Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
Today I am in Bellingham. I am looking forward to some days at home after being on the road for several weekends. I was blessed this past weekend to have my granddaughter spend the night and several people in my house for our ‘church at home’ Sunday with Alife. It is still winter here and it is much colder than it was in Africa. My body is adjusting to wherever I am.
For the past weeks I have been addressing the content of Psalms Chapter 84. This Psalm describes the psalmist’s desire to be a place where God lives and to be someone who invites others to know the life and freedom that comes from being a place of God’s habitation. The psalmist was proclaiming the truth that God intends to make known to all mankind. God has always desired to dwell in and among His children.
The basic problem of the Old Covenant was that man could not relate to God on a personal basis. The power of God’s prophetic nature was not fully attainable by God’s people because they were limited in their ability to hear God for themselves. They were bound to the limitations of their flesh. The true longing of their souls and the true cry of their flesh could not be satisfied within the limitations of an Old Covenant relationship. They lacked the power of God within them that would allow them to do all that the prophet spoke. They could attain to a measure of prosperity, but they could never be established. This is true for us today if we choose to pursue a path of a knowledge from God but fail to prioritize on a being intimate with God. Jesus made a way for us to be a living temple wherein abides the Spirit of God. This is a greater temple than any created structure of form of worship created and facilitated by man. God is the builder of our lives by changing our hearts and minds by His manifest presence within our hearts.
God wants to establish us as His sons and daughters in the earth and into all of eternity. He doesn’t just want to bless us in this life. He wants us to have and to know eternal life. That eternal life is to know God the Father and Jesus the Son in an intimate and personal way by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (Jn. 17:3). We can find a testimony of this in the story of Jehoshaphat when he chose to adhere to God’s presence in the face of his enemies.
2 Chronicles 20:20 And they rose early in the morning and went out into the Wilderness of Tekoa; and as they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, “Hear me, O Judah and you inhabitants of Jerusalem: Believe in the LORD your God, and you shall be established; believe His prophets, and you shall prosper.”
It has never been God’s intent to merely prosper His people. He has always desired to ‘establish’ them. We find this to be true throughout Scripture. A good example is found in Isaiah 61:1-3:
Isaiah 61:1 “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 2 to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn, 3 to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.”
The goal of these three verses of Scripture is not just that we might prosper. God has much more in mind for us. God’s goal is not just to give us riches for our poverty, healing for our brokenness, or freedom from our captivity. His goal is that we might be ‘established’. There is only one reason that God brings freedom and prosperity into our lives. That is so that we might become the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified. God intends that there be a people with a personal relationship with Him. He desires to have a people who will ‘believe Him’ that they might be ‘established’.
We must believe God in order to be ‘established’. To believe God means that we must first have a living relationship whereby we can hear Him and relate to Him. We must live in His presence. We have been called to be the place of His dwelling. It is in that place that we can be ‘established’. This was not possible in the Old Covenant, but for just a few. In the New Covenant, Jesus has made a way for this to be the real world for us all.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
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House of Bread Ministry
3210 Meridian St.
Bellingham, WA 98225-1728
