Most people, I believe, see The Altar as a place where they “go to pray the prayer” and get right with God. They can look back on their lives and even remember the specific day and time when they ‘walked the walk’ and got saved. Occasionally, in a deep state of desperation or intense conviction, people may go up front and kneel before God

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What if The Altar is simply (and most amazingly) a place where we go to encounter Jesus. What if, by going to The Altar, we are deliberately placing ourselves in a position to stand naked and unashamed in the Presence of God? What opportunities are we missing by thinking that an encounter with Jesus is limited to the first time we went up to The Altar? What are we afraid of?

As The Holy Spirit is beginning to stir up something deep inside us as the result of a message, a song, or simply experiencing God’s Presence – what might our response look like?

By making a deliberate choice to go to ‘The Altar’ we taking the posture of saying, “Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit; I want You to do more inside of me. I submit my brokenness to You and ask You to move inside me by the power and anointing of your Holy Spirit. I ask for wisdom and revelation in the areas You have lovingly and gently exposed in my life. Come and penetrate – come and shine Your Light in my life in a more profound and personal way.” Coming to The Altar is a “Selah Moment”. Pausing in the Presence of God.

“Jesus also did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that would be written.” John 21: 25 What if a similar interaction between Jesus and the woman at the well happened multiple times in Jesus’ ministry? What if Jesus wept alongside many more people besides Mary and Martha over the death of Lazarus? What might happen if we chose to simply stand or kneel in God’s Presence?

Can we encounter Jesus in a similar way today? Coming to The Altar is a good place to start. What keeps us back? We say we believe that Jesus is in our midst when we gather together in His Name. But we often doubt the possiblity that anything supernatural could happen in those moments.