A private audience with God

Last night I was feeling tired and drained after a difficult day at work, dealing with a difficult applicant all via email.  Although I had done nothing wrong, I had been the one this person vented on all day long.

So at one stage in the evening I aimlessly paged through my Bible, emotionally not really open to anything I read.

Then I focused on the heading "Hezekiah asks for help" in Isaiah 37. That slowly got my attention, especially this part:

Isaiah 37:14-16

After Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it, he went up to the Lord’s Temple and spread it out before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed this prayer before the Lord: “O Lordof Heaven’s Armies, God of Israel, you are enthroned between the mighty cherubim! You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You alone created the heavens and the earth.

From the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary:

The phrase, "dwellest between the cherubim," arose from their position at each end of the mercy seat, while the Shekinah (glory), and the awful name, Jehovah, in written letters, were in the intervening space. They are so inseparably associated with the manifestation of God's glory, that whether the Lord is at rest or in motion, they always are mentioned with Him (Nu 7:89; Ps 18:10).

I just got this sense of God calling me to enter into His presence, to come right into His throne room, and just tell Him how terrible my day had been and soak in His peace and awesome Presence.

But so many times we just feel sorry for ourselves and don't feel like praying.  What God wanted me to see is this is not "praying" in the traditional sense, this is just running to God's inner sanctuary and being with Him there while He restores my soul.

With that in mind, these verses below took on a much richer meaning for me.

Hebrews 4:14,16

So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe...So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.

Hebrews 6:19-20

This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary. Jesus has already gone in there for us. He has become our eternal High Priest in the order of Melchizedek.

Hebrews 10: 19-22

And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.

Ephesians 3:12
Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God’s presence.

Ephesians 2:18

Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.