us carries. It is a genuinely loving act to take the pain of another person’s heart and carry it to God.
Third, because we have a mission we cannot fulfill. Moses looks at the task, leading this stubborn people into the promise, and says, in effect, I can’t do it, God. He sees the magnitude of the assignment, and it drives him to desperation. Maybe one reason we have lost our own desperation is that we have lost sight of the size of what we’ve been called to do. People are dying across the world with little knowledge of the gospel. The needs are staggering. As long as we believe we can program our way out of it, we are hopeless. But when we can finally say, “God, this is too great for us. We must have your Spirit,” then we will begin to understand.
Four prayers for a desperate church
Jonathan Edwards, in the middle of the Great Awakening, said, “When God has something very great to accomplish for His church, it is His will that there should precede it the extraordinary prayers of His people.” So let me leave you with four:
May God’s presence come down. “Return to us, God Almighty! Look down from heaven and see” (Psalm 80:14). Awaken us.
May God’s Word come home. When Ezra opened the book in Nehemiah 8, the people stood, lifted their hands, and bowed their faces to the ground. May we receive His Word like that again.
May we reproduce His Word. We do not gather to be entertained. We gather to be equipped, so that we can walk into everything God calls us to.
May God’s holiness come through. I am praying that apathy and complacency would be struck down, and that a fresh hunger for the glory of God would overwhelm our hearts.
And may we walk away asking the only question that matters this week: How desperate are we for the presence of God, in this church and in this community?
Father, we come before you and confess the depth of our need. Not one of us sits here by our own merit. We are saved by your grace, we hold your Word by your grace, and we depend on your grace for the next breath we breathe. Give us the sense Moses had, the holy fear of trying to move one step forward without you. Give us hearts that cry, “Show us your glory. We are desperate for your glory.” Awaken us to who you are, and let your Spirit move among us in a way we could never manufacture ourselves. In Jesus’ name. Amen.