Right now there is nowhere else I want to be than in His presence. I am consumed by this thought, this hope of something greater than meetings and songs. I want to sit in dissonance and hear the harmony of His truth. I want to utterly be consumed by His loving kindness. “Hope is here”, that is what He just wrote to me. Hope is here. I will run around screaming that along with all the other crazy things He has told me. “Lift up your feet,” He told me that gem two years ago. Six months ago He told me to “put on your remembering hat.” Compared to that one hope is here is for sure doable.
You have no idea what two hours in the prayer room at IHOP KC can do to you. There are just these transcendent moments that people will never believe when I tell them. Not everyone is convinced that there is something special here. Those people have never been here. There is something pure in endless worship 24/7 forever. Try to replicate that. Try to imagine that? Try for one minute to picture Revelation 4 playing out for real over and over. Those who don’t believe in mountain top experiences have never been to the top of the mountain. It has become clear that we have lost vision of this truth. In our jaded nature we chide those with a mountain top moment. We dismiss an emotional response as if God did not create it. We seek to eliminate it from our experience because somehow real Christ followers are steady and need not go to the mountain to hear from God. In Exodus God specifically instructs Moses to go to the mountaintop to meet with Him and see His glory. “Be ready by the morning and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain.” (Exodus 34:2) Moses experiences the fullness of the presence of God and “quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshipped.” (8) Moses is forever changed in that instant. When he comes down from the mountain we are told that his face shone. He literally had a different countenance. The people knew he had encountered the Holy God and they were in fear from the reality of the depth of this change.
In Matthew Jesus takes Peter, James and John where? To the mountain where He literally transfigures and reveals His holiness. We are told "His face shone like the sun." And then God speaks and tells them that this is His Son. Then they all head back down and Jesus tells them, "tell no one of the vision until the Son of Man is raised from the dead." And so we see that they go to the mountaintop to meet with God and this moment is set to propel them into ministry after Jesus has been resurrected. You don’t leave real moments to return to a pretend life steeped in sin and hopelessness. These for real moments stay with you, they change you. They set your course. They are necessary. There is no turning back.
We don’t need to shy away from these things. We need to be lost in his presence. Ours is not the call to test the truth of an encounter by ensuring that there are no more mountaintop encounters. We must climb again. We must leave the safety of steadiness and we must head to the mountaintop. We need to risk it all for this experience that we may look like something of the Holiness of God. There will be those who are faking. It is not for us to decide. It is for us to lead them there time and time again so that one day they will drop to their knees and worship the mighty God of Israel and in that moment be forever changed and forever secure in His presence. Once there we will never leave. We will bring that change down from the mountain with us. This has to be our call. We must have more of Him. We must hunger for more of Him. We have to stop running about and we need to have a fresh anointing of His infinite power. We have no idea. I have no idea. I do know that His presence is our only hope. Hope is here. This is truth.
