One Encounter Away from Breakthrough: How God’s Presence Transforms Lives

I don’t know when we first began to routinely use the word encounter in our churches, but it certainly has a new level of attention—and familiarity—in recent years.

Its use became particularly prominent in the 1990s and the Toronto Blessing and the outpouring of the Father’s love. We now use the word encounter often to describe an experience of meeting with or hearing from God, being touched by His power, or having our life interrupted by a revelation or manifestation. Of course, most important of all, we use it to describe our first encounter resulting in our salvation.

There is a danger, however, when a word or theme enters a season of popularity. It gets introduced through fresh revelation and then quickly creates an assumption of understanding, a familiarity of language, and even an assumption of experience from the pulpit that isn’t necessarily true. We must ensure that the language of our faith is always connected to a life of faith. We can so easily compartmentalize our Christian experiences and language, and none perhaps more so today than encounters. Yet moves of God for centuries have begun at a place of encounter. The Bible is a historic, holy, and beautiful journal of ordinary men and women who encountered an extraordinary God.

Because the term encounter has become overly familiar in many settings, let me attempt an explanation, if not a definition, as it pertains to this journey on which we’re embarking.

An encounter is first and foremost an intimate, though not necessarily individual, point of connection with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is also a point of transformation or exchange. Encountering goes beyond a mere meeting; it stops me in my tracks, as would be the case if I encountered a dangerous animal while walking. I cannot continue the journey without making corrections and alterations to the way in which I walk.

Living in Northern California for fifteen years, my wife and I were aware that we could encounter a mountain lion or bear while out walking. If that occurred in our locality, adjustments would be made. First, we would change the way we walked: we would not travel alone, and we may even adopt the American way of always packing (a gun, legally of course). And so it is with a true encounter with God. It will cause us to walk differently, be filled with the spirit, and therefore never travel alone, and also always carry power with us wherever we go.

One of my wife’s and my favorite comments by pastor Bill Johnson, when talking about a person who needs a breakthrough, is, “They are only one encounter away from it.” It is a belief, based on hundreds of testimonies through the ages, that an encounter with God will change the hardest heart, heal the deepest hurt, restore the most broken relationship, and turn around any life—regardless of how hard they are running away from or against God. Certainly that was the case for Saul on the road to Damascus.

Saul’s Conversion

I invite you to come with me as we walk through the moments of encounter on that dusty road. It is surely one of if not the greatest turn-around in history. Saul, the zealous opponent and prisoner of the law, became the zeal-filled preacher and demonstrator of the gospel and a free man of grace.

Many translations of the Bible refer to that portion of Acts 9 as “Saul’s Damascus Road Conversion” or “The Conversion of Saul.” While the experience did, indeed, result in a conversion, limiting it to his conversion alone misses his complete transformation: the convergence of his past and preparation for all that God had for him. It is not unlike reducing the Kingdom of God to the church. All of the church is in the Kingdom, but not all of the Kingdom is in the church. All of Saul’s conversion is in the experience, but not all of his transformation can be understood by the use of the word conversion. Saul wasn’t just converted, he encountered the resurrected Christ.

I prefer to call it the ultimate encounter, for it surely altered the way Saul thought, his vision for his life, his daily steps, his values, and his companions, to name but a few transformations. It is perhaps better described as a completion of this scholarly Benjamite, Jewish, Hebrew, Pharisee, and zealous man, language he used in his writing to the church in Colossae, “And in Him you have been made complete, and he is the head over all rule and authority” (Colossians 2:10 NASB95).

Encounters have invaded my study, thinking, experience, and expectation. But now, in a more revelatory and personal way, they have become my journey, inspired by Saul’s/Paul’s journey. As we travel this road together, we’ll begin to see that encounters are not so much about a destination, but about the process—their impact and outcomes. As you agree in your heart, you will begin to see more. It is a simple principle, seen often when we decide to buy something new, especially a car. It actually has a name, the Baader-Meinhof syndrome. Suddenly it seems that the car we have decided on is everywhere. You will find the same to be true as you seek encounters. You will hear of them more, recognize them in the lives of others, see them in the Bible, and, I believe, have more encounters yourself.

A personal goal of mine in life and ministry is to avoid definitions or stories that limit or seem unreachable. If an experience is presented in overly spiritual or dramatic ways, it can cause people to negate their own more “simple” experiences. Our Christian lives were never meant to be ordinary, but in the ordinary moments, they must always allow us to be hungry to pursue greater things, rather than feel that others’ encounters are out of our reach or that ours are of a lesser value or significance. Everyone reading this deserves to desire, pursue, experience, and maximize life-defining encounters however long or short, big or small, ordinary or extraordinary.

We have all been commissioned as priests and therefore our pulpit, academic qualifications, experience, and expression must avoid division within the bride of Christ. Some of the greatest expressions of God are through people who have no letters to their name, no pulpit, no dramatic experience, their expression is not famous yet their calling is lived out daily because they saw, heard, and believed that God had encountered them.

My desire is that we all experience and are presented with an attainable, achievable, attractive, applicable, and accessible Christianity. All while always maintaining the marvelous, inexplicable, supernatural, and mysterious. In other words, we need an accessible relationship with God, which always requires that we live by faith, are conscious of an unseen world, and constantly confront the impossible in the name and power of Jesus. The road to relationship is narrow, the invitation to enter has specific requirements. It can even be described as exclusive. But once in the family of Christ, the experience becomes inclusive in that everyone can experience all that belief in Jesus offers, and that includes encounters for all.