Question: if a person is held hostage, what is the word for the money paid to set that person free?
Answer: Ransom... We'll come back to that.
Welcome to part two of our series, Under Construction.
We view our lives as God's continuing construction project. If you are a Christian, God is hard at work building something in you.
God is building your heart to be a suitable home for Christ.
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love... (Ephesians 3:17)
There is a literal, physical construction project in the Bible that we are using to illustrate how God makes your heart a spiritual construction project to be a suitable habitation for Christ.
That is the construction of the Tabernacle. We introduced the Tabernacle last time.
The Tabernacle was a tent, built as a portable worship center for God's people, when they wandered in the wilderness, back in the days of Moses.
Every part of it symbolized something important. The colors, materials, fabric, textures, the layout, the rituals, everything. It was all very precise and very exact.
Last time we talked about why.
That's because...
The Tabernacle represents on earth the whole body of TRUTH that originates in heaven.
1 - The first part of God's construction project is to anchor your life to truth.
Anchor your mind to truth, anchor your emotions to truth, anchor your instincts to truth, anchor your choices to truth.
Body, soul, and spirit, mind, will, and emotions... everything inside of us constantly pinging the eternal truths that flow from the heart of God.
That's what the tabernacle stands for, and that's the first part of God's mystical, spiritual construction project in your heart. To deliver you from the lies, from the matrix, from the deceptions of a world gone mad... and to re calibrate you to... truth.
True truths. Absolute truths. Eternal truths. Transcendent truths. Reality stays real. Truth stays true.
Jesus said, this is the difference between building your house on the rock vs building your house on sand.
Truth comes first.
What comes next
After truth, the second thing we need to reconstruct in our society is our topic today.
I invite you to meditate with me on the topic of:
I want to develop this with you today. In theology it is called dominion, or reigning in life. The founders of our country called it Liberty.
If you're going to construct a life...
A marriage, a family, a society, a country, a church
Any institution... or person... or group...
If you are going to make it a great home for Christ, then, alone with truth, you have to make freedom a core, central, constituent, non-negotiable foundation.