Reply To: The Holiness of God, Chapter 11 – Holy Space and Holy Time

[Lynne MazzaHilway]

“In our society religion is limited to a kind of personal therapy. Ours is a profane existence, no sense of the presence of the holy. There seems to be an unbridgable chasm that cuts us off from the arena of holy, doomed to live days chained to the profane. We feel an aching void that seems to be filled by the holy, a meeting with the Absolute Reality, a meeting with a holy God who forms the center or core of human existence.” God created and fashioned us with this void that can only be filled with Him but sadly too many of us too much of the time try to fill it with anything but Him. “God is not at the edge of Christian lives but at the very center; God defines (or should) our entire life and world view.”
Here again in this final chapter we see transitions or “thresholds that signal a change from one realm to another, one stage or status to another. (It’s here where) Christ meets with His people to nurture them and strengthen them in their sanctification; (here) in sacred space and sacred time that Christians find the presence of the holy. The bars that seek to shut out the transcendent are shattered.” I’m still reading Ezekiel and he too refers to such thresholds where “they will no more defile my holy name by setting their threshold by my threshold.” Too often we don’t see or respect these transitions or the holy – “you have not kept charge of my holy things” Ezekiel writes. We see we haven’t come very far.
Sadly people feel” trapped and seek relief from the here and now”, where Lewis says “except in the present can the Eternal be met”. No wonder God encourages us to be still, in the moment where Heaven can meet earth. So challenging with all the distractions and anxieties, why we need His Spirit even to help us receive the inheritance and possession of Him.

And we forget and take for granted that holy moment we transitioned from death to life, we’re born again! Such a moment of sacred time, “there is a holy purpose to history, even our salvation. A sacred space marked as a phase of passage, a spot of a new beginning, passage from destruction to redemption, a bridge (Christ) from profane to holy.”

Lord may we revere and honor our worship, prayer and revelation of You as times and places of Your sacred holiness where we enter Your presence and You enter ours.