Now, I’ll just show you. I just need someone to help me. “Would you like to help? You don’t have to do anything. Just come on over here where people can see. Can I just take your hand? What I want you to do is just this: I want you just to close your eyes for a moment. Just make everyone vanish. I just want you to be open to what you may feel and experience in the next few minutes. Now, I’m not going to pray for you and minister to you; what I’m going to do is I’m going to meditate, and I’m going to talk to people as I meditate. As I mediate, what I’m meditating on will become real for me, and there’ll be a flow of God’s love in my life that will touch you. So you just remain standing there...”
So in order to put the truth of God’s love into my heart, I began to meditate on Psalm 23 – the Lord is my shepherd. The word shepherd is a friend. So, I just begin to picture Jesus, and He’s standing in front of me. I use my imagination to see Him, as He’s described in the Bible in many places.
His eyes blazing fire, compassion and love, looking straight into every part of me, reaching out of me, no condemnation. I can see His eyes looking at me, loving me. I look on His countenance and I see Him smiling. Someone who loves you, smiles at you. I see Him smiling. I see the brilliance of who He is. His hands – kind of like they’re reaching out for me. He’s my friend; He’s welcoming me into His world. I look at that, and see this is the Jesus, who loves me. So I open my heart and allow that love to just flow into my life, allow my heart to become filled with that, filled with the Spirit. See, it’s very real. I feel His presence right now. It’s flowing. “Oh, Jesus.”
Now, while I was meditating, it started with me creating a picture, but I’ve done it so often that immediately I could connect with Him straight away. It’s like, I’ve done it so often, that each time I do it now, I can go straight to where He is. Meditation creates tracks in your mind; a pathway for you to come into the presence of God. So, the moment I stop and go into Psalm 23, oh my friend, there He is – my friend; and I can step into His presence.
Now, I’ve done that so often, it just now is a habit of coming into His presence, to be aware that Jesus is with me. Now, was it like that at the beginning? No it wasn’t. I just thought I was imagining things. I didn’t feel God at all. I didn’t feel anything. I felt silly. I just felt like I’m making it up, because what was in my mind, my heart was fighting against it. So meditation is imagining the truth over and over and over, and embracing it until your heart receives it. Amen.
“Come. Come.” “What did you feel? Oh, you’re crying. Why are you crying? What did you feel?” “I felt like Jesus holding me, embracing me.” Now, I don’t recall saying that, but meditation opened the way to experience the reality, and then the Holy Spirit moves, and it’s now got a life of its own. So in meditation, you take Biblical truth, you begin to picture it, you hold it in your heart and embrace – ‘this is true. This is true’; and then the Holy Spirit begins to make it real in your life.
I just did that for several weeks. I thought: if I can experience God’s love, each day, like this, my life will change. So instead of doing lots of things, I built one thing into my life. Sometimes we’re so busy, and we have so much information, we don’t build anything into our life. It’s not enough to know all the knowledge; it has to be worked into your life. So, for the person who’s struggling with sexual sin, they need to picture every day, yielding their body; and just speak into their mind, reject all the thought trees. Begin to picture Jesus accepting them. Picture Jesus’ holiness flowing into them. You need to change the pictures. Beholding Him, we are changed.
“So, can I just practise with you? Close your eyes. I’ll just hold your hand. Just imagine now, Psalm 23. The Lord is my friend, and I look at Him, and I see His countenance – eyes loving me, countenance smiling, hands reaching out; like I feel I want to just take a step towards Him and be in His presence. You notice as soon as I took a step towards Him, there was a flow of His presence start to touch.