by Clive Mcpherson

Created on: April 05, 2009   Last Updated: April 06, 2009

To answer the question of whether God is within us or not, let me start by telling you about myself; my first memory of praying to God is as a boy growing up in England, where I was taught the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:1-4, which I loyally recited whenever I was requested to do so, during morning assembly at school and in Sunday school at our local church.

I did not fully comprehend the depth of what the prayer was about, nor did any of the adults around me take any time to explain; in fact they most likely did not fully understand it themselves.

Much later in life, I started searching for a meaningful and personal relationship with God, and during that search was when I began to grasp the hidden truths of that simple yet very powerful prayer.

If you just read the words of the prayer at a surface level, then from just reading the first six words of it, "Our father, who art in heaven", you are immediately led to believe that God is outside of you. This is because of the way our minds have been programmed; at the mere mention of the word heaven, we instantly think of some ethereal place, up above and beyond the skies.

So, since the Lord's Prayer already tells us that God (our father), is in heaven, I used this as a starting point on my quest to fin God.

God is in heaven, so the next logical question to ask in our search for God is, where is heaven?

As a child I was led to believe that heaven is somewhere out there, over the rainbow, and so my prayers were naturally aimed towards this invisible deity hiding above the clouds. The way I was taught to pray was as though I am talking at God, seeking favors from Him. One of the great discoveries in my search was that it is possible and more beneficial to listen to God. In my normal style of praying, I was not listening to what God had to say to me, and on the odd occasions that I did try to hear what God had to say, I tried to hear with my natural ears and I was focused on receiving the answer from up above me somewhere.

Once I started paying attention to biblical scriptures like Luke 17:20-21, which says "the kingdom of heaven is within you", then my whole approach to finding God took a dramatic shift, accompanied by equally dramatic results.

By simple reasoning then we can deduce that if God is in heaven, and heaven is within you, then God is also within you.

There have been debates over whether the literal translation is meant to be "the kingdom of heaven is within you" or "the kingdom of heaven is within

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