Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
I had a great week with being back home, Thanksgiving holiday, and all of my family together for a few days. It was a real treat to have everyone together. I am home for a bit now and looking forward to catching up on several things as well as some needed family time. God is good and it is a good day to be alive.
I have been addressing the need to experience and embrace the fire of God in our lives. God is a consuming fire in that His presence consumes what can be consumed and His presence captures the attention of our hearts and minds. The fire of God is found in the manifest presence of God. This was the case when Moses received the Law from God.
Exodus 24:16 Now the glory of the LORD rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day He called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. 17 The sight of the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. 18 So Moses went into the midst of the cloud and went up into the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.
It was in the manifest presence of God that Moses received the Law, how much more do we need the presence of God in our lives that gives us His grace that changes our hearts and minds from within. The context of Hebrews chapter 12 is receiving a covenant that has a greater glory than the Old Covenant of the days of Moses. God’s presence in our lives will consume what can be consumed but it will also give us the reality of the unshakeable kingdom of heaven in our hearts and minds. Eternal things become realities from within us by God’s manifest presence in our lives.
1 Corinthians 3:16 Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
The good news of the New Covenant is that in Christ we are a temple of Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is the messenger of God sent into our lives to cause us to each be a message of God’s amazing grace. To be a message of life we must be fully joined to the messenger of life.
Malachi 3:1 “Behold, I send My messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts. 2 “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderers’ soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness.
The context of Malachi is that God was not seen by His people for who He really is. They did not honor Him as their Father and could not even see Him as a master as they would a master among men. Their offerings were not what He desired. He wanted them to know Him for who He really is. The priests had not given their lives for the Father’s will or for the children of His name, but God was sending the remedy to their problem. He was sending His Messenger that would be like a refiner’s fire within them and a soap that would wash away the stains of sin in their lives. I believe that Messenger is Holy Spirit. Jesus came as the word made flesh so that through Him, we can be made a testimony of the word of God in our lives. He made it possible for us to live our lives as sons and daughters of God, the Holy Spirit within us testifying that we are His children. Our former lives of flesh are transformed to be members of the body of Christ filled with Holy Spirit. We are priests of God attending to the fire of His presence in our lives. By this we are being transformed to respond to God rightly and to make offerings that testify of the character, nature, way, power, and authority of our heavenly Father in this world. Our hearts are turned toward God as our Father, and our hearts are turned towards the generations of His children for the glory of His name. The fire of God is within our hearts.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
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House of Bread Ministry
3210 Meridian St.
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