As I was studying Emmanuel this week, I found a new take on this verse:
"How lovely are Your dwelling places, YHWH of hosts!" (Psalm 84:1)
"And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)
"And I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will place them and multiply them, and I will set my sanctuary in their midst forever. My dwelling place also will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people." (Ezekiel 37:26-27)
"For we are the temple of the living God." (2 Cor 6:16)
I never realized that that verse from Psalm 84 is talking about US! I've had it memorized for so long because it got immortalized in "Better Is One Day," but I never really understood it.
And my favorite part is that we are lovely as His dwelling places, not because we're lovely in and of ourselves, but we are inherently so because He chooses to dwell among us and in us.
So those are my thoughts for the week. Merry [late] Christmas, all!
Hi Pearl, Thanks for the Christmas encouragement. Made me think of Corinthians where Paul says, "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's spirit lives in you?" I think your/our surprise has been felt in many places by many people throughout space and time. My bias is that genuinely trusting the reality that I am a temple and God's spirit lives in me is the single most difficult truth for me to accept as a child of God. I think my damaged heart wrestles with the idea that "this is too good to be true!" By faith I hear Christ giggle, "Yep. You can't handle the truth. But, happy days, the truth, by grace, is handling you."
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