5 - Encountering God Himself

Here’s a truth that either liberates you or frustrates you, depending on how you’ve been approaching the Christian life:

Sanctification is not primarily about behavior modification.

It’s not about trying harder or becoming more disciplined or finding a better accountability system. Those things have their place. But they are not the engine. The engine of real, lasting transformation is something far simpler and far more profound.

It’s beholding God.

What Paul Saw

Paul wrote in Second Corinthians: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

Beholding. Looking at. Gazing upon. Actually encountering. Not striving. Not white-knuckling.

Think about how this works in human relationships. When you fall genuinely in love with someone, you don’t have to try to think about them. They’re already on your mind. You find yourself slowly becoming more like them, picking up their mannerisms, sharing their values, not through deliberate effort but through proximity and affection.

Something similar, but infinitely more powerful, happens with God. When you truly encounter him, not just accumulate information about him but actually meet him, you are changed. Not because you’re trying. Because you cannot stay the same after seeing him clearly.

This is why the pursuit of God himself, not spiritual experiences, not ministry success, not moral improvement, but God himself, has to be the foundation of everything else.

The Most Neglected Discipline

If encountering God is the engine, prayer is the primary fuel. And yet for most Christians, prayer is the most consistently neglected spiritual practice.

We know we should pray more. We feel the guilt of not doing it. But somehow we never quite get there, and when we do, it often feels mechanical and hollow rather than like an actual encounter with someone who’s present.

One reason is that functionally we don’t really believe it matters. We’d never say that out loud. But we prioritize everything else and squeeze prayer into whatever’s left. And that reveals our actual belief: that prayer is nice, but not necessary.

Consider Jesus. The Son of God, God himself in human flesh, prioritized prayer above everything. He got up while it was still dark to pray. He spent entire nights in prayer before major decisions. He regularly withdrew from his own ministry to be alone with the Father. If Jesus needed that, how arrogant are we to think we can do without it?

There’s also a subtler barrier: sometimes we’re avoiding prayer because we’re avoiding God. We know there are things he wants us to deal with that we’re not ready to deal with. So we maintain a surface-level relationship. We pray quick, safe, transactional prayers and never pause long enough to actually listen. But God is not waiting to condemn you. He’s waiting to love you, guide you, transform you. Yes, he will convict, but only because he loves you too much to leave you in what’s hurting you.

What Genuine Prayer Looks Like

Real prayer involves setting aside significant time. Not five minutes between snooze alarms. Actual blocks of time where your only agenda is to be present with God. This requires saying no to other things. But nothing you give up to spend time with God will ever be a loss.

It requires coming with honesty rather than performance. God already knows everything about you, your thoughts, your sin, your fears, your petty resentments. The Psalms model raw, honest prayer throughout. David complains to God, questions him, mourns with unfiltered grief. And God calls him a man after his own heart. Don’t sanitize your prayers. Bring the real you.

And it requires listening, not just talking. Most of us treat prayer like a vending machine. We insert requests and wait for output. But genuine prayer is a conversation. It includes silence, waiting, paying attention to what God might be saying through Scripture, through circumstances, through the quiet internal voice we usually ignore.

Scripture as Encounter

Alongside prayer, Scripture engagement is essential. But the way most of us read the Bible isn’t doing the work it could.

We read it to check a box. To complete a plan. To find proof texts for what we already believe. None of that is wrong exactly, but it isn’t the main event. The purpose of Scripture is transformation through encounter with God. “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.” Living. Active. This isn’t passive information transfer. It’s God speaking, revealing, transforming.

The key is slowing down. Try reading one verse ten times instead of ten verses once. Sit with a paragraph for fifteen minutes, not to analyze it but to ask: what does this reveal about God? What is he calling me to change? What am I avoiding here? The goal is not information accumulation. It’s transformation. And transformation comes through depth, not breadth.

The Paradox at the Center

Here’s the honest paradox underneath all of this: the more intentional you are about encountering God, the more you realize you can’t manufacture encounters with God. He’s not a vending machine you unlock with the right techniques. He’s a Person who reveals himself according to his own wisdom and timing.

You can create the conditions. You can clear the space, remove the distractions, open your hands, quiet your heart. And then you wait. Sometimes God will meet you powerfully. Other times you’ll pray and read and feel absolutely nothing. The heavens will seem shut.

But God is always at work, whether you feel it or not. Your feelings are not a reliable gauge of his presence or activity. He’s as present in the dry seasons as on the mountaintops. This is why they’re called disciplines. You practice them faithfully whether you feel like it or not. Because the goal is knowing God. And knowing, real knowing, happens through consistent, faithful showing up. Day after day. Year after year.

Commit to one specific change in how you approach prayer this week. Not ‘pray more,’ that’s too vague. A specific time, a specific place, a specific length. Write it down and protect it.