Face to Face With God: Get Ready for a Life-Changing Encounter with God

by Bill Johnson

The spirit of wisdom and revelation is not given to make us smarter but to make us more aware of unseen realities. The purpose of this spirit or anointing is to give us wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. It works not merely to increase our understanding of kingdom principles but also to reveal the King Himself. Presence always wins out over principles.

The heart to seek God is birthed in us by God Himself. Like all desires, it is not something that can be legislated or forced, but rather it grows within us as we become exposed to God’s nature.

God’s love for people is beyond comprehension and imagination. He is for us, not against us. God is good 100 percent of the time. These realities burn deeply into the hearts of all who simply take the time to behold Him.

And the truth is that the degree to which we perceive the face of God corresponds directly to the degree of our yieldedness to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit into the image of Christ. The question for every believer is whether we will be satisfied with only a partial transformation or whether we will be so captivated by who He is that we will allow Him to kill everything in us that would inhibit us from becoming a mature manifestation of Christ.

Not only does everything in our lives that is inconsistent with the kingdom of God start to die the moment we encounter Him, but the superior, supernatural reality of His kingdom starts to come alive in us.

These two aspects of God’s grace—access and power—set us up to understand what it means to grow in favor with God. At the heart of growing in favor are two aspects: (1) the pursuit of God, the practice of coming before God through the “new and living way” (Hebrews 10:20) that Christ has made available to us, and (2) receiving, in God’s presence, measures of His own nature that empower us to be conformed into the image of the Son He loves.

Faithful servants don’t get hung up over how they’re going to fulfill the Master’s command before they’ve even tried or even after they’ve tried a few times and been unsuccessful. They trust the Master. If He said it, then apparently He thinks they’re up to the task—if they use the talents He’s given them. They see that being given the opportunity to represent Him in all His power and glory is the greatest privilege they could ever receive.

Unfaithful servants look at the commands to do the impossible and question the goodness and wisdom of the Master. Instead of pursuing Him to find a way to fulfill His commands, they put them out of sight and go about their business. Ignoring God while pretending to serve Him is a serious violation of relationship and cuts us off from being able to do the very thing we were put on the planet for—to live our lives to honor the One to whom we will give account.

Finding wisdom is the process of discovering and correctly aligning our lives in relationship with the head, Christ, and with our unique destiny to express an aspect of His nature in a way that no one else can. God’s favor rests upon us when we are being and doing that which He created us in His wisdom to be and to do. “He who diligently seeks good seeks favor” (Proverbs 11:27). The word good here means “things that are of benefit” or “pleasing.” Those who put extra effort in pursuing the things that please the Lord and bring benefit to the King and His people cannot help but increase in favor with God and man.

Many people want more money, or open doors for their business or ministry, or even greater opportunities for their families. But God’s favor is first and foremost about giving us the privilege of knowing Him, simply for the purpose of knowing Him. It could be said that divine favor comes to those who have chosen to keep the main thing the main thing—knowing and loving God. “Let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me” (Jeremiah 9:24).

The challenge for every one of us is to renew our minds and hearts so that our affections are anchored, keeping God’s approval as our supreme goal and reward. If we fail to place our value for the favor of man in its appropriate subordinate position in our hearts, we will be vulnerable to tragedy.

We repent when our sorrow over sin leads us to the place where we receive power from God to change the way we think. We may all be able to change what we think about, but only God can give us a new perspective on reality. In particular, only God can build a paradigm in our thinking in which we live for and from a relationship with Him instead of going through religious motions and being content simply to know about Him.

Radical obedience always gives priority to what God has said over what He hasn’t said.

The simple reason for these aborted destinies was a lack of repentance—a failure to allow God to retrain their thinking from the slavish mentality of Egypt to the mentality of those fit to walk in covenant with Him. In the same way, many Christians repent enough to get forgiven but not enough to see the kingdom.

While God knows everything about everybody, He does not know everyone. He can give more facts about a person than anyone could ever know of himself. But a relationship takes mutual consent and cooperation. For Him to know me I must open up my heart and give Him access to the secret things of my life.

Seeing God is costly. Something in us always dies. But it’s only the part that is hindering us from becoming more like Jesus.

In fact, the entire Bible was written with this assumption: only those who have a personal relationship with God will truly be able to understand it. To those outside of a relationship with God, the things that are only understood in the context of intimacy with God appear to be in conflict.

In order to gain a heart that longs to know God, we must sacrifice our need to be right, to understand or explain things. We have to trust Him enough to let Him shatter our boxes of understanding and lead us into deeper realms of His truth.

We also have to recognize that full repentance and transformation can only take place through real encounters with God—through actual experiences with His power and grace.

we can only live in the kingdom, our promised land, if we are willing to embrace the adventure of experiencing God as He is. And so I challenge you to count the cost and, like Moses, to step boldly into the thick darkness where God is. There is nothing worth more on this earth than encountering His manifest presence and responding to the invitation to know and be known by Him. It is what we were made for, what we were saved for, and the only thing that will satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.

It is in the heart of God for His people to actually represent (or “represent”) the aspects of His nature that people hunger for. He must be expressed through us. God has set us up to be successful at representing Christ by giving us the promise of His Spirit who would come upon us in power. Peter expressed this wonderfully when he said that we “have been given . . . exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these [we] may be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, NKJV).

“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Paul taught us that “the kingdom of God is . . . righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). That is, the kingdom of God is in the Holy Spirit. When He is poured out on us, the King’s domain becomes manifested in our lives. This kingdom first creates heaven on earth in the “earth” of our lives, which enables us to mature as co-laborers with heaven in order to bring transformation to the earth around us. Thus, the outpouring of the Spirit deals directly with God’s destiny for humanity. The purpose for which Christ accomplished salvation for mankind was just this, to put us right with God so that He could rest upon us, creating a people who could co-labor with Him to bring heaven on earth.

Each encounter works deeper in our hearts, bringing about the needed transformation so that we might be entrusted with more of Him. The more profound the work of the Spirit is within us, the more profound the manifestation of the Spirit f lowing through us. That in essence is the purpose behind the promise found in Ephesians 3:20: “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us” (emphasis added).

We need to pay a price to see more clearly. Moses’s whole life groomed him to see God. His success as Israel’s leader depended entirely on his ability, moment by moment, to perceive and follow the presence and voice of the Lord. But at one point God gave him the opportunity to be successful as Israel’s leader in a different way. He offered to assign an angel to take the people of Israel into the Promised Land. This angel would have made sure that every success came to Moses as God promised.7 But Moses was hungry for God alone, not merely for what God could do to make him successful. He insisted on following the presence of God Himself, saying, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here” (Exodus 33:15). Moses was the great leader he was because he was not focused on personal success but on the God who could be known. Moses preferred the wilderness with God to the Promised Land without God, a noble choice for sure.

But His unwillingness to allow them to see any form of His likeness was because they were prone to idolatry and would most likely create an image to represent His form. Today we fall into the same trap when we create formulas to represent kingdom revelations. People are often tempted to look for shortcuts to kingdom benefits, resulting in Ishmaels instead of Isaacs—counterfeits instead of the real thing.

The sobering thing to realize is that every time we are exposed to the miraculous—to the acts of God—we are responsible. That is, power forces us to respond. And our responses, either of faith or unbelief, shape who we are. Unbelief hardens us to God, while faith makes us more alive to Him, more capable of knowing and perceiving Him.

The first thing to realize is that it is possible to position ourselves to encounter God by learning to recognize the signs of His presence, not only as we experience them but also as others experience them.

The second thing to realize is that when God does lift the veil of our senses to perceive what is going on in the spiritual realm, we are not spectators who have stumbled upon something that has nothing to do with us. God is communicating with us and allowing us to see what He sees in order to invite us to know Him and partner with what He is doing.

Only those with His heart can be trusted to use His power for its intended purpose—to represent Him in all His glory and goodness. This is our challenge—and our destiny.

“The ways of God are discovered through the acts of God, but they are recognized only by those who are hungry for Him. . . . If our value system places more importance on what God does than on who He is—if we are religiously motivated rather than relationally motivated—we will not be drawn to recognize the greater revelation behind God’s acts.”

“One of the essential gestures of faith is to live with the expectation that the God who said that His sheep hear His voice and who gave His life to restore relationship with each of us would like to communicate with us. This faith leads us to lean into His voice—to learn as the prophet Samuel did to say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”

A key thought for me in this whole story is found in the phrase, “He remained upon Him.” This punchy prophetic declaration describes how Jesus did life: He walked through life in such a way that the dove of the Spirit would not be startled and leave. In Him we see a lifestyle that was crafted around the passion to host the presence of the Spirit of God. Being a person on whom the Holy Spirit can remain has a cost. (Cost in this context has nothing to do with works. It is passion for Him and a reverence for His presence where every move we make has Him in mind.)

The baptism in the Spirit, a profound encounter with the face of God, adds the power of heaven to bring transformation to planet Earth. This baptism qualifies the least in the kingdom to be greater than John. It is a promise that is in effect now, to the degree we live in and manifest the King’s domain.

For the believer, it is theologically immoral to allow an Old Testament revelation of God to cancel or contradict the perfect and clear manifestation of God in Jesus. I’m not denying that God displays anger and judgment in the Old Testament, as did Jesus to some degree, but by and large Jesus came with a display of extraordinary compassion. This is the revelation of God that believers are responsible to teach and model. This was made clear in Jesus’s statement, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21). The only justifiable model we have is Jesus Christ. The job description is fairly simple: heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, and cleanse lepers.4 If you say you are not gifted in such things, then I say, “Find out why.” Most of what we need in life will be brought to us, but most of what we want we’ll have to go and get. God has made these realities available. We must pursue them. These gifts are the overflow of the face of God encounter.

I have found a wonderful key for life: it’s best to live from what you know to be true in spite of the mysteries that you can’t explain. I cannot afford to stumble over my questions when what I do understand demands a response and commitment.

“[ Jesus] not only modeled a supernatural lifestyle, but He also illustrated that the ultimate quest is for the face of God. His lifestyle of both fasting and praying on the mountain throughout the night . . . demonstrated His unquestionable priority to seek God’s face. . . . It was the intimacy that Jesus had with His heavenly Father that became the foundation for all the signs, wonders, and miracles performed in His three and a half years of earthly ministry.”