Heart Tracks - Sacred Life

"Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Exodus 3:5....Live with a sense of sacredness."....Chris Tiegreen

I'm convicted by this Scripture and by Tiegreen's words. Are you? In His Word, its stated that we're not to "treat what is holy as if it were profane." Volumes could be written by how easily we do that in the church today. Holy life, holy living, are not popular subjects in the modern church of the west. We like to emphasize how loving, forgiving, giving, compassionate, merciful, and welcoming God is. Not a lot is said about His holiness, and though He is all of the above and infinitely more, He is holy. So holy that if He were to show Himself fully to our flesh, we would be destroyed. Even when we do acknowledge His holiness to some degree, we don't say much about His command to "be holy as I am holy," which are His words and not mine, or any other preacher or person. Revelation tells us that His throne is surrounded by myriads of angels who proclaim constantly, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty."

In Exodus 3, when the Father appeared to Moses in the burning bush, He told him that the ground he stood upon was holy ground. It was holy ground made so by the very presence of God. Shouldn't it be for we who believe that He is with us wherever we are, that the ground we stand upon in His presence is holy ground as well? Wherever we are, whatever we're doing, we do so upon "holy ground." I have written down in my prayer journal that I would treat every place I might be in the course of a day as holy ground. This means not just in what I do or say, but in my thought life, my attitudes, and my desires. Doing so is impossible in my own strength. I cannot come close to living out that prayer in any way but by living each moment and day with Him in front of me and before all else. I think that this is what it is to live a sacred life. I think living such a life is day by day journey where we learn, by His grace, how to do just that. It requires an act of our will to consciously live with Him before us, yet empowered by His grace to do so. We may stumble at times to do so, but the stumbling is the result of our letting other things, people, desires and thoughts come before us instead of Him. What we fix our eyes upon becomes what we fix our hearts upon as well.
Yet here's the joy; His presence through His Holy Spirit pursues us, places Himself and His holiness before us, and calls us once again to live upon His holy ground. To live that sacred life. To not treat as profane, that which is holy.

The lure of the profane is everywhere. It places that which is not worthy before us and steals our eyes and hearts from the only One who is worthy. And we end up living profane lives, worshiping profane things, when it is the sacred life that we were created for. Profane life or sacred; which are we living? Are we living with Him before us in all things, or have other things taken His place? Isaiah spoke of the "Highway of holiness, where the unclean could not walk." I want to walk that highway, made clean not by keeping rules and regulations, or by my own efforts at being holy, but by the work of His Holy Spirit, and the empowering of His Life upon mine. Wherever we stand today, He makes that ground holy. May our lives reflect that reality.

Blessings,
Pastor O