It's 2:17 A.M Wednesday morning, July 11, 2007 and once again I've awakened completely out of my sleep. This has been ongoing for well over 2 months now and believe it or not, this is the first morning that I'm not beyond frustrated.
Let's back up to Sunday, July 1, 2007. The sermon ministered on that day was about Worship. Amazingly enough I left church feeling as if i'd finally received a clear message regarding my inability to sleep through the night. Prior to July 1, my only two prayers during those hours were "God please help me go back to sleep" or "Okay God, if there's something you want to say, please do so because I need to go to sleep, I have to work tomorrow." (LOL). With my new revelation I decided that I'd greet the next sleepless night with worship to my Lord.
Okay, it's 2:17 A.M and I'm doing all I know to enter into worship and nothing is working. An hour later, I'm back to being frustrated. "Once again, up for no reason. I can't even enter into worship" were the thoughts that flooded my mind. Immediately I quieted my mind and whispered this prayer "God, please teach me how to worship you in spirit and truth. If I've gotten away from the most basic of principles, please reteach me."
All along my dear friend and fellow LLOP sister, Taliah, was on my mind - even during my attempts to worship. Since I was slap fresh out of ideas and still unable to sleep, I decided to give her a call at 3:30ish A.M - (**Taliah, love you girl;-). Taliah and I talked for quite awhile. Somewhere in the conversation we began talking about God's faithfulness. I would say something and she would respond; she would say something and I would respond. Before I knew it I was sitting upright in the bed, rocking back and forth, raising my hands, shaking my head...just all into the conversation. In His faithfulness, He gave me an image of the mercy seat and how it was positioned in the middle of two cherubims, angles who are seen throughout scripture "guarding" the temple or throne of God; accordingly, they are also associated with the presence of God.
In Revelations 4:6 -11, the cherubims appear in John's revelation of the Throne Room; they are facing each other crying out "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come." In Exodus 25:17-22, God instructs Moses to collect an offering from the people so that he may build God a sanctuary. The sanctuary was to include a mercy seat, made of pure gold. The mercy seat was to sit in the middle of two Cherubims that would be facing each other. In other words, the faces of the Cherubims were to face the mercy seat from opposite ends. The mercy seat is where the Lord told Moses that He would meet and speak with him. (Are you getting the revelation yet?) Again we see in 1 Chronicles 13:6 another mention of God dwelling between the Cherubims. The text says "David and Israel went to Baalah to bring up from there the ark of God the Lord, who dwells between the Cherubims, where His name is proclaimed."
See, Taliah and I were behaving like Cherubims. In essence we were crying out to one another "holy, holy holy" and in the midst of our exalting Him, we were creating a mercy seat...the place where God's name is proclaimed; the place where He promised to meet and speak. It was such a blessed time on that phone. We had entered into a form of worship and it was awesome. What was even more awesome is the fact that not once did we attach God's worth to anything that He did for us. Not once did we say, God is so good because he gave me this, or God is so good because he gave me that. No, nothing. It was all about Him. We cannot measure God's worth based on our lives, we measure our lives based on God's worth. We have to know that regardless of good times or bad times, He IS worthy of our praise. He IS worthy of our worship. He IS worthy of our best.
If I may, let me draw an analogy of God's instructions to Moses in Exodus 25. Pretend that the bible was written in 2007 and He's instructing you and me. Here are a couple of translations:
Offering = worship
Mercy seat = place where God abides, dwells, meets & speaks
Pure gold = pureness of heart
Cherubims = us (per scripture, the Cherubims actually had faces of humans)
Play around with those translations and see if the scripture becomes more relevant to you. Actually Matthew 18:20 reiterates how God abides in the midst of 2 or 3 that are gathered together in His name.
I'm really interested to hear back from you all so please comment via the blog and let me know what you think. Until next time, much love from my heart to yours (got that bit from Paula Deen:-).
**See also Ezekiel 10:1-20 for more info on the Cherubims.
***In case you're wondering, Taliah and I ended our conversation at 5:59 A.M.
~Barbara
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