Being With God...While Letting Him Be God (Part 2)

The Spiritual Formation movement, has emphasized the immanence of God:

a.k.a. being with God. 

Immanence is God's closeness, the truth and experience that He is always with us 


(see "Being with God...While Letting Him Be God: Part 1).
The practice of being with God is drawn from the major figures in Church history who communed with God in practical, everyday ways. These ancient sources of spiritual reform have been tapped into by the modern spiritual formation movement. 

The movement's goal is to see and experience God in the everyday, for Him to be relevant in daily activities. 


Yet, in God's relevance, one can slowly presume that God's involvement in daily activities is all that He does, all that He wants, and all that is important to Him. I.e. that God is only doing what we perceive Him doing. 

We can limit our relationship with God to only His attentiveness to us, and forget the vast intrigue of His mystery, other-ness, and power. 

For us to have a healthy spiritual formation of being with God (immanence), we must have a healthy understanding of God being apart from us (transcendence). 

Psalm 50 says, 

12 

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

    for all the world is mine and everything in it.

God is independent of us, and does not need us at all. God "being with" us can slip into believing God needs us or that God is like us. 

God doesn't need us, He wants us. This is why His love can be unconditional. 

And God isn't like us, He is different, but He has chosen us, created us, and made Himself relate-able to us. This is shown in His commitment and pursuit of us at the most through Jesus. 




Jesus brings together God's transcendence and immanence into one person. 

It is because Jesus is God that He can make us fully human.

And it is by His humanness that we can finally be holy with God. 

Through Jesus the inaccessible God becomes part of our daily existence.