The Cost of God's Presence Almost No One Pays | A.W. Tozer

Everyone wants the presence of God. We sing about it. We pray for it. We long for the sense of his nearness, the warmth, the peace, the glory of knowing he is here. But there is a cost to the presence of God, a real, specific, daily cost, and almost no one is willing to pay it. That is the secret behind the great mystery of the modern church, why so many seek his presence and so few ever find it. It is not that God hides himself from those who seek him. It is that his presence has a price and we have wanted it for free. We want the glory without the surrender, the nearness without the death, the warmth of his presence without the cost of his presence, and there is no such thing.

Be honest with yourself for a moment. You have asked God for his presence many times. Has it come? Have you known the deep abiding manifest presence of God or only fleeting moments that fade as quickly as they came? And if it hasn't come, have you ever once asked why? Really asked? Not blaming God for hiding, but wondering whether there is a cost you have never been willing to pay. Because there is. The presence of God is the most valuable thing in the universe and like everything of supreme value, it cannot be had cheaply. Tonight I'm going to show you the cost of God's presence, the exact price that almost no one pays. And I'm going to show you why the few who pay it find what the comfortable cost avoiding multitude never will. This will not be a comfortable message. But if you are tired of singing about a presence you have never truly known, it may be the most important thing you hear.

But before we go one step further, I want to know where the remnant is because I believe that scattered across this comfortable cost avoiding presence seeking but price refusing generation, there is a remnant, men and women who are no longer content to sing about his presence while living without it, who are ready at last to pay the cost. And I want to see you. So, right now, comment where you are watching from. Your city, your country. Type it in the comments below. Let the remnant make itself known, so that across this dying world, we can see there are still those willing to pay the cost of God's presence.

And now a direct word from us, the ones who make these messages, because this is where it becomes practical. The presence of God is paid for in the secret place, in the daily discipline of seeking him, dying to self, building the altar where his presence falls. But here is the hard truth. Almost no one pays this cost. And the reason is not unwillingness alone, but lack of a way. They feel the longing tonight, resolve to seek him, and within 3 days the noise and the distraction and the sheer difficulty have swallowed them, and the altar stands unbuilt again. That is the exact reason we built the war room manual. It is not a book to admire and shelve. It is a tactical battle plan to help you pay the cost, to silence the noise, conquer the distraction, build the altar, and stay in the secret place until his presence comes. It will never replace your Bible. The word is the foundation on which the altar is built, the final authority, always. But the manual is the structure that takes you day-by-day into the place where the cost is paid and the presence is found. If you are done singing about a presence you have never known, and ready to pay the cost, the link is in the description and pinned to the top of the comments.

And now, quiet your heart, and let the preacher show you the cost of God's presence that almost no one pays. I want to speak to you tonight about the presence of God and about the cost of it. The cost that almost no one in this comfortable generation is willing to pay. For I am persuaded that the great tragedy of the modern church is not that it does not want the presence of God, but that it wants it on terms God will not grant. Wants the blessing without the cost, the nearness without the surrender, the glory without the grave. And so we have a church that sings endlessly about the presence of God and knows almost nothing of it in reality. A church that has the vocabulary of intimacy and the experience of emptiness because it has wanted what only the costly seeking can obtain and has refused to pay the cost.

Let me say at the outset what the presence of God is worth that you may understand why it cannot be cheap. The manifest presence of God is the most valuable thing in the universe. It is the one thing that made the difference between the people of God and all the nations around them. Moses said it plainly, "If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence." Better to die in the wilderness with his presence than to enter the promised land without it. It is the one thing that turns a building into a sanctuary, a gathering into a holy assembly, a life into a dwelling place of God. Everything else, the gifts, the blessings, the answered prayers, is secondary to this one supreme treasure, the presence of God himself. And precisely because it is the most valuable thing in the universe, it is not to be had for the small change of a casual, comfortable, cost-free religion. The pearl of great price cost the merchant all that he had. The treasure hid in the field cost the man everything he owned, and the presence of God, the supreme treasure, costs no less.

Consider Moses, for he understood the worth of the presence as few ever have. God had offered him everything a man could want, a land flowing with milk and honey, the fulfillment of every promise, angelic escort to drive out the enemies before him. But with one condition, that God's own presence would not go with them, lest his holiness consume a stiff-necked people on the way. And Moses, hearing of all the blessings offered without the presence, refused them all. "If thy presence go not with me," he said, "carry us not up hence." He would rather have the wilderness with God's presence than the promised land without it. He would rather have the barren place with the manifest presence of God than every blessing in the absence of it. Do you understand what that reveals? Moses had learned that the presence of God is not one blessing among many to be weighed against the others. It is the one thing that makes every other thing worth having, and without which the richest blessings are empty. We have reversed this. We seek the blessings and are content to have them without the presence. We want the milk and honey, the answered prayers, the good gifts, and we do not grieve much if his manifest presence is absent so long as the blessings come. But Moses would have traded every blessing for the presence and counted the presence alone worth more than all the gifts combined. Until you have come to value the presence of God as Moses valued it above every blessing, above the promised land itself, you will not pay the cost of it. For a man pays the great cost only for what he counts the great treasure.

And mark what the presence of God did to Moses, for it tells you what the presence is worth. He came down from the mountain, from 40 days in the manifest presence of God, and his face shone. Shone so that the people were afraid to come near him. Shone so that he had to veil his face, for the glory of the presence had marked him. That is what the presence of God does to a man. It marks him. It changes him. It leaves a glory upon him that others can see. And the absence of that shining in our day, the absence of any glory upon the faces and the lives of those who profess to know God, is the evidence that we have not been where Moses was, have not paid what Moses paid, have not known the presence Moses knew. The shining face is not for Moses only. It is for every soul that pays the cost and dwells in the presence. And its absence among us is a sermon in itself, preaching that we have sought the blessings and refused the presence. And so we do not shine.

Now, let me tell you what the cost actually is, for I would not speak in vague generalities when souls are hanging in the balance. The first cost of God's presence is the death of self, and this is the cost almost no one will pay. The presence of God and the enthroned self cannot occupy the same heart, for God will not share his glory with another, and the self is a rival God demanding worship. Where the self reigns, God will not manifest his presence. Where God manifests his presence, the self must be dethroned and crucified. And here is where the multitude turns back, for they will surrender much. They will give God 90%, 99%, but there is always that final citadel of the self, that last reserved corner of the heart, that one area marked private into which they will admit no intruder, not even God. And it is precisely there, in that reserved corner, that the issue of his presence is decided. For God will not enter as a guest into a house where he is not Lord. He will not manifest his presence in a heart that has reserved any corner from his rule. The cost of his presence is the surrender of that final corner, the dethroning of the self in its last stronghold, the death of the proud and stubborn ego that sits enthroned demanding its own way. And this death is the cost almost no one will pay. Which is why almost no one knows his presence.

The second cost of God's presence is the forsaking of every rival. For the presence of God will not dwell where idols are tolerated. An idol is anything we love more than God, anything we will not surrender to him, anything that occupies the place in our hearts that belongs to him alone. And we have many, not the carved images of the ancients, but the subtler idols of the modern heart. Our comforts, our ambitions, our reputations, our pleasures, the people we love more than God, the dreams we will not lay on the altar. The presence of God requires that these be cast down, that the heart be cleansed of every rival, that nothing be left enthroned beside him. For he is a jealous God, not with the petty jealousy of men, but with the holy jealousy of a love that will not share the beloved with another. And he will not manifest his presence in a heart divided between himself and its idols. The cost of his presence is the casting down of every idol, the cleansing of the heart from every rival love. And this cost, too, the comfortable will not pay, for they love their idols too well to cast them down, and so they keep their idols and forfeit his presence.

The third cost of God's presence is time, and unhurried time, and this our frantic generation grudges above all. The presence of God is not found in the rushed and hurried moment, snatched between distractions. It is found in the patient waiting, the lingering before him, the unhurried seeking of a soul that has set itself to seek his face and will not be turned aside. The saints who knew his presence were men and women who waited on him, who tarried in the secret place, who gave God the unhurried time that intimacy requires. And we who will not give him 10 unbroken minutes, who cannot sit still in his presence without reaching for the device, who have filled every moment with noise and stimulation, we wonder why we do not know his presence. We have not paid the cost of time. We have tried to know the presence of God in the cracks and margins of a life given to a thousand other things, and it cannot be done. For his presence is found by those who seek him with the whole heart in the unhurried time that seeking requires.

I must make a distinction here that will clear away much confusion, for there are two ways the scripture speaks of the presence of God, and we have collapsed them into one to our great loss. There is the omnipresence of God, the truth that he is everywhere, that there is no place we can flee from his presence, that in him we live and move and have our being. This presence is his gift apart from any cost. He is present everywhere whether we seek him or not, present to the sinner and the saint alike, present in his sustaining of all things. But there is another presence, what the saints call the manifest presence, the felt, known, experienced nearness of God, when he draws near not merely in fact, but in conscious reality. When the soul knows itself to be in his presence and is changed by it. And it is this manifest presence, not the omnipresence, that costs. God is always present in the first sense, but he manifests himself, makes his presence felt and known, only to those who seek him on his terms, who pay the cost of the seeking. We have confused the two and concluded that because God is everywhere present, we need do nothing to know his presence. And so we live in the omnipresence and never taste the manifest presence, surrounded by a God we do not perceive, near to a presence we never feel. The cost does not purchase his omnipresence, which is free. It opens the soul to his manifest presence, which is the treasure. And the soul that will not pay the cost may rest in the truth that God is everywhere and never once know the manifest nearness that transforms.

And let me tell you that this manifest presence, once known, becomes the one thing the soul cannot live without, the pearl for which it will gladly sell all else. The man who has tasted the manifest presence of God is forever spoiled for the cheap substitutes that satisfy the presence-less crowd. He has been in the holy place and the memory of it ruins him for the entertainments and diversions that content the comfortable. He has felt the weight of God's nearness and nothing less will ever satisfy him again. This is the mark of those who have paid the cost, a holy dissatisfaction with everything but God, a hunger that the world cannot fill, a homesickness for the presence that draws them back again and again to the secret place. The crowd, which has never tasted the manifest presence, is content with the substitutes, for it does not know what it is missing. But the soul that has tasted cannot be content, for it knows now what the presence is and will pay any cost to dwell in it. Once you have known the manifest presence of God, you will understand why the saints counted everything else as loss, and you will gladly pay the cost again and again to return to the only place your soul now calls home.

Let me speak now of the device in your pocket, for it has become, I am persuaded, one of the great thieves of God's presence in this generation. It is a tabernacle of distraction, a portable altar of noise that you consult every few minutes, that fills every silence, that crowds out the stillness in which God is known. You cannot know the presence of God while your attention is fragmented across a thousand notifications. You cannot wait on him while your hand reaches for the screen at the first moment of silence. You cannot seek him with the whole heart while half your heart is scattered across the endless feed. I do not say the device is evil in itself. I say that for multitudes, it has become the very thing that keeps them from the presence of God, the noise that drowns the still small voice, the distraction that makes the secret place impossible. And part of the cost of his presence in this generation is the laying down of the device, the silencing of the noise, the deliberate creation of the stillness in which alone he is found. Until you are willing to put it down, to leave it in the other room, to silence the noise and be still, you will not know the presence of God, for he is not in the noise, and the noise is where you have chosen to live.

I must press upon you why God has ordained that his presence should cost so much, for it is not arbitrary. God makes his presence costly because only the costly seeking prepares the soul to receive him. The presence of God is not a trinket to be tossed to the casual. It is the holy God himself drawing near, and the soul must be prepared, emptied, cleansed, surrendered to receive him without being destroyed or without turning his presence to its own pride. The cost is the preparation. The death of self empties the soul of the pride that could not bear his presence. The forsaking of idols cleanses the heart that could not hold his presence while divided. The unhurried time stills the soul that could not perceive his presence while frantic. The cost is not a fee God demands arbitrarily. It is the very preparation that makes the soul able to receive and to bear the weight of his presence. And this is why the cost cannot be waived, why there is no cheap shortcut to the presence of God, because the cost is not a barrier to the presence, but the doorway to it. The very process by which the soul is made ready to receive the God it seeks.

I would have you understand that what you think about God determines everything about how you seek him. For what comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. The soul that thinks of God as a comfortable, undemanding deity, a celestial therapist who exists to soothe and bless, will never pay the cost of his presence, for it does not believe the cost is necessary. It expects the presence to come cheaply because it has conceived a cheap God. But the soul that has glimpsed the true God, the holy, the high and lifted up, the consuming fire before whom the seraphim veil their faces, that soul understands at once why his presence costs, why it cannot be had casually, why the self must die and the idols fall before such a one will manifest himself. The low thoughts of God that fill the modern church are themselves part of why we will not pay the cost. We have made God small and cheap in our minds and so we expect his presence to be small and cheap as well. Recover a true vision of who God is, the infinite majesty, the burning holiness, and you will no longer wonder that his presence costs everything. You will wonder rather that such a God would manifest his presence to us at all and you will count any cost small for the privilege of his nearness.

Let me be practical then for I would not leave you longing for the presence without showing you how to begin paying the cost. You begin by settling the matter of the self, going alone before God and yielding to him the last reserved corner, the final stronghold, praying not the vague prayer of general surrender, but the specific costly prayer that names and yields the very thing you have withheld. You begin by casting down the idols, identifying honestly what you have loved more than God and laying it on the altar, refusing to keep any rival enthroned beside him. You begin by giving him time, real and unhurried, setting aside the hours the world demands you give to lesser things and guarding them for the secret place. You begin by silencing the noise, laying down the device, creating the stillness in which alone he is known. And you begin by seeking not for a feeling, not for an experience to validate your effort, but for God himself, waiting on him with the whole heart, paying the cost day after day until the manifest presence comes. There is no shortcut through this, no technique that bypasses the cost. There is only the daily paying of the price in the secret place until the soul is emptied and cleansed and still enough for the presence of God to be known. Begin where you are with the cost you can pay today and build from there the costly life out of which the presence flows.

And lest the cost seem too great for you, too far beyond your strength, let me tell you that even the paying of it is enabled by grace, and you do not pay it in your own power alone. The God who calls you to die to self gives the grace to die. The God who calls you to cast down your idols gives the strength to cast them down. The God who calls you to seek him gives the very desire that seeks. The death of self is not a feat of your own willpower, but a work of the spirit who puts to death the deeds of the body in those who yield to him. The seeking is not the unaided striving of your own heart, but the response to his drawing. For no man comes except the Father draw him, and the very hunger you feel for his presence is his hand upon you drawing you to himself. So do not look at the cost and despair, thinking it beyond you. Look to the God who calls you to pay it and trust him to enable the paying. Bring him your weakness, your divided heart, your attachment to your idols, your addiction to your noise, and ask him to work in you what you cannot work in yourself. The death of self, the casting down of idols, the hunger that seeks him with the whole heart, for the cost high as it is is paid not in the strength of the flesh but in the power of grace, and the God who set the price stands ready to supply what the price requires. You have only to yield, to stop resisting, to give yourself to the God who is already drawing you, and to let his grace accomplish in you the costly work that ends in the joy of his presence.

For in the end, this is the great paradox of the cost, that everything it requires you to surrender is something that was destroying you, and everything it gives is life. The self you are called to crucify is the very tyrant that has made you miserable. The idols you are called to cast down are the very chains that have bound you. The noise you are called to silence is the very thing that has kept your soul starved and shallow. The cost of God's presence is not the surrender of good things for the sake of a demanding God. It is the casting off of the very things that have been poisoning your soul in exchange for the presence that alone can satisfy it. You lose nothing in paying the cost but what was killing you, and you gain nothing less than God himself. This is why those who pay it never regret it, why they count the cost as nothing, why they speak of the surrender not as a loss but as the greatest liberation of their lives. The cost looks from the outside like a terrible price. From the inside, once paid, it looks like the trading of a prison for a kingdom, of death for life, of emptiness for the fullness of the presence of God.

Now I must confront the cheap religion of our day, for it is the great enemy of the costly presence of God. We have built a Christianity designed to cost nothing, that asks no death, requires no surrender, demands no idle cast down, no time given, no self crucified, a comfortable, convenient, cost-free religion that fits neatly into a self-centered life and disturbs nothing. And we have wondered why this cost-free religion has produced a presence-free church. But the two go together. The cheap religion that costs nothing produces the empty experience that knows nothing of God's presence. For the presence of God was never cheap, and the religion that refuses the cost forfeits the presence by the very nature of the case. We have wanted a Christianity that costs us nothing and gives us everything. And we have gotten instead a Christianity that costs us nothing and gives us nothing. A religion of words without reality, of singing without presence, of profession without power. If we would know the presence of God, we must forsake the cheap religion that has kept us from it and embrace the costly seeking that alone obtains it.

But hear me now. For I would not lay the cost upon you without showing you the glory on the other side, lest you think the cost too great. The presence of God is worth infinitely more than everything it costs. What you surrender to obtain it, the self, the idols, the time, the comfort, the noise, is nothing, less than nothing beside the surpassing worth of knowing the manifest presence of the living God. Ask any soul that ever paid the cost and found his presence whether it was worth it, and you will hear the same answer every time. A thousand times, yes, for the presence of God is a treasure beside which all that it cost is as refuse. The self that was crucified, the idols that were cast down, the comforts that were surrendered, the time that was given. All of it appears in the light of his presence as the wisest investment ever made, the trading of dross for gold, of trinkets for the pearl of great price. There has never been a soul that paid the cost of God's presence and counted it too high. The comfortable, who would not pay, keep their self and their idols and their comfort and their noise, and they do not have his presence. The few who paid the cost gave up these things and gained the presence of God, and there is no comparison between the two. Better to pay everything and know his presence than to keep everything and live without it.

Consider the two lives that you may see clearly what hangs on this choice. There is the life of the presence-less believer, the one who sings about God's presence but has never paid its cost, who has the words of intimacy and the experience of emptiness, who goes through the forms of religion year after year without ever knowing the manifest nearness of God. His prayers are addressed to a God he does not feel. His worship is offered to a presence he does not sense. His religion is real in its profession and hollow in its experience. And beneath the activity there is an ache he cannot name, the ache of a soul made for the presence of God and living without it. And there is the life of the one who paid the cost, who let the self die, cast down the idols, gave the time, paid the price, and who now dwells in the manifest presence of God, whose prayers rise to a God he knows is near, whose worship touches a presence he feels, whose life is marked by the glory that the presence imparts. The difference between the two is not that one was granted the presence and the other denied it. The presence is offered to both. The difference is that one paid the cost and the other would not. Which will you be? The presence-less believer aching with a hunger he will not pay to satisfy, or the one who paid the cost and found the presence worth infinitely more than all it cost?

And do not tell yourself you will pay the cost someday in some more convenient season, for that season never comes and the delay is itself the refusal. Every day you put off paying the cost, the self entrenches deeper, the idols grow dearer, the noise grows louder, the capacity for the unhurried seeking withers further. The presence of God is not easier to obtain at 60 than at 30. It is harder, for the heart has grown more set in its comfortable ways, more attached to its idols, more addicted to its noise. The time to pay the cost is now, while the longing is awake and the truth is pressing on you, while you can still feel the ache for the presence you have never known. Do not be the soul that always intends to seek God in earnest later and arrives at the end of life having sung about his presence for decades and never once paid the cost to know it. The cost is the same today as it will ever be. Pay it now while the longing is alive and do not put off until a tomorrow that may never come the one transaction that matters more than any other your soul will ever make.

So, I bring you to the question this whole message has been driving toward and only you can answer it. Will you pay the cost? Will you let the self be dethroned and crucified, cast down the idols, give the unhurried time, silence the noise, and seek the presence of God with the whole heart, whatever it costs? Because the presence of God is available to you, not cheaply, not casually, but available on the same terms it has always been available to those who will pay the cost. The God who manifested His presence to Moses and to the saints of every age waits to manifest it to you if you will pay what almost no one pays. The cost is real and it is high and it is the very reason so few know His presence, but it can be paid. And the soul that pays it finds, on the other side of the cost, the presence of God that the comfortable, cost-avoiding multitude will never know.

Do not let this be one more message that stirs you and changes nothing, for that is the very pattern of the cost-free religion I have been describing. You can be moved by a message about the cost of His presence and then return unchanged to the comfortable life that pays no cost, having added a religious feeling to a life that never built the altar. The stirring is not the paying. Do not mistake the emotion you feel right now for the cost itself. Let it drive you tonight to the secret place to begin at last to pay the cost of the presence you have so long sought and never found.

So, go. Go and pay the cost of God's presence. Let the self be dragged to the cross and crucified in its last stronghold. Cast down the idols you have loved more than Him. Give Him the unhurried time that intimacy requires. Silence the noise. Lay down the device and be still. Go into the secret place and build the altar and seek His face with the whole heart, paying the cost the comfortable will not pay until His presence comes. And do not pay the cost once and turn back, but build the costly seeking into the daily discipline of your life, dying daily, seeking daily, waiting daily in the secret place until the presence of God becomes not a fleeting moment, but the abiding atmosphere of your life. Everyone wants His presence. Almost no one pays the cost. Be one of the few who pays it, and you will know what the cost avoiding multitude never knows, the manifest presence of the living God, worth infinitely more than everything it cost. In Jesus name, pay the cost and find the presence of God that almost no one finds.