Our devoted time of worship should be as if we are taking a trip. With any trip you take, there is a destination. The holy place is our ultimate destination in worship. Thinking in terms of the Tabernacle, we enter His gates with thanksgiving and come into His courts with praise. The old chorus you are probably singing in your head now stops at the inner court, as you know. Unfortunately, that is also where most people stop in their worship. They praise and thank God and glorify His name, but they don’t take the time to commune with the Father. The holy of holies is the place where we have communion with God. We sit at His feet surrounded by His glory. We enthrone Him on our worship. He inhabits the praises of His people! This is where Jehovah God, Creator of heaven and earth, the Ancient of Days, invites us to dwell! He is the reason we live and breathe. Why would we not want to enter into His dwelling place? If given a special invitation to have a private dinner with the President of the United States, what kind of person would go through the main gate of the White House property, enter the doors into the foyer, and then not go into the banquet hall when summoned for the meal but instead decide that the foyer area was as far as he wanted to go? Would that person not be thought of as a fool? Would that not be disrespectful toward the President? Then why should we do that in our worship when it comes to entering through the veil into the holy place? Furthermore, could it be that we are dishonoring God by not fully accepting His invitation?
The veil of separation between the inner court and the holy of holies was torn when Jesus breathed His last breath on the cross. The Father has enabled us to go in and out of the holy place as we desire. Without going into a full explanation of what each chamber represents in the Tabernacle, the holy of holies is where God’s presence resides. It is all about Him. No flesh or unclean thing is able to stand in the presence of God. In the Old Testament, the priests were not even permitted to sweat while in the holy place. Does this mean that we must be perfect before we enter into the holy place? Absolutely not. We will never be perfect until that day in which we see Him face to face before His throne in heaven. However, He sees beyond our faults.
“Yet now has [Christ, the Messiah] reconciled [you to God] in the body of His flesh through death, in order to present you holy and faultless and irreproachable in His [the Father's] presence” (Colossians 1:22, Amplified Bible).
If we are worshiping in spirit and in truth as we ought, then we should be being honest with ourselves and attentive to the Holy Spirit as He reveals to us our flesh. There is a process of cleansing where each time we enter His presence, He will cut away a little more of our flesh. It is our flesh that hinders the will of God from going forward in our lives most of the time. Whether it is sin, disobedience, offense, or apathy, it all comes down to the flesh—our human nature. God will not allow these to coexist with Him. This cutting away is our spiritual surgery to remove the dead human nature so that our spirit may live and thrive in Him. So when we come into the holy place, we must be cleansed and purified by the blood of the Lamb if we desire to be made into His image more and more.
Now that we have entered into the presence of God, we have been cleansed by dying to our flesh, and we have communed with the Father, now is the time when the dark glass through which we see gets a bit clearer. You see, at this point we are at a place of total surrender to the Father. Our focus is on Him only. Will we see Him face to face in the holy of holies? No. For God told Moses in Exodus 33:20 “You cannot see My face, for no man shall see Me and live.” However, what God makes clearer to us is who He is. He begins to reveal to us more of His attributes. If a distant road sign has been pointed out to you while driving on the highway, you might only see the image of the sign at first without seeing the details or information contained in it. But if you continue driving toward the sign, the words or symbols on the sign become clear to the point that you are able to read and know what it is the sign is telling you. It is similar as we are focused on God in worship. The more we worship in the way I have described, where our destination is the holy place, the closer we come to Him and thus we are able to see more of His attributes. The more of His attributes we see, the greater the revelation we have of His nature. As the revelation of His nature increases in us, so does our knowledge of God and His ways. The more we know of God, the more we have to worship. I believe we spend far too much time laboring in prayer to find God’s will and guidance for our lives. If only we would just sit at His feet and worship Him, we might already know these things because we would know Him and be more familiar with His ways. This is the Father’s ultimate purpose for us—to know Him. He desires to make Himself known to us.
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