Three Houses

 Aaah, summer

This afternoon Michelka was trying out her new little swimming pool in the back courtyard when Mirka called across the fence asking if we wanted to go to the lake so she also got to take her very first swim in Tabor’s beautiful Jordan.  Then not long after we got home the power went out as a super summer thunderstorm unleashed so she had her first candlelit bath.  …Three watery firsts in one day!

I want to conclude this little series of musings on what I’ve been learning about priesthood, & that with its’ logical end by which an almost unbelievable beginning is opened to us.  It has so challenged me to the core that I’m wondering at it daily with my mouth gaping open & asking myself, “Can He mean what I sense He does?”  But I do believe He does & so I’m endeavouring to respond in faith & to dwell in this dimension I’ve been spying.  A quote by Art Katz first by way of introduction…

“When we have become discontent with everything less & when we have staggered and reeled before the demands of this calling, then we come to see that to enter into this priesthood, we must enter into the High Priest Himself. The book of Hebrews brings us to the reality of which the Levitical priesthood was but a type and a shadow. There is a higher order of priesthood, more sublime, more exalted and more demanding - the order of Melchizedek, the king of righteousness and peace.”

What I have been spying is that when we are called into the High Priest Himself through the fulness of His ministry on our behalf & to be priests out of His priesthood, we are simultaneously called to dwell in the heavenly places with Him - to enter & have our essential beings with Him there in the Most Holy Place, in the very throne room of God, & to be sent from there. 

Most of us are familiar with His substitionary death for us by which our sins are atoned for & have therefore been united with Him in that dimension of His ministry, as a reality & not as mere doctrine.  I have only recently been discovering union with Him in the other aspects of the fulness of His work for & in us, again as living realities & not empty doctrines I agree with mentally: His identificational death by which I was crucified with Him, His resurrection by which His resurrection life lives in & pushes through me…and most of all His ascension, by which I have been seated with Him in the heavenly places. 

Before this year I have honestly never heard these aspects of the gospel, that I was invited into a living union with Christ to this extent of being seated with Him in the heavenly places.  But if that’s where He is today & I am in Him it can’t be otherwise; as bizaare as it sounds, that I am presently dwelling in heaven while my physical body is here on earth, I am beginning to believe it, to believe the gospel! 

 

A few weeks ago a lady at the playground invited me to come to a Moms group that meets at the parsonage on Wednesday mornings.  I went this morning & it was so interesting on so many levels!  There was a room for the children to be watched & play in while a priest had a talk for the moms in another room.  He talked about our primary identity being loved sons of God in Christ & living out of that, exactly what the Lord has been speaking to me about now for some months, so that was extremely interesting. 

It was also interesting to take up the invite & find myself in a Christian meeting (this one Catholic) & to experience it as a newcomer/outsider, though it’s all so familiar to me.  Quite a few of the women were woman I’d seen around town & with whom we always say “Dobry den”, so it was interesting to open the door, see them there & be drawn into this whole little network. 

Then in light of all the Lord has been unfolding about priesthood, it was also super interesting to watch the interaction of “The Priest” with the moms who might or might not understand their own priesthood & to be there as one learning to live out of His high priestliness.  I found myself thoroughly enjoying the life of Christ I encountered there this morning

Following on the initial glimpses of seeing God’s love as expressed in Christ serving us as the great high priest, I read some of Art Katz’s writings on priestliness - Apostolic Service: Priestliness, The Melchizedek Priesthood & The Apostolicity Of Incarnation. 

The nature of priestliness continued to become clearer, & in particular the relationship between priesthood & apostolicity.  There has always been this ire that rises up in me when I hear someone talking about very entrepreneurial people being ‘apostolic’ & it is clear to me now why that is, best stated in Katz’ statement that “There is no apostolicity without priestliness.”  I have also sensed this as a lacking element in the ’missional’ sphere.  It is what Christ said of Himself in John 10:36, that the Father sanctified & sent Him into the world.  He could be sent because He was first made a priest in nature - a holy servant, a love sacrifice, emptied of self. 

In the first article I mentioned Katz talks about all that was required for the consecration & ordination of Levitical priests before they could begin to serve (Lev.8&9).  Since that was the type & shadow of the greater priesthood to come that we are part of in Christ, the Melchizedek priesthood, I have been reading these passages with an eye for their realities that are found in Christ. 

Two things stood out to me in particular.  The first was the way that Moses washed Aaron & his sons with water before the entire assembly & then clothed them - they were made bare before the people.  The second was the 7-day period of waiting & staying at the entrance to the Tent Of Meeting, ministering first to God before man in a final & seemingly absurd requirement & time when what was shot through with ambition & self in them was brought into death. 

Somehow in the process of this consecration the priests seem to be made one with the Lamb & the sacrifices, becoming the sacrifices of love they would offer.  So with the believer He has made a priest & apostled.  He ministers the sacrifice of Christ to people out of His union & oneness with the Lamb, the high priest - Paul called it ”the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God” (Rom.15:16).

The theme of priesthood first came to me in the context of the last months in which God had been revealing His love in the gift of His Son in a deeper way than I’ve ever known before. 

All it took was one word in Watchman Nee’s comment on 2 Cor. 13:14 about the communion of the Holy Spirit.  He wrote that His ministry is realizing & making Christ’s finished work reality in us.  His ministry?  God serves us?  Then a few days later reading Ps. 117 & praising His great love for us I again saw the expression of it in Christ the suffering servant (Is.53) & the ministry of the Holy Spirit. 

Somehow to be given to truly see the God Who expresses His love by serving in this utterness of selflessness is to simultaneously see myself in His light & to know that there is nothing in me that suffices to love Him, my neighbour & my brother the way He commands it, the way He means love.  I first began to see the connection between servant-love & priestliness in Is.56:6 where the word for serve is the word often used for priestly service in Hebrew. 

It has been a Revelation 1:10-17 encounter with the Word as John saw Him, the eternal Priest-King in the order of Melchizedek.  “When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as though dead.”  That God should serve me is repulsive to my flesh that wants to ’serve’ Him first & everything in me has recoiled from it like Peter, “You shall never wash my feet.”  I’m discovering it’s one thing to hear ”God is love” for 33 years & quite another to hear, believe/receive it!

I posted earlier about how God had begun speaking about priestliness.  The depth of insight into priesthood that He gave was quite amazing &, as with any time that He gives revelation, now it is a matter of applying what He has spoken.  To do that it might be helpful to muse here some & attempt to articulate some of what I’m learning. 

Many things have made a deep impression but for tonight the one I’d share is this: For a few years now I’ve been very excited to see how God is demolishing the clergy-laity divide in His church as He re-establishes the functional headship of Christ in it.  In the New Covenant this is rightly referred to as “the priesthood of all believers” in place of the Old Covenant’s ’professional’ class of ministers.  Then it was the Levites but we still have the residue of the old with our present-day ‘pastors’ & ‘missionaries’ (or priests, etc. in Catholicism).  The ways the clergy-laity divide actually both seriously impedes the functioning priesthood of all believers & sets up men as idols in Christ’s place are very clear to me. 

But the thing that’s made the deep impression was the realization that I haven’t actually had a clue what a priest or a priesthood actually are!  When I started to ask myself what a priest is I came up quite blank.  And how can you be something if you don’t even know what it is?!  Ach jo, turns out this is yet another empty, disembodied religious word that needs to be fleshed out.

Well I’ve had 2 ultrasounds now in 5 days.  My doctor sent me for a genetic ultrasound because of the history in Keith’s family; even though the baby looked just fine she wanted to be sure.  And according to the genetic ultrasound everything looks fine with little Mr. Enns too - by all accounts this is a definite boy.  This doctor’s ultrasound put the due date on October 22nd & since my doctor had it as October 18th, he said “Ok, so October 20th at 17.00″.  This same doctor’s guess was actually only 2 hours off with Michelka so we’ll see how close he is this time!

We were in Brno on the weekend, in part so I could take in the last evening session of 24-7 Prayer European gathering there & also to see our friend Marc who had gone for the meeting. 

Our time with him on Sunday turned out very differently than expected when someone hit his rental car & sped off just as we were saying farewells.  We called the police & then spent the rest of the hot afternoon in the parking lot chatting while we waited for them to come & then to finish what they needed to do on-site. 

Though it was by no means the way I’d plan to spend an afternoon, I still can’t shake the feeling that there was an important lesson in it (besides that we got to things we hadn’t yet talked through when we’d first said so long) — like that justice must be served no matter what, even when time is seemingly wasted in the waiting & ‘important’ plans are put on hold?  I don’t much believe in accidents

Well this is interesting, seems revealing.  I’ve been at this experiment for a bit now in writing some snippet regularly as a discipline in learning to appreciate the sanctity of the day’s every moment.  I can see I’m tempted to slack off now at what is roughly the 6-week marker at which habits are typically either formed or not formed.  Whether or not I continue in this vein, it has been a helpful exercise!

The subject of the necessity of all our doing proceeding out of being is weighing heavily on my heart.  How contrary is that to the way the world defines people in terms of their function & to how we typically relate to each other!  So as much as I might write things I’ve been doing or even thinking, it seems most important today to just say that I am.  I’m not even trying to be or hoping to be (still my own doing)…  I am because He is.  Doesn’t the irony of how uninteresting that sounds taste so sweet?!

He has been speaking alot this week about our call to the reality of priestliness & how it is intrinsically related to apostolicity. 

It somehow seems so archaic in our day & yet ironically the restored revelation & reality of it is probably one of the greatest needs right now in Christianity.  I’m needing to digest way more before I’d have anything more to say on it except that I’m hungrily eating the word that’s coming!

One of the things God has been highlighting a lot lately is the predominantly defensive posture many Christian kids in my generation seem to have had modeled for them as opposed to an offensive posture.  

I first noticed myself replicating this on the train one day.  A couple ladies in our compartment were talking to Michelka in a way that really sat wrong but my very first thought was to try to shield her from it somehow (defensive - ie: keep the bad away) instead of how I could minister Christ to them, modeling the kingdom come (offensive - ie: overcoming evil with good). 

I notice it in how some other Christian moms talk about what school to put their children in.  They run through the problems with all the schools in town & conclude that none of them are a good environment for their children, true enough.  But there’s something in me that screams that this is all wrong…my heart tells me Christian kids must be able to be sufficiently equipped & strong to be the influencers instead of the influenced. 

It seems like this has everything to do with having a revelation of the kingdom & then that revelation being appropriated, substantiated, made real by faith.  Like on the train, this defensive posture is evidently still so engrained in me.  With a revelation of the kingdom, I can spy this dream of a Spirit-Christianity on the offensive, even for kids.  My very present-tense challenge though is to actually enter the reality of it by faith & to bring it to bear in every little moment, like on the train.  And just for the record, I don’t mean reverting to sickeningly ’Christian’ nice, I mean the kingdom - the two are worlds apart!

 

Well, it was mighty sweet to spend last Tuesday-Thursday up in Prague with the Mudriks.  We came home & then Elaine & the 4 girls came down to stay with us Saturday-Monday while the boys were away in Holland.  What a rich time we had! 

I wanted to get away with being in Prague where no one knew it was my birthday but Keith sms’ed Elaine just before he flew & she made an amazing birthday dinner.  The biggest challenge I sense Him putting before me these days continues to be really knowing Christ in the everyday-ness of life — and for that first allowing myself to be known.  I keep coming up against the utter impossibility of this in & of myself & the simultaneous invitation to receive His all-sufficient grace to accomplish it… 

Keith is flying to Sweden tomorrow & will be gone til SAturday & Michelka & I are going to go stay in Prague for a couple nights & visit the Mudriks.  Looking forward to some good adventures

It’s the second long weekend in a row.  Today it’s the commemoration of the end of the second world war.  It was a beautiful sunny day & we went for a beautiful bike ride today along the river.  It’s really hard to stay inside in spring so we went to the square in the afternoon to sit for awhile at our second favorite spot & enjoy the sunshine some more.  How profoundly Europe & the world have simultaneously changed & remained the same…

I just can’t get away from this theme of worshipping God’s holiness, the perfect harmony of all of His virtues — particularly as expressed in the seeming contradiction of mercy/love & His terrible justice/judgment.  The last 5 years of my life have been about the rod of His chastening & discipline as the highest expression of His love in just judgment.  Though my sin is surely forgiven He has not allowed me to get away with not experiencing the outworkings & consequences of it.

Art Katz has written a piece called “The Holocaust: Where Was God?”, subtitling it “An Appeal For Jewish Consideration”.  This is what one reviewer wrote about it:

“In a daring hypothesis - turning to ancient Hebrew scriptures as a key of interpretation to the most modern of all events, the Holocaust, - the author brings a challenge both to the agnostic secularist as to the religiously-minded that compels a searching reappraisal of one’s deepest convictions.”

The appeal He presents in it for Jewish consideration (and of the nations) is this: that “the sufferings that we have experienced as Jews, in all of the calamities of our history and including the Holocaust, are the fulfillment of God’s judgments forewarned prophetically in the concluding chapters of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy”. 

Having tasted His chastening I do not find this unlikely but rather highly likely.  Furthermore, I see the direct correlation between this question & our witness.  How does this appeal for consideration strike you? 

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Excerpt: “I had the privilege once to meet Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew and winner of a Nobel prize for peace. He himself is a survivor of the Holocaust and is probably one of the greatest authorities on the subject of the Holocaust. He is the most beautifully eloquent man and if there was no God, then he is a picture of Jewish nobility and ethical and moral sensitivity that would be the admiration of anyone. If there is a God, however, that very thing that we would otherwise be impressed by becomes questionable in the light of God’s indictment on the condition of mankind.

“I asked him privately: ‘Mr. Wiesel, to what degree would you be willing to acknowledge that the sufferings that we have experienced as Jews, in all of the calamities of our history and including the Holocaust, are the fulfillment of God’s judgments forewarned prophetically in the concluding chapters of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy?’ He looked at me for a moment in that kind of stunned silence and then answered: ‘I refuse to consider that.’”

I’m still meditating a lot lately on godly fear of the Lord.  Psalm 99 calls the nations & the whole earth to tremble & shake before the Lord & to exalt Him because He is holy.  A quote by Charles Spurgeon in His excellent work on the psalms hit me like a ton of bricks:

“The terrible Avenger is to be praised, as well as the loving Redeemer. Against this the sympathy of man’s evil heart with sin rebels; it cries out for an effeminate God in whom pity has strangled justice.”

Somehow this seems to describe something very deep & of great consequence that has gotten off kilter from the perfect harmony of His love/grace & justice/truth/judgments in our corporate knowledge of Him.  I find myself pondering the practical implications of this in our midst a lot…  What do you think?  Has ‘judgment’ become one of the dirty no-no words in Christian vocabularly?  Is God the Just Judge ‘out’?

 

We left Thurdsay for a little family get-away to the mountains in the north of Czech that we hadn’t been to yet & got back this afternoon.  Thursday we were in Pec Pod Sněžkou & the next morning took the chairlift to the top of Sněžka, the highest mountain in Czech.  You can see the people hiking it below from the chairlift (the longest I’ve ever been on for sure) & hiking would have been my preference following spring run-off but wasn’t so enticing in the snow.  In the afternoon we took a drive through the same mountains on the other side of the border in Poland & ended up in another mountain town on the Czech side, Špindlerův Mlýn, where we stayed last night.  I still don’t tire of the beautiful countryside in this country!

When spring comes again after winter I get downright giddy seeing the first buds on the trees & watching them burst open a little more each day with resurrection life.  Many times I head out with Michelka for little jaunts just to see how much more the little buds have opened…the amazing picture of His eternal covenant promise of resurrection & life out of death.

 

Wow did the team that came ever get a huge amount of work done at the farm.  They were such hard workers!  There were 13 people on the YWAM team from Texas with Scot & Misty Bower who are with 24-7 with their 2 delightful children.  Last night we had a farewell dinner on the square before they carried on first thing this morning. 

 

I/we were so impressed by their willingness to do any jobs we had for them - picking up abestos tile, hauling huge beams & debris of all sizes from the barns, digging trench, cleaning house, cutting wood & the most entertaining: manoevering an old farm implement out of the barn over huge gaps in the floor:)  Misty wrote about how the best part for her was being able to show us the servant-heart of Jesus & that beautifully sums what these guys were to us this weekend.  Thank you!   

I haven’t written much here yet about the farm I’ve mentioned a couple times, called Novy Mlyn.  In the last year we’ve gotten to know Mike & Nicola Robinson, originally from Birmingham, England but now living in Tabor after they bought a farm about a 1/2 hour out of town.  The property has a big farm house & 2 big barns on it along with a few other outbuildings.  Within the first hour of being there for the first time after having moved to CZ they watched the second barn collapse before their eyes, the first barn having collapsed during the heavy snows a couple winters back. 

Last summer they offerred to give us the patch of land on which one of the barns is situated, to join them in life there & in reconstructing the barn & the rest of the property.  We’d already been looking at buying something in the country in tandem with others somehow for a few years prior.  We were both inclined to take up their offer so in the last year we’ve been making baby steps in all the logistics involved in this rather massive project.

We were out there for the afternoon on Sunday & yesterday afternoon we spent a good deal of time cleaning up the farmhouse in preparation for a team that’s coming tomorrow to help out with manual labour - mostly a whole lot of deconstruction & clean-up in preparation to be able to re-build where the dilapidated barns now stand.

There’s a big beautiful full moon glowing orange tonight.  Thank you God for the faithful witnesses in the sky to Your beautiful covenant!

The feast of Passover and of Unleavened Bread begins tonight & my heart wells up with anticipation to celebrate the Christ of these feasts.  “Easter” comes & goes & nothing in me registers.  I can’t bring myself to say “Happy Easter”.  The church in the first century knew nothing of this discrepancy between the supposed Christian Easter & the Jewish PAssover.  They knew only Passover & Unleavened Bread, particularly as the Lord celebrated it with His disciples & as the early church celebrated it (daily) in the Lord’s supper.  

Many have seen Easter as another form of the name of the Babylonian fertility goddess Astarte, known in Hebrew as Ashtoreth whose poles the Israelites were commanded to utterly destroy.  It is not for me to go into this further here but a quote I heard in a radio interview with Frank Viola about his book Pagan Christianity? expresses what’s in my heart about Easter: “Christianity didn’t destroy paganism, it adopted it.”  Like with Christmas, I’m aware of that many see redemptive aspects in these celebrations.  As He’s been bringing these things to light the last years I’ve sensed the depth of His jealousy though & I’m skeptical that He’s pleased with the mixture & adoption of counterfeits vs. their utter destruction. 

I see this confusion, adoption & mixture as having had the very detrimental outcome of having muddied both the gospel & our practise of the Lord’s supper.  In other words, critical aspects of the revelation of the Christ of the Passover & Unleaved Bread & consequently our life together in Him (as symbolized by His supper) have been lost to us.  I’m advocating rediscovery & celebration of the Christ of the feasts.  The implications of all this for our witness, particularly to the Jewish people, weighs heavily on my heart.  I don’t see them being able to recognize their Messiah in a people who are not living feasts of Passover & Unleavened Bread (& the rest of the Lord’s feasts).  More is at stake than we know.

It was such a huge joy to be able to spend yesterday morning & this morning with our friend Lenka. 

She lives in another city, Hradec Kralove, but from what we’ve been experiencing together I know that the union of the whole universe in & under Christ as the ultimate end of the gospel is not God’s impossible utopian dream but an actual reality to be entered into — our own opinions & thoughts crucified with Christ & enjoying His one heart & mind together!  It was so amazing to share & discover that He’d been revealing & speaking the exact same things to both of us during the same period of time. 

What He’s been been opening up is the revelation of the gospel of the kingdom as the gospel of His Son (as Paul puts it in Romans 1) as the invitation to enter the kingdom by receiving the sonship the Father has conferred on us before the foundation of the world.  It’s opening my eyes to what it means to be known by God & I’m seeing that the heart & point of life is to receive the Father’s love & the life of Christ as the expression of it so as to be able to love Him & others in turn. 

I’ve heard these words all my life but have been chronically religious - ever hearing & never understanding, ever seeing but never perceiving - & therefore not being known & knowing these realities in the Hebrew sense.  He’s been revealing my heart & I can’t agree more with Jeremiah that the heart is deceitful above all things & desperately wicked.  I have no illusions about the human heart.  Its’ defenses & rebellion against the love of God wear innumerable disguises, the most effective being religion.  Indeed, who can know it except that He gives us the revelation of His love in Christ with the accompanying grace to believe/receive it.  Thank you Abba, Father!

What does being ‘known by God’ mean???  I can’t bear that these be more mere empty religious words I think I understand but actually don’t at all because they haven’t become experiential knowledge.  The implications are too great.  I can’t bear the thought of hearing Him say “I don’t know you or where you come from” or “Get away from me.  I never knew you“ as Luke & Matthew have it.  It seems to have everything to do with His word gaining entry into our hearts & His life/Spirit into our spirits, daily & momently.  According to the Light that reveals where we actually are versus where we think we are mine’s been pretty full of unbelief, disallowing Him to know me.  It’s freeing to learn I can’t even believe of myself tho but have to draw on the faith of Christ!

“‘The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God.”  1 Corinthians 8:2-3