God Lives in You

Get this – God is living inside of you! Wow! What a bizarre concept.

But will God indeed dwell with men on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built. – II Chronicles 6:18

Third Day sing a question, “All the heavens cannot hold you Lord, how much less to dwell in me? I can only make my one desire holding on to thee.” Quite frankly I don’t like this song. Don’t agree with it either. Yet it does have a good point to get across. How is it possible to hold Him in our hearts when even the heavens cannot hold Him?

God cannot be defined. He cannot be put in a box. “Good definitions,” according to Weirsbe, “must set limits, but they must also leave room for expansion. It’s all right to put up walls so long as you include a door and a few windows.” Some, for example, have put God into such a nice little box that they’ve arrived at the adamant conclusion that He no longer performs miracles. I’d rather risk leaving Him that window open.

Solomon designed a magnificent temple and God filled it to overflowing and more. God made His own temple – our bodies – and put eternity in our hearts. God is so big that only eternity can hold Him. And so that “God-shaped vacuum” in our hearts is where our eternity lies. Or, as Pascal suggested, we have a thirst that remains unsatisfied unless satisfied in Him.

We must have our lives so filled with God’s presence that we are no longer necessary.

So that the priests could not continue ministering because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. – I Kings 8:11

May this be the case in our own lives. Our bodies are now His temples. We must allow ourselves to be so filled – in every nook and cranny – that we overflow with His fragrance. Ian Matthews wrote, “Where God finds space, He enters.” So may He fill our hearts (those vast, wide, open spaces) to the brim so that when we spill He spills from our lips. We need to be filled with so much of Him that we are no longer ministering but rather that He is ministering through us.
Thus, as He ministers through us, we will flood the world with His glory.

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. – Habakkuk 2:14

Reminds me of the song Dive by Steven Curtis Chapman. “But we will never know the awesome power of the grace of God until we let ourselves get swept away into His holy flood.” I want to drown in the knowledge of His glory. Lewis wrote of beauty to say, “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (emphasis my own). I want to bathe, even drown, in the beautiful knowledge of His glory. This is not a merely intellectual knowledge. This is to know as Adam knew. Adam knew his wife and next thing you know she was pregnant. This is more than intellectual, this is an intimate knowledge. It is practical, but more so, it is relational. It has to do not with experimenting, but with experiencing. Although Lewis was referring to the physical beauty of women there is a beauty which is even greater. Woman was created last. God was saving the best for last. She is the crown of creation. And, as one of my favourite poets said, “Women. Whatever they ask of us we can do. If we can’t do it, it doesn’t exist. And if it doesn’t exist we’ll invent it for them.” But for all the beauty that they possess – all the beauty that even you possess (which is a lot) – there is only one who merits the term ‘sublime.’ That is the beauty of the glory of God. That is the beauty that fills us. And that is the beauty we need to drown in.