I must meditate in the truth until my heart embraces that it's true, see? I must meditate in the truth until my heart welcomes, receives and produces the fruit of it, so if you come before the Lord and you're consciously aware something's not right with me and you feel a bit ashamed about your life, then the truth of your righteousness is not operating. If it's operating I can actually come boldly into His presence like the Bible says. That's why the Bible says come boldly, come boldly into His presence. Let us come boldly to the throne of grace where we'll obtain mercy and grace to help in time of need! God says come boldly into His presence - but you see if you've got shame and guilt you won't come boldly and then you may put a religious thing over it and say well actually we're not into this clapping, shouting thing. We'd rather be reverent before God - but that's actually a lie. It covers completely the truth, that in fact that person is not right before God. They don't feel right before God and they're trying to put on a religious cloak to make it appear as though they are.
Constantly the Bible tells us how to come near to the Lord. It is always with strong expressions, praise, gratitude, thanksgiving, declarations, all of those things and then bow down and be intimate with Him. We can come with the bold expressions because our heart is right. We can come with bold expressions, there's nothing hanging on me anymore. People can't pin one on me anymore, I'm free, I'm right before God! So how can I get the truth to shift? It shifts through meditation. It shifts as I will meditate. Now how am I going to do that? Well meditation, you can say well [unclear 00.37.08] but it's nothing like that. Meditation is quite different. Meditation, biblical meditation means taking the word of God and imagining it, picturing it, using your imagination.
Your imagination is like a screen on the inner man and that's where the impressions from God, the revelations from God come. It's also where impressions from the outside world come and so our imagination we have to renew. We need to actually use the imagination God's given us. How do we do that? We take the word of God and we begin to picture it and then imagine what that truth looks like. God says I'm righteous, what does it look like to be righteous? What would it look like in standing before God? What would it feel like? So you imagine what it looks like, you imagine what it feels like. You are imagining, picturing inside yourself the truth. It's not trying to make up something, not trying to make up some weird thing or make up things in your imagination. It's taking biblical truth and repeatedly picturing it and embracing that picture, welcoming that picture until that picture begins to settle in the heart and you become conscious I'm right before God.
So when you come to pray for someone whatever your conscious of will immediately arise, so if I bring you up to pray for someone, get someone with a need, bring you to pray for them, this is what'll happen: the moment you come near to pray for them the first thing you'll be aware of is whether you're close to God or not. If you're not aware you're close to God and God is full of love and He's a good God and He will supply, immediately you'll start to fear because you have to perform. Now I've got to do something, see? The reason you have to do something is because you're not conscious that you're standing near to God, that God is the One who does something. You are just the postman who delivers, receive, deliver, receive, deliver. You don't have to be smart to be a postman - oh here's the letter, okay, just deliver it.
So ministry to people is receive, deliver, receive the letter, post the letter, well it's your number, there it is. Now that actually is what ministry really at the core of it involves, but the key part is being conscious of the presence of God, being aware of His presence. So to become aware of His presence I must take time to meditate, to continually reflect on the truth. I'll give you three or four truths you can reflect on in just a moment, but I need to not only imagine it and see it, imagine how it feels, I allow the feeling of that to rise - it's good. See, for example if you look back over your shoulder and you see all the rest of your life behind you then what do you see? If you're a forgiven person and you know you're forgiven you look back, there's nothing to see, it's wiped away, see? If you know that you are a forgiven person it's a revelation for you, you're not going to feel bad about any of that stuff in the back. But you see if you're not sure about that you'll start to remember all the things you did, you're going to feel bad about them and that stops you accessing the presence of God.