 wants to show up big time in your life. His presence, his kavad, his very weightiness wants to show up in your life, your family, your home, your business, your church, your city. And today on Hope Today, I'm Amy, I'm here with Tom and Sidney Tom. Are we ready for it? I don't know, I don't know if we're ready. You know, this isn't just gonna be a program. We are gonna expect the presence of God here today because, you know, we're gonna be talking to Roger Helen and he's written a book called Pursuing God's Presence and Roger talks a lot about what it is for the presence of God. He uses that word, you used it, Amy, kavad. That, and I know Sidney, you've used that word a lot on here as well, that weighty presence of God. Listen, let's just listen from the back of the book here. He says, we'll learn how to pursue God's presence and holiness in everyday life. Present center life at work, home and church. Enjoy a deeper biblical fullness of the Holy Spirit. I mean, these are things that we all want. If there's anything we want as Christians, it's more of the Holy Spirit, more of the presence of God in our daily lives. I know as I was reading this book on every page, there's something to meditate on and think about as we desire that presence of God in our lives, Sidney. You know, one of the things I just think of, like when people talk about like if they're questioning, is God real? Well, if you've experienced the kavad, the glory of God, if you've experienced his weighty presence, there's been multiple times in my life, whether it's been at a church or a conference or even at my home where I literally, it's just reverencing the presence, reverencing who God is, the creator of the universe, the king of kings and just worshiping him and just speaking to him and whether it's through songs or just through praises. And when that hits and you can't get up, you can't tell me God isn't real. And in that moment, it's just like his consuming fire that just baptizes you all over again. I think that to me, there is nothing like the presence of God. There's nothing like the kavad, the glory, the weight of God. I even remember, I think at a Covenant's conference that they had a couple of weeks ago, is that I remember Becca Greenwood said something that really stood out to me and she was like saying that when she was experiencing the presence of God, it was so thick, like she stopped breathing and realized like through the glory, that's where we get our breath and then she was just, she had this whole encounter and I was like, man, I mean, there's just something about it, Amy. It's undescribable. So I'm just like, I just encourage you today. Like this is an experience and encounter. This is more than a show, but make an altar before the Lord. Begin to sing praises even right now in your living room. I mean, we're here, but I mean, you can just cultivate the presence at your home wherever you're watching from and you can expect, like, you know, he'll run the heavens and he will come down and hit you and touch you and stand on the word of God. Nothing like it, Amy. Let's set the atmosphere. Like let's create a wide landing strip for the presence of God to land in our lives. You know, there's some things that we can do to hinder that. I mean, strife, division, hate. I mean, it's not like God's scared of that. I mean, God wants to be present and to help us through tough situations. But man, let's prepare our hearts. Let's be good ground and good soil today so God can speak to us and hopefully we can make some course corrections, Tom, and really experience the divine presence of God in our life. I reminded, as we're talking about this, our former president several years ago, Olien Eagle, was seeking God for vision for this place and she received from him the first thing. It was a four-part thing, but the first thing was that this ministry and this program and this studio would be a platform for the presence of God. And I think that's something we never want to deviate from because in the world today, many of us, we can pursue all kinds of different things. And we think these things are gonna make us happy, high-paying, successful job, and expensive new house, the perfect spouse that in our business of life are we actively pursuing the one, the one who matters most. Well, Roger Helland is our next guest and in his book, Pursuing God's Presence, he offers a practical guide to daily renew and joy for those who hunger for God. Roger, welcome to Hope Today. Tom and Amy and Cindy, thank you so much. It's a privilege and an honor to be a part of your program and your dear viewers training in today. Well, it's our privilege as well and I loved what you've had to share in your book. Tell us a little bit about your story though. It's moving from, you say you move from pagan to pastor and tell us about that and about how you've experienced those times of God's saturated presence in your life. Yeah, that's a great question. So when people ask me, Roger, what's your background? I say, well, one word, I was a pagan. I was not a really nice person. I grew up in a non-Christian family in Southern California and Jesus Christ actually was a swear word in our family. Never went to church, never read the Bible, never prayed. So as a young person in just east of Los Angeles is where I grew up, we again lived a secular life without Christ. But just recently this movie Jesus Revolution that was released sort of depicts this movement during the late 60s, early 70s, whereby the Lord really grabbed a hold of a lot of really hippies during the hippie movement. That kind of dates me a little bit. I was saved on the fringes of that. I wasn't, I was in the US Army at the time but I was home on Christmas leave and a friend of mine who'd become a Christian that I used to deal drugs with and we kind of lived through the dark lifestyle. He became a Jesus freak and they called him Jesus Freaks back. And I remember Josh McDowell said, look, Jesus doesn't make freaks out of people. He makes people out of freaks. And so there was a life change in my friend and he started sharing the gospel with me while I was peaking on LSD, believe it or not, I was completely hallucinating and just out of my mind on LSD, about 10 o'clock at night on a Friday night in late December and the Holy Spirit got through and really convicted me in my heart and I experienced the manifest presence of God and I looked back on it. I know that's what that was then. I prayed my first prayer. I said, Jesus, if you are real, I want to believe. Jesus took me up on that offer, visited me a couple of weeks later and I've had this sense of the filling of the spirit of God which I call my personal Pentecost where I encountered the presence of God in a way that I knew my life had changed from the inside out. And those are my early encounters with the presence of God coming from pagan and then eventually was led to Canada. I became a pastor, went to seminary, pastor in churches and became a denominational leader and now author and teacher in different theological schools. So quite a journey from pagan to pastor. Yeah, quite a story. I love those stories, but let me talk to you because you've had a lot of different backgrounds and I can appreciate that. I understand you've experienced God in a lot of different settings. Tell me about this word, kavod, kavad, however it's pronounced and what that exactly means, not just when we first meet Jesus or maybe first baptized in the Holy Spirit but on a continuing basis. Right. So it's actually a Hebrew word, it's pronounced kavod to think of V-O-D-E-K-A-V-O-D-E kavod. It's a Hebrew word that's kind of hard to translate. The best translation that we usually read is the word glory. So when you see the word glory often, so for example in Habakkuk 2.14 where it says that the knowledge of the kavod, the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The fullness of his kavod, his glory, his presence really is what that is getting at. The person of God, the kavod means the weight of his presence, the radiance of his characters, holiness, his power, his purity. You look at the sun, you look at the universe and you're captured by its glory. Really, the heavens declare the glory of God, his radiance, his power, the weight of his glory, his presence. And there was those times of encounter where different ones, different people in history and revival and renewal and just practical daily life where there are times where God really moves in in a way that's close and imminent. There's the omniscience of God or the omnipresence of God where God is present everywhere. I don't like the air we breathe. We're not aware of it until you pay attention and you realize, well, I've got lungs and I can feel the air in my lungs or if they're not working, air really becomes a priority. COVID really showcased that for a lot of people. But then there's the manifest presence of God and where his glory is, kavod is experienced and felt. So what I try to capture in this book is seeking and experiencing and hosting the presence of God, his kavod, his glory, his face. So how can we do that? I mean, I've been a Christian for a long time and I've seen times of revival. I've seen that presence of God poured out in various meetings and even in my own personal life. But yet then there's just sort of like the daily walk of faith. How do we move into this awareness of God's presence and see that move? I feel like God wants to do that. How do we open that platform for his presence? You know, Tom, that's a great question. I mean, I'm all for revival and renewal, but I was also a surfer in Southern California. We can't, you know, you're not always surfing the waves. Sometimes it's flat. The way the tide's out or, you know, the waves aren't, the sets aren't coming in. So you wait and you wait. You pay attention. You look out for the waves rolling in. They come in sets. So even in the same way, the waves and moves in the spirit of God, we pay attention. And one of the key waves is really the key verse that I unpack and there's numerous places in scripture where it says, seek the Lord. So for example, in Psalm 105.4, it says seek the Lord and his strength. It literally means to beat a path towards him, to make a well-worn path to, you know, obtain and discover God. And then it says, the second part of that verse, to seek his presence, literally his face, continually without interruption. So there's intentionality. There's a lot of things that we can seek, you know, and it's when we really put the Lord at the center of our search. So for example, if we were in a mall and we had a child with us, we read a playground and we lost that child. I mean, different parents that's happened to, right? We lose sight of our children in a busy mall or a playground or we lose our cell phone or whatever or a computer. You know, what happens is everything gets mustard towards that pursuit until we discover. So it's all dependent around value. So the extent to which we can value God and seek him primarily through prayer, through awareness, through practicing his presence, paying attention to, you know, often subtle ways in which he speaks and moves around us, that I think takes discipline. I try to articulate how to do that really, practicing enchantment, looking at creation, looking at how God speaks even in our heart and in our mind through scripture, you know, devotional living and paying attention to, you know, the gifts of the spirit and how God communicates. And again, it's developing an awareness, practicing his presence, like we practice other things and pay attention to in our workplaces and in our homes and in our churches. Roger, are there some things that we can do that will hinder or stop the presence of God from being fully manifest in our everyday life? Yeah, you know, that's a great question. I think there's a variety of different things. One of them would be lack of attention to God. So in Hebrews 11.6, it says that without faith, it's impossible to please God. So faith is that posture, it's that surrender, that place of belief in him and paying attention to him. But then it goes on to say that we must believe that exists and that he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. So that implies that number one, we're aware and we pay attention. So if we're not paying attention, if we're not in a prayerful mood or a mode, I should say, if we're sort of busy and going about our workaday world and most of us are really busy people, we can crowd God out. And so I think that is a grand hindrance to his presence. A second area, of course, would be lack of holiness in our life. Scripture is really clear about when we pursue God, we are pursuing his presence. So Hebrews 12, 14 says to seek peace with all people and holiness without which no one will see God. And so there's this pursuit of holiness that if we're not pursuing it like the hound after the hare, that's a hindrance because these barriers get in the way of our relation. And being able to, I call it that purity enhances perception and so the extent to which we're growing in holiness, not rules and regulations, but living in the elegance of who God is and his character, that is a gateway to experiencing his presence. So I'd say a couple of things, busyness and lack of a pursuit of holiness get in the way of experiencing his presence. You know, Roger, I'd like to stop on that word holiness for a second because I grew up in one of the churches from the holiness tradition, Church of the Nazarene, great church, but it came out of that, that holiness movement in the late 1800s and then the Pentecostal movement kind of came out of that and charismatic movement. But what is that, is it that we live wholly to experience God's presence or does God's presence move us into that place of holiness? Both and, yes. So when we pursue the presence of God, we encounter his holiness. Think of holiness as the radiance of the sun or the radiance of the manifest glory of God. And so whenever, whatever space that God occupies as holy, if you think of Moses taking off his sandals when he approached God at the burning bush incident, you know, that was sacred ground. And God is sacred. He's separate from sin and unrighteousness and he's totally pure from the inside out and radiant in his glory. And so holiness is the beauty of God really. It's its elegance. It's not rules and regulations. And I get it, the holiness movement was trying to rectify a problem back then of a lack of sanctification and righteousness and daily living. And so there, you know, these holiness traditions really set up frameworks. Phoebe Palmer, which is a real hero of mine, she taught on holiness and the heart of holiness was consecration and the altar of our hearts to be placed upon there and Christ would sanctify it. So, but it turned into rules or regulations and don't play cards and don't work on Sunday and don't, you know, smoke and, you know, drink wine and, you know, and certainly there's excesses that can occur, but it's not just built around, you know, negations. It's the addition of the character of Christ in our life. And when we encounter his presence, he transforms us from the inside out. We become holy people, be holy for I am holy. Pursuing his presence means to pursue his holiness. So let's take this into the average person walking with the Lord, having trouble at work, you know, maybe just there, that's where we spend most of our time. So how does that, how does the presence of God change the atmosphere? Can it, can we be that bearer of the presence of God into a difficult situation like maybe a work situation or a family situation and begin to change the atmosphere there? Absolutely, in fact, I spend a few chapters where I talk about, you know, home-based Bethel, Bethel being the house of God in our family. I talk about God at work, a whole chapter on how do we really pursue the presence of God at work because God's, he's at work 24 seven. And when we have an awareness that God is in our workplaces, it doesn't matter if we're a physician, if we're a secretary, if we're a, you know, bus driver, school teacher, a business person, whatever. God is at work in those places. And so there's ancient practices, what I would call the aura at labor, sort of the prayer and the labor, the labor and the prayer work rhythm that the Benedictine monks practice for centuries and centuries that teach us, how do you pay attention to God in rhythms of work where we pray and we, we labor, we pause, we pay attention, we listen in stereo to people in meetings and listen to the Holy Spirit speaking into our heart and our minds and giving us discernment and also being a carrier of it. We're glory carriers. When we come into environments, we are love and light and we carry his, his presence in our lives that can impact those around us and be salt and light. So I've got a number of different stories which I could refer to, but God is at work. And so that's part of it's not just that church, but God is present everywhere, always. I love that. And I'm gonna have you, I'm gonna have you pray for us in just a minute here, but I have to ask you about spiritual leaders, you know, being one myself and having had that opportunity and humbled by that, but you take it straight to church and spiritual leaders in the book. And I've got to read this quote, I already read it to Amy. Church leaders must devote themselves to prayer in the ministry of the words, the act six, four. Then you have this line, preachers often prepare too much, preach too long and pray too little with unremarkable results. That's a zinger, but Amy's over here saying, amen, that's true as a pastor. So tell us what, what can change in our church beyond kind of a, even a happy singing or even just a kind of a sleepy sermon. What can change? What should our church services look like? Well, Asperger University is probably my go-to place right now when they had the outpouring of the spirit back in February, last at almost three weeks and people lined up outside for six hours to get in there in the freezing cold in Wilmore, Kentucky. What was the draw? It wasn't good preaching. It wasn't good singing. It wasn't a guest speaker. It was actually the presence of God. So the transformational impact of God's presence in a church setting is the, I believe, the absolute ingredient. We can have good preaching and good singing but a lot of church services are designed around sermons and singing but they don't necessarily manifest the presence of God which becomes a compelling weight of his glory that brings healing and holiness. It brings the empowering presence of the gifts and people can enjoy a good time but walk away really unchanged but it's the presence of God that really changes people. So I talk about present-centered churches and I know I'm a preacher. I love to preach but I believe without prayer the preaching doesn't carry the authority. It doesn't carry the unction. That's some of the writers from the past talk about the anointing of the spirit. The presence of God which quickens the heart but it only comes in the context of prayer and a life of prayer. Not just pray before the service or pastor prayer for five minutes in the middle. Jesus said my house should be a house of prayer and not a house of preaching and not a house of worship but I mean those things occur but until we become a people of prayer we really do block, I believe, the presence of God activated in our churches and in our personal lives. Roger would you take a moment and just pray for us, pray for our viewers that the presence of God it would be something that we would earnestly desire? Absolutely. Lord Jesus, you are the word of God and that you manifest the presence by your Holy Spirit in our lives, the presence of God. And Lord I even know through COVID that we're various times, Zoom meetings and remote connections across the world where we experienced your presence that people would leave those meetings at times feeling your glory. The weight of your presence being awestruck, being speechless, walking away in tears and experiencing that afterglow for hours. Lord I pray even now for your dear viewers out there from this great television station as they tune in, whatever the need may be, disappointment or discouragement, Lord depression, Lord a sense of refreshment and renewal that we all need on a daily basis for joy, for direction, Lord I pray as Moses pray that if your presence doesn't go with us we don't wanna go, Lord we can't face life and the tragedies of our world, the brokenness of our political world, the brokenness of our financial world, the brokenness of physical and emotional and spiritual infirmity and the need for a touch of your presence, oh Lord. So Lord even now, would you release a greater measure of your presence even as Habakkuk says that the knowledge of the glory of God would cover the earth as the water covers the sea. Saturate us, oh Lord, with the waters of your presence cover us, empower us, bless and encourage and direct and supply according to the needs in Christ Jesus in whose name we pray, amen. Roger Helen, thank you so much to Book of Scott for suing God's presence. Thank you so much for being with us, Roger. Thank you, it's been my pleasure. Amen, Amy. Ooh, you know, when you've experienced the presence of God in your life, it's like you can't live without it. It becomes like the air that you breathe. And I think about all the times that I have tangibly experienced the presence of God, whether it is in a church service with the people of God worshiping together, all in one, all in agreement or maybe it's at a wedding we're doing and you just feel the presence of God, the weightiness of God as this couple is making a covenant before God when my son is up in his little studio room and he's writing a worship song. Talk about the presence of God but there's another place that might seem a bit unusual where I experience the very heaviness, weightiness of God and that is when I'm having dinner with sinners. I'm talking about, we think totally different about everything in life but yet we are friends and when I'm sitting there and when I'm talking to them and when I'm listening to their points of view, I'm telling you, I feel the presence of God and there is a scripture that is, it is a game changer where sin is grace abounds. It's like, what? How can God's presence show up where there's sin when there's somebody that things totally different. Anti-Christ or anti-God, like Roger said, maybe Jesus Christ has only been a cuss word in your house. Well, I love the scripture in Romans 5, verse 20. It says, but sin didn't and doesn't have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness that we call grace, aggressive forgive. I mean, so I'm talking to the person, you just smoked weed to live today. You're sleeping around with everybody and anybody. You're searching for anything the world has to offer and it's sin, it's sin, it's sin, it's separating you from God but here's what grace does. Grace invites you into life with God. So today let's make the decision and let's make the change where Jesus Christ is not a cuss word in your home but Jesus Christ is the Lord and the savior of our life. Jesus is a friend of sinners. So if that's you today, will you just say this quick prayer and then give us a call? Just say, dear Father, dear Jesus, I have sinned. I'm a master's sinner, I'm the best at it and my way isn't working and I just open my heart for you to be the Lord and the savior of my life. Jesus come into my heart, forgive me of my sins and make me a new person in Jesus name. It's done, just like that. You go from darkness to light, just like that you go into the kingdom of heaven and you experience God's grace, His very kavad, His very presence in your life. Nobody is too far gone that the grace of God cannot reach you. That's what He's the master of redeeming, rescuing, bringing us back. So today you can have hope today because of Jesus. On tomorrow's hope today, being a light unto the world and blessing others through powerful worship. The Waynesburg University Lamp Lighters performs several beautiful worship songs that will fill your heart with God's goodness and joy. That's tomorrow on Hope Today. 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