One thing have I desired of the Lord; that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple. – Psalm 27:4
When God spent time communing with Adam in the Garden of Eden…what did they talk about?
All of Adam’s needs were met, there was no disease, distress, debt or disaster to worry about…so what did Adam have to talk to God about?
What was the purpose and focus of their fellowship together?
Two things.
- Beholding the beauty of the Lord
- Inquiring in His temple
Beholding beauty…and inquiring in the temple.
Now we understand from Scripture that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19) aka the “house of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4).
So if the Lord is the Lord, and your body is the house of the Lord/the temple…then the “I” that seeks to “dwell in the house of the Lord. ..” is your Spirit.
Remember: you are a Spirit, you have a soul (mind+will+emotions) and you live in a body.
And through the Internal scanner of the Scriptures, we can see that the One true desire of your Spirit (the real you) is simply:
- to live in your body as long as it can just so it can
- behold (chazah – have a vision and contemplate with pleasure) the beauty of the Lord and
- inquire (baqar – to inspect, admire, care for, consider, search, seek out)
When you put these all together, you suddenly see the Masterpiece work of Art that Jesus paid for on the Cross to restore to the hands of His Father.
And it’s a beautiful picture of your Spirit simply spending time gazing, marveling and wondering at the beauty of the Lord all the time…With the same way a baby can spend hours marvelling at the wetness of water or the “fingyness” of his fingers or squeal with delight when he lets go of the side of his cot and doesn’t fall over immediately.
This simple delight in the beauty of simple things is the delight your Spirit – the real you – longs to take in simply beholding the beauty of the Lord.
A big obstacle to this goal though is one question:
How is beholding the beauty of the Lord going to pay the bills/clear the debts/put food on the table/help with getting the dishes washed?
Or asked another way:
“This perfume is worth a year’s wages! Why wasn’t it sold and the money given to the poor?” (John 12:5)
Both of these are implying and stating that the time and lavish attention spent just beholding the beauty of the Lord is better spent elsewhere on matters of a much more practical nature.
But John 12:6 reveals that this question is the question of the thief:
But Judas did not really care about the poor. He said this because he was a thief. He was the one who kept the money box, and he often stole money from it.
The moment you lavish your time, energy and attention on the Lord, you place it beyond the weakly grasp of the Thief who comes to “kill, steal and destroy”…and you place them in the hands of the One who came to give you Zoë: “life, and life more abundantly” (John 10:10)
And the place you receive this abundant life, this Zoë is the place of your Spirit dwelling in God’s presence NOT to talk about lack, needs, daily struggles (because you trust your Father to take care of those) but rather to contemplate with pleasure the beauty of the Lord and to meditate, revel in and inquire within the temple.
That’s the place of Zoë, and that’s the place where you are transformed into the person God created you to be…The person who will “work the greater works”.
But it starts by dwelling in the place of Zoë, the place where you allow your Spirit to simply dwell in the presence of the Lord to behold his beauty and inquire in His temple.
But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. – 2 Corinthians 3:18