Vibrance Ministries: Exhilaration - The Divine Gift of PRESENCE

Part of your experience of God should be pure EXHILARATION. If it isn’t, there is something that is missing. Time for some trouble-shooting.

I went into prayer asking for a deeper experience of God’s presence. I came out disappointed. Time to troubleshoot. What was it that was blocking the experience of God’s presence? I got a lesson in exhilaration.

Exhilaration may be defined as a profound state of joy, anticipation, and elation, with a heightened sense of connection to the divine or a transformative spiritual experience.

Powerful words, yet they fail to capture the raw potency and energy of exhilaration. Exhilaration is amped up excitement, glee, jump out of your skin hold on to your innards, adrenaline rush! Exhilarations is ecstasy, rapture, liberation, celebration and jubilation all rolled into one. Exhilaration is a mad primal, primordial scream ‘I am king of the world!’.

Exhilaration is jumping from a plane with no parachute and enjoying the ride all the way, it is riding full tilt off a cliff, it is flying through space unfettered, unbounded, where there is only one word, whoooo!

Note well, I do not recommend any of these activities. Spirit speaks in symbols, so allow these images to stir in you the energy of the emotion that is exhilaration. It is running full tilt when your lungs threaten to burst open, it is dancing with frenzied abandon, it is coming undone in the throes of orgasm.

Exhilaration is eagerness, fervor, fire, animation, disinhibition. Exhilaration is fearless and intense, full on anticipation of satisfaction.

How open are you to the energy of exhilaration? When was the last time you allowed yourself to feel exhilarated? Do you even remember how?

Exhilaration is an integral, primal expression of our God. God is energy, God is emotion. One of the most potent energies of God is exhilaration.

If you are unable to feel it, you are limited in your ability to feel Him. Open yourself to the experience of exhilaration. Go back to a place where life was fun and exciting and full of promise. When the most important thing was that lick of ice-cream on your tongue, the sound of music in the air and the feeling of anticipation. From that place approach your God. Reach out, embrace Him, experience Him.

Too often we don’t receive from Him because we are so bound up in what we are reaching for we take all the fun out of it. Our God created fun. The innocence of fun, the joy of fun, the eagerness of fun, the exhilaration.

Do you know your God as fun? He is. He is funny, He is eager, He is joyous, He loves to make us laugh. He does! Does your God tickle your funny bone?

God wants to expand our awareness and appreciation of Him. He wants to rekindle in us the fullness of who He is. He wants to unearth the parts of Him that we have buried in ourselves, through suffering, through responsibility, through experience, through religiosity.

God wants us to see Him in a new light and relate to Him in a new way. Exhilarationm sheer joy of being in His presence. He wants that for you, for all of us, but you have to allow yourself to connect to it, to revel in it, to let it take you into Him fully and completely until you dissolve in divine union with Him, an experience of pure rhapsody.

Exhilaration is charged up, fecund, ripe, ready to burst forth into verdant, juicy, delicious fruit. Exhilaration is vibrating with excitement, resonating with anticipation, poised in that instant right before take-off, ready to go! Just a touch, the slightest spark is all it takes to trigger lift-off.

This is what the presence of your God should do in you. You should come out of your prayer time charged up and ready to take on the world because you’ve had a taste of the pure energy of exhilaration.

Exhilaration is the experience of victory before the victory. It is your Spirit feeling the excitement of the breakthrough even before life catches up. Exhilaration is that moment when you are poised on the edge of the diving board your muscles tensed, your spirit centered and you are about to take off and execute a perfect triple reverse backflip. It is the anticipation and it is the execution.

It is that place where you are so practiced that you step out of the way and God is in control, no thought is needed you simply flow as everything inside you is primed and ready to flow. It is the moment when you let go.

Let go and let Him overflow.

Whoa! Sounds amazing, but how do I get there? First lesson, be present.

I was on a magic carpet ride, full on Arabian Nights, flying over mosques, dodging between spires, careening between buildings, hanging on for dear life, screaming with gleeful excitement. But I was resisting. As a seer, I see many things in spirit, some are relevant some are simply entertainment. I dismissed image after image, scene after scene until Holy Spirit whispered ‘be present.’.

If you are not exhilarated by Gods presence, chances are you are not present. Dear Christian friends I know this to be true for the vast majority of us. By far, the majority of the time we spend in prayer, we are not even remotely present with our God.

Be PRESENT in His PRESENCE.

Mostly we are present with our problems, our hopes, our desires, our ambitions, the responsibilities, the to do list. Mostly we are present with the pain in our body, the hole in our bank account, or the problem that needs solving.

Sometimes we are present with our heartfelt desire to be in action, bringing the kingdom to the world n all its glory and splendor. But dear friends, how can we give to the world that which we ourselves do not possess? Do you possess God? Do you possess His kingdom? Do you possess His presence?

If you do not walk in the internal experience of the presence of your God, you are broken cisterns trying to water the world from a dry and corrupted source. Are you exhilarated in the presence of your God?

For the vast majority of Christians the answer is no. It may come in church when you are caught in the group frenzy, but in the privacy of your prayer closet your devotion is dry bones. Dear friend it is so simple. You have forgotten how to be present in His presence. You may have forgotten how to be present, period.

How good are you at simply being in this present moment. Not judging it, not scoring it, not critiquing it, not filling it, not reaching beyond it. Content to simply be.

Especially when you are in the trenches and feeling the searing heat of your fire that is the hardest thing in the world to do. Simply be.

Spirit showed me today, that while you are in this moment with the problem you have been walking with for ten years, there are a million different stories being birthed in this same moment. There are open doors, solutions, breakthroughs that are available to you, in this moment.

Your moment is here, but you are elsewhere.

Practice being present in God’s presence. Start there. His presence is the source of everything you can ever need. When you are in His presence do not reach for things, reach for the experience.

It may be a gentle warmth in your body, it may be a quiet peace in your heart, it may be your heart overflowing with love, it may be the release of tears. Or it may be sheer exhilaration.

An important part of my lesson today was the importance of your awareness and participation in the process. We may speak in tongues and chant and rock and sweat as we earnestly plead for the experience that we think represents God’s presence, and still come away empty.

We are empty not because He was not present but because each time He tapped us on the shoulder we shrugged Him off. We are looking for a particular experience and ignoring the one He wants to share with us. We must allow His presence to express as He wills it, in any given moment. He knows what you need in this day, allow Him to give it to you in His own way.

As Spirit tried to engage me over and over in the simple experience of exhilaration, I kept shutting it down. I was determinedly reaching for His presence! Well, there are not too many experiences that demonstrate our Father’s presence as potently as exhilaration. Over and over Spirit sent scenes that evoke the feeling of exhilaration, until I finally got it, tapped in and jad a joyous ride.

Picture yourself on a roller-coaster, you are securely strapped in, it gets to the top of one of those super high loops and then it plummets. In your imagination allow yourself to experience that feeling as your belly falls out under you, your hands raise up in the air, your mouth opens and joyous bellows erupt from your throat.

That is exhilaration. That is being totally present in the moment where fears fall away, troubles fade, the moment takes you and you just ride the experience. Feel what comes up as you take the ride.

To cultivate exhilaration is to cultivate the spirit of VICTORY.

Exhilaration is a place of trust, it is a place of hope, it is a place of joy, anticipation, eagerness, victory. All these things our God wants for us, but sometimes before we can meet the experience externally, we have to allow it internally.

Our prayer time is the perfect time to tap in and drink Him in. Now take Him with you as you go through your day. What juicy fruits might you bring forth in this day?

Exhilaration.

Author: Max Patrick @VibranceMinistries

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