Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.
Eph. 3: 17-18 NLT
Communion with God is sharing in the presence of God: speaking and being spoken to by Him. Communion with God is participating in the life of God: an encounter that is loving, grace-filled, and life-changing. Communion with God is experiencing the constant, conscious presence of the Holy Spirit: we are never alone or forgotten. Communion with God is heaven on earth: a foretaste of the life we will live in heaven. Do we make it our daily goal to pursue communing with God as we go about our daily tasks? Is his presence our heart’s desire?
Whereas to the Puritans communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing.
The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not.
The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it.
When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.
Modern Christian books and magazines contain much about Christian doctrine, Christian standards, problems of Christian conduct, techniques of Christian service—but little about the inner realities of fellowship with God.
Our sermons contain much sound doctrine—but little relating to the converse between the soul and the Saviour.
We do not spend much time, alone or together, in dwelling on the wonder of the fact that God and sinners have communion at all; no, we just take that for granted, and give our minds to other matters.
Thus we make it plain that communion with God is a small thing to us.
But how different were the Puritans! The whole aim of their ‘practical and experimental’ preaching and writing was to explore the reaches of the doctrine and practice of man’s communion with God.
J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (reprint ed., Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 215.
HT: Justin Taylor