Week 4 we’re looking at what it means to be the Bride of Christ, and specifically how we were created for intimacy with God. We are a kingdom of priests made to minister unto God and we are His temple, His dwelling place.
Thursday night we focused on why we set ourselves apart as a priesthood, looking at Psalm 65.
40-Day Focus – 3/25/10 – Bridal Identity: Intimacy – Priests to the Lord / Psalm 65 (9.1MB 20min)
Week 4 we’re looking at what it means to be the Bride of Christ, and specifically how we were created for intimacy with God. We are a kingdom of priests made to minister unto God and we are His temple, His dwelling place.
40-Day Focus – 3/23/10 – Bridal Identity – Intimacy / A Dwelling Place for God (11.8MB 26min)
“…the Bride has made herself ready…” Revelation 19:7
A couple weeks ago I mentioned the two major things that I see God doing as He begins to move the Church towards that reality: 1. Revealing the beauty of Himself as the Bridegroom God to make us long for that day. 2. Revealing who we are as the Bride of Christ that we would understand where we’re going. Last week we covered the first – how God is revealing Himself as the author and finisher of the great drama of redemption and capturing our affections and our passions in a great worship and prayer movement. This week I want to begin looking at the second: God is pouring out a revelation of who are we in Christ, and specifically, who are we as the Bride of Christ.
Scripture is remarkably clear, not only about God’s desire for relationship, but about what specifically that relationship looks like. Using images that we would all be familiar with, we’re called His children, His body, His house, His friends, His temple, His garden, His servants, His army… One image in particular, though, is the Spirit’s image of choice at the end of the story. It’s not the Spirit and the friends that cry come, or the Spirit and the army… it’s the Spirit and the bride. Why is that? Perhaps because more than any other image, the image of bride and Bridegroom captures the fullness of what God wants to accomplish in His church. The image of the bride captures the two themes contained in all the other images – intimacy and partnership – and wraps them in the language of love, passion and desire – the central message behind the story of redemption.
Made to touch God
This week I want to fix our thoughts on the first of those two central elements of our identity – we were made for intimacy with God. At its simplest intimacy simply means nearness – we were made to be with God where He is (John 17:24). God did not create and then step back to observe, He created the world, set man in it, and then set Himself it – walking in the garden with Adam in the cool of the day. God’s end objective is a return to that nearness (and even more so) by the work of redemption as God again dwells with man (Revelation 21:3). The fundamental reason we were created was to be with God. More specifically, though, not to just be with Him in physical proximity, but to be aware of His nearness and joyously so, and for Him to be joyously aware of our nearness. We were made for fellowship with God – interaction with God in a way that touches our hearts and touches His.
God has been working from beginning to end to have for Himself a kingdom of priests – a people created to minister to Him in the presence of His glory. There are awesome parallels in the Old Covenant that begin to give us a picture of what New Covenant Christianity is all about. The very first thing God does after saving Israel from the hands of their oppressors is to offer them a covenant, and at the center of that covenant He asks them to build the tabernacle – the place of meeting.“And there I will meet with the children of Israel, and the tabernacle shall be sanctified by My glory. So I will consecrate the tabernacle of meeting and the altar. I will also consecrate both Aaron and his sons to minister to Me as priests. I will dwell among the children of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them. I am the LORD their God.” Exodus 29:43-46 In the New Covenant, we are the priests (1 Peter 2:9) – God is jealously reclaiming His house as a place of meeting and His people as a priesthood set apart to minister to Him. God Himself desires to dwell among us and the revelation is coming that it was for that very reason that He delivered us.
I sometimes try to imagine what it would have been like to “go to church” in the days of Moses. I suspect it would have been slightly easier to remember why you’re there – it would be awfully difficult to have gone to the tabernacle and had your attention mostly on the priest, or the Levites playing their instruments, or the crowd of fellow worshipers… the giant glory cloud coming out from the Holy of Holies would likely have prevented that. The truth is our modern form of corporate gatherings allows very little time for what the central purpose of the tabernacle was – meeting with God. It’s something we need to be aware of, and consciously working to shift – to get in the mode of coming together to meet with God – very much aware of the presence of the Guest of Honor. Jesus is zealous about our remembering that His house is meant to be a place of meeting for God and man, and not treated otherwise – “My house will be called a house of prayer.” Matthew 21:12-13
Made to host God
Besides being the priesthood, the glory of the New Covenant is that we are also the temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). We were made to host the presence of God. I believe there’s coming a shift to presence-based ministry – where our focus is first inviting the presence of God and creating an atmosphere that is welcoming to Him and then doing the works of ministry. In Jeremiah 2, the prophet describes a terrifying reality – the glory of the Lord has departed the temple and the people aren’t even asking “where is the Lord?” Instead, they go on about doing the stuff… without God. God is stirring up an urgent insistence in the hearts of His people that we must first acquire the presence of God, and then move. A cry is arising like that of Moses (Exodus 33:15-16) that God’s presence is all that we have that distinguishes us from the world and we refuse to be without it.
With that cry comes a great shift in the way that we operate – with an intentional focus on welcoming God’s presence and creating an atmosphere suitable for God. From the beginning, it has been our chief assignment. Adam was assigned to tend the garden (Genesis 2:15) – the place where God met with man. The Israelites received regulation after regulation on how to maintain the tabernacle – why? Because it is no common thing for the presence of God to be among us and we are to honor His presence by intentionally laboring towards hosting Him. There is a new wave of holiness coming – not out of regulation, but out of reverence over the awesome invitation to host God’s presence. God is calling His people to step into the role of priesthood – ministering to Him and maintaining the fires of sacrifice that invite His presence.
The fruit of intimacy
Biblically and practically, intimacy promises us three great benefits: fruitfulness, joy and unity. Intimacy with God is the cure for powerless Christianity, it’s the cure for boredom and anxiety, and it’s the cure for division and compromise.
Our power comes only from connecting with God. It is His power in us that releases power to heal and conviction in preaching. ““Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”” John 15:4-5 As we prioritize intimacy in our lives and ministries, we will see more and more of the activity of God.
Our joy comes from our hearts connecting with God’s in the way they were made to. Nothing can ever satisfy the human heart apart from connecting with the heart of God. God is just plain too jealous to let it. He created us for Himself and He will fully satisfy every desire of our heart, but nothing else ever will. As we enter more and more into who we are as a kingdom of priests, there is a great wave of joy coming – “in Your presence there is fullness of joy and at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11
Our unity with God, and then with each other comes from our being joined to Him (John 17:20-23). If we look more like the world or our particular group’s ideals than like God, it is the inevitable result of being in closer contact with others than with God. There are only two ways out of that – get farther from the world (move to the desert) or get closer to God. As we awaken to the glory of who we are as the temple of the living God, not only near Him but in Him and Him in us, our closest fellowship will become with Him, and He will become our greatest influence.
Highest praises
Part of the vision God has given me for my life is awakening the song of Revelation 5. I believe we’re beginning to hear whispers of it, but I can see in my heart the day that it fully lays hold of us and becomes a glorious roar of praise. God is awakening an awareness of the glory of who we are in Christ Jesus – more than delivered, more than forgiven, more than saved – redeemed unto God as a holy priesthood. Before this thing is done, that’s the reality that is going to fill our hearts with highest praises for the Lamb of God.
“Now when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll, And to open its seals; For You were slain, And have redeemed us to God by Your blood Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, And have made us kings and priests to our God; And we shall reign on the earth.”” Revelation 5:8-10
Scriptures for meditation: Psalm 65:1-4, Psalm 132, John 15:1-17, Revelation 5:8-10, Revelation 21:1-4
Week 3 we’re focusing on the central shift that is coming: God first. The reality that God is the author and object of all of creation. Tuesday night we focused on the worship movement and God’s desire to awaken hearts to His glory.
40-Day Focus – 3/16/10 – God First / Calling Forth a Worship Movement (10.1MB 22min)
One of the best descriptions I’ve heard for what’s beginning to take place in the Western church is ‘a Copernican revolution’ – the center of our universe is about to change. Copernicus was the scientist who made the audacious claim that it was not the sun that revolved around the earth but the earth around the sun. Similarly, one of the single biggest heart shifts implied in “My house will be called a house of prayer” is in God taking His place at the center. As much as we understand the importance of God – how His light lets us see, His nearness comforts us and His continual presence allows life to continue – we are still prone in our human pride (and particularly our Western culture) to place God in a revolving role in our world rather than our world revolving around Him. God wants to change that… and there is no more glorious change. Nothing so drastically impacts our corporate and personal relationship with Christ as when He takes center stage.
In the beginning, God…
It begins with a simple revelation – God is the beginning, the middle and the end of the story. “For of Him, to Him and through Him are all things.” Romans 11:36 His desire is the initiative, His grace the vehicle and His pleasure the end of it all. It’s a crucial revelation – to the way we understand the gospel, to the way we function as a church, and to the way we relate with God. Our culture would put a humanistic slant even on religion – making it begin and end with us: we do our best in this life, God responds and we are either blessed or cursed accordingly. It’s a model that fits perfectly well with the religions men have created, but it’s totally contradictory to what God has done in Christ. God is the divine initiator – He moves and we respond.
It’s what makes the gospel message what it is – a divine invitation that must either be accepted or rejected. The emergent watered-down gospel that teaches there are many ways to God makes the very wrong assumption that it is God who responds to us – we behave in a particular way, and God doles out salvation in some formulaic manner. From that framework it’s hard to see why God would respond more positively to a good atheist than a bad Christian. The truth of the Biblical gospel is that God, who had no requirement to interact with man at all, by His own initiative reached out to humanity and extended an invitation – an offer of covenant. Like every covenant, the New Covenant was not a negotiated contract between two parties but a one-way offer from God to join us to Him and His eternal life through His extravagant offer of love on the cross. Because God extended the invitation we are left with only two choices – accept His open arms or scorn them.
It’s not just our gospel that errors without this understanding, though, it is the very way in which we live out Christianity. The silence of our prayer rooms makes a terrifying contrast with the busyness of our church programs. We suffer from a profound over-abundance of services, programs, teachers and ministries, and a profound lack of the voice and activity of God. We will never regain the activity of God in our midst so long as we maintain a system where we’re so busy doing what we’re doing we can give only a small portion of our attention to seeking what God is wanting to do. We won’t regain the voice of God in our midst so long as our pastors are so busy managing all of the programs needed to keep everyone happy that they’re not spending long hours in prayer receiving the word of the Lord. There’s coming a return to God as the divine initiator of every good thing – a shift from a programs-based culture to a prayer-based culture. Every program, no matter how good, will eventually fail to satisfy, because Christianity was intended to be an ongoing interaction with a living God, and God is too jealous to let anything else work for long.
Perhaps most critically, though, I’ve found this revelation to be the single greatest factor in my relationship with God. The more real this truth is in my heart, the more I find myself able to cease from striving and connect with God. Without it we are open targets for the chains of empty religion. Ours is the God of the first move. It is no mistake that He is pictured as the Bridegroom and we are the Bride. The whole of redemption’s story testifies to it – He has set His affections on us and is courting us. It is Him knocking on our door, not us knocking on His. He created us by His own initiative, revealed Himself by His own initiative, redeemed us by His own initiative and joined Himself to us by His own initiative. The trap of religion is sprung loose at that revelation – “we love Him because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 We love Him not to earn His affections, but because we already have them. It makes all the difference in the world when we come to God not because we need to (though we do), but first because He wants us to. “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory.” John 17:24
Regaining our fascination
The tragedy of getting things in the wrong order is not just that we spend far too much effort trying to win God’s affections when we already have them, it’s also that we pay far too little attention to allowing God to win our affections when that’s what He most desires to do. Jesus says it clearly – “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.” Matthew 22:37,38 It’s not a command to work ourselves up to acts of extravagant devotion out of our own strength – God wants to fill our hearts and minds with a genuine passion for Him that overflows into a life of devotion. Right now much of the body of Christ in America is bored with God and so we find ourselves powerless to overcome the struggles of our hearts and minds. We get our entertainment and our passion from the same place the world does, and then we wonder why it’s so hard to live as a child of God rather than of this world. It is only in feeding our hearts and our minds upon the glory of God and the wonders of His love that we will truly find power from the inside out to be the set-apart people we are called to be.
Much of what has been introduced in the Western church in recent years for the sake of ‘relevancy’ is a thinly disguised effort to make church more entertaining – a tacit admission that we don’t really know what it means to be fascinated with the superior pleasures of knowing God. God wants to take us there, but we won’t force it on us. He’s doing the courting, but we have to say yes when He knocks on the door, give Him the face-to-face time He wants and pore again and again over the letters He has written us that tell us what He is like. Jesus knows exactly what it takes to produce love in us, and He is committed to do it – “And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” John 17:26 It was what He came to do as God-incarnate on the earth and continues to do by His Spirit in us: proclaiming the glory of who He is. There’s a fresh wave of that coming… God is stirring hearts to the high calling of beholding Him and adoring Him. He’s raising up messengers whose central message is proclaiming Him – His beauty, His power, His love. He’s raising up singers, musicians and songwriters who will declare the goodness and greatness of God in a way that stirs the hearts of men. God is releasing a worship movement.
Regaining our passion
When God takes center stage, our passion will be rekindled – not only for God, but for the things God is passionate for. Confronted with an expression of Christianity that is lacking in passion for the many good things that God has called us to – loving our neighbors, acts of justice, giving to the poor… – the response of the emergent church has been to deemphasize the message of God and emphasize the message of passion for godly activity. This may bear some fruit in the shortterm and certainly has popular appeal with a generation that has been called the most socially conscious generation in history, but longterm it’s a disaster and a totally unnecessary one. When we divorce the things of God from God Himself they not only lose their effectiveness, but we begin to rely on human passion and not on God’s passion.
God is raising up His own move of passion for the things of God, but His move stems from passion for the heart of God. From the furnaces of the prayer movement, God is releasing a justice movement, a missions movement, a compassion movement, a signs and wonders movement… No one is more passionate for the things of God than God Himself. If we find that our expression of Christianity is largely devoid of passion and purpose, the answer is to stare into the heart of Christ and find His passion and purpose. No one is more committed to the lost, the poor, the oppressed and the hurting than Jesus. As God’s holy, jealous desire gains entrance into our hearts, we find a sense of purpose in our journey – both inward and outward. It was Christ’s relentless, passionate love for the world that stirred men like Paul to not only reach out to the lost and hurting, but to pursue them relentlessly even when rejected, scorned and persecuted. There’s a fresh wave of that coming… God is stirring hearts to the high calling of inquiring of His heart and becoming friends of God. He’s raising up messengers who make known His heart – His passion, His plans, His purpose. He’s raising up intercessors, evangelists, justice workers and missionaries who will be gripped by the heart of God and labor to see that heart manifest in the earth. God is releasing a prayer movement.
Responding to God’s initiative
What would it look like if God were exalted to the center in this way? What if we could actually offer each other and the world something that was initiated not by men but by God? What if we lived in the place where our hearts were fascinated by God and His story? What if we found our identity and our purpose by diving deep into the heart of God? What would it look like if the people of God came face to face with God… who He is, what’s on His heart, and our place in it all? What would it look like if we lived there in a Christianity that was not about activities but an ongoing encounter with a living God?
What will it look like when… God is zealous for it. He’s committed to it. He will not rest until He has it, and the Divine Initiator has already set things in play to bring it about. The only question now is how will we respond? Will we be early-adopters that press in to the new thing God is doing and lead the way? Or will we wait until the old really falls apart and the new becomes urgent? ‘Jesus, come and take Your place in the center of it all.’
One thing I have desired of the LORD,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the LORD,
And to inquire in His temple.
Psalm 27:4
Scriptures for meditation: Ps 27:4, Col 1:14-16, Ps 16, Mt 22:36-38, Phil 3:7-12, Eph 4:11-16