Pastor Ian shares the message ‘Weight and See (God’s Measure of A People)’. Exodus 37:17-24.
What is the difference in the construction of the Lamp stand, to the other instructions given by God in making the other implements in the Tabernacle?
In other instructions, God was specific with measurements (length, width and height). However, the lamp stand was different as it was a weight measurement.
It was a representation of the Holy Spirit who is given without measure, the heaviness (Hebrew = Kabowd) of God’s presence.
An instance of the Kabowd can be read from 1 Kings 8:10-11
“When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple.”
1 Kings 8:10-11 NIV
What does this mean for us?
We cannot treat His presence in a casual way.
We need to have an understanding that when we come to a Holy God, we cannot do anything but fall on our knees before him.
The presence should illicit in us a humility moving us to give Him the honour that he deserves.
The way God measures how we are doing is not by our service or our ministry, how many people we have in the house or in membership. He does it by measuring the weight of His presence in the lives of His people.
The lamp stand is not a candle, where it consumes itself. But the lamp stand gives its light by way of the oil that is poured into it. The presence of the Holy Spirit gives our lives its true substance.
We need to make more room for God to do greater things.
With an artist like Michelangelo, he looks at a block of marble and sees the beauty in it. We would ask Where? God is the same with us. He looks at what are crude vessels but sees all the beauty and potential that is in us.
LikeThis is how the church was birthed.The Apostle Paul says:
“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love”
Ephesians 1:4 NIV
The church came into being by a beating process, because Christ Jesus the lamb of God was the block of Gold and it was God who worked in Him. ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise/crush Him. Isaiah 53:10a
The church was birthed out of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Christ Jesus took the beating for us and then returning to the Father but not before He promised to send the Holy Spirit as a comforter.
With the coming of the Holy Spirit, there came into being a glorious body of spirit empowered believers called the church.
The light of Christ needs to illuminate more in us for us to be more effective in and outside of the church.
The lampstand didn’t make the light, it carried it. The same is true for us we do not make our own light but shine the light of Christ through the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
When the philistines captured the Ark, the representative presence of God. David went to retrieve it to bring back to Jerusalem, the only problem was He was bringing it back the way it had left on the back of a cart.
David and the people failed to honour God’s presence. As it was brought back, it should have been borne on the shoulders of men, the Levites. . Those carrying it would have felt it’s weight. It was meant to rest upon people’s shoulders.
It is the same today we are the priests of the new covenant and we are called to bear the presence, the weightiness, the heaviness of God not on our shoulders but within.
We pray that we would once again become a reverent people to carry His presence. Allowing his Holy Spirit to illuminate in our lives, the things that we have neglected and those wrong things we have allowed in. May His spirit cause in us a mourning for the loss and a reverence for our relationship with Him. Let Him renew your Spirit today.
As we carry His presence, watch, wait and see what God will do.