Valuing His presence… is there anything more valuable?

‘And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him.’
-    Matthew 3:16

One of my two earthly heroes, Bill Johnson, once distilled his revelation of the above verse into this phrase: ‘The Holy Spirit rested on Jesus like a dove, so I must move with the dove in mind.’ What he means by this is that the Holy Spirit, whilst not being weak, can be grieved and quenched by what we do, and the idea of moving with the dove in mind is that we don’t do anything that would send the dove into unrest – accommodating the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, in our everyday lives, from the smallest thought to the greatest action.

The Dove
For the last five or six weeks two doves have been nesting next to my bedroom window in a plastic fixing on the side of the house. Prompted by a mentor to ask whether this may be a prophetic sign, I asked God what He was trying to communicate to me. The message came instantly and as clear as anything – He said ‘Jonno, you move with the dove in mind when you minister to people, but there is a difference between moving with the dove in mind, and living with the dove in mind. It’s time to live.’
After that encounter I constantly talked with the Holy Spirit throughout the day, asking His advice on situations, spending quality time with Him and making sure I acknowledged Him in everything we did. The fruits of this were instantaneous: the impact of the Holy Spirit upon my workplace prompted questions such as ‘why are you always happy?’ and comments like ‘there’s something about you that’s different to everyone else’, and favour opened up in front of me everywhere I went. From acknowledging the Holy Spirit’s place in my life I was accessing the declaration of Psalm 23:6 – ‘surely goodness and mercy shall cover me all the days of my life’.
You may be searching for a specific point or concept on which to pin all of the above, so here it is: the favour I found and the grace set before me came because I learned the importance of Valuing God’s Presence.

Values
What we value in life determines our focus and becomes the thing which we invest ourselves into most. If I value football above all other things then my time, energy and money will all end up going into football because the way in which I bestow value upon it is by giving of myself and my resources to it. Similarly, if I place the greatest value on books then I will spend my money buying hundreds of books and then pour all of my energy and time into reading them all. If I place the highest value on the One who is the Most High then everything I am is given over to Him and my desire to be involved with Him every second of every day.

Jesus Doesn’t Lie
When Jesus said ‘seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added to you’, He wasn’t lying. He is the way, the truth and the life, and the truth can’t lie. In light of this we come to realise that valuing His presence allows us to seek Him and His kingdom before anything else and as we do we come to the revelation that he is the strongest place to start from, the firmest foundation on which everything else can be added.

I’d encourage you to get a hold of Jesus Culture’s ‘Holy’ online and listen to the spontaneous intro by Kim Walker, as the words to that are one of the best examples of valuing His presence and the intimacy that is created by that value-filled relationship:

Just one look on Your face, just one glance of Your eyes… my whole world has changed. I seek only to see Your face, I don’t want to go anywhere without You God, without Your presence. Let me see Your face, the beauty of Your holiness… take me into the holy place.

Change Your View
Once we value the Holy Spirit for who He is – Holy – we realise we must shift our perspectives from seeing Him as a supervisor to seeing Him as purity in it’s most remote form, yet a purity that chooses to live inside of each of us. With that revelation whole worlds will change and we will come to realise that not only do we not want to go anywhere without God’s presence but that we cannot afford to.

Would you leave the house without your clothes? Of course not
How about without your skin? I didn’t think so.
Then why should we go anywhere without taking the One who lives and breathes inside of us, closer than cloth and closer than skin?

Look in the mirror every morning, and declare ‘I will not go anywhere without God’s presence’. ‘Anywhere’ includes in the home too – He’s not a coat you put on for going out in.

I’ll leave you with a statement that I was given at age 18 by my other earthly hero, my dad: There is nothing in life outside of God that can benefit you.

Three years on I still find that pressing need to live with the dove in mind.

Jonno.