The Healing Presence

Curing the Soul through Union with Christ

by Leanne Payne, 1989
The Healing Presence
  1. Celebrating Our Smallness — God does the work so long as we keep doing the one work He has given us to do: believing “in the one whom He has sent.”
  2. Practicing the Presence — Fixing our mind on Christ kills sin in us and enables others to believe and draw near to God as well.
  3. Spiritual Power and Authority — As we learn to invoke the Presence of the Lord, and to offer ourselves as channels of His love and power, we become ministers of His power and authority.
  4. Separation from the Presence: The Fall from God-Consciousness into Self-Consciousness — If we do not practice the Presence of God, we will practice the presence of another. To be self-conscious is to be separate from all others, bent and twisted toward our own idols. In practicing the Presence of God, we straighten up into wholeness, relationship, and the practice of the presence of the new creature we are in Christ.
  5. Creative Power — The prayer of faith makes every Christian an artist, listening for the work that God would do and collaborating with Him to bring it about.
  1. The Presence of God Within Us — There are three blocks to discovering our true center: failure to forgive, failure to receive forgiveness, and failure to acquire the virtue of self-acceptance. To live from any other center is to rebelliously seek what is not real but illusory.
  2. Incarnational Reality: The Christian Union with God — Maintaining the objective reality of the transcendence and sovereignty of God is essential for retaining the immanence of the subjective dimension. Christianity is incarnational. Anything else is not Christianity.
  1. Perceiving God Aright — Right thinking about God is essential and must start with Scriptural, incarnational imagery.
  2. Imagery and Symbol: “The Imagery Really Matters” — We become what we set our eyes upon. Corrupt symbols destroy our ability to worship, our ability to govern ourselves, our ability to express the strengths of personality, and our ability to draw near to God.
  3. The Terrible Schism in the Heart of Man — Biblically, the heart refers to both “minds” (head knowledge and heart knowledge) and to both the soul and spirit. The heart must be cleansed, and our schism must be healed.
  4. The True Imagination — The truly imaginative experience is the experience of receiving from God. The pictures our hearts make of the real are not themselves the real. But the images we receive often communicate awesome Truth to us.
  5. Introspection versus True Imagination — When the rational mind analyzes the imaginative faculty to the point of quenching it, we lose the good of both experience and thought. Introspection is actually pride. Conquering this tendency allows the soul to continually grow and expand.
  6. Incarnational Reality: The Key to Carrying the Cross — Often in our confused understanding of what it means to die to self we actually put to death the “new man,” leaving us in the clutches of the old. To carry the cross is to practice the Presence of Jesus and to carry His Life in us to other people. Substitution is not carrying the cross, it is making ourselves little saviors to others.
  7. Renouncing False Gods and Appropriating the Holy — False gods come in subtle forms these days, more as ideas than as objects. All the same, they must be renounced. We must turn away from the lies of our culture and turn toward the awesome and fearful power of the Light in which there is no darkness.
Also by Leanne Payne:
Crisis in Masculinity
The Broken Image
Real Presence
Other Items on Related Topics: presence
The Christian Book of Mystical Verse
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Men Who Met God
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Real Presence
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