Friday, June 20, 2008

An Invitation

From Psalm 24

7 Lift up your heads, O you gates;
be lifted up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.

8 Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty,
the LORD mighty in battle.

9 Lift up your heads, O you gates;
lift them up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.

10 Who is he, this King of glory?
The LORD Almighty—
he is the King of glory.

One might wonder why, if he is the Lord of hosts, he needs to stop at the door and ask for admittance. But it is part of the greatness he put into man—dominion over the earth and the power to choose who will rule here. Just as in the Narnia Chronicles, it took representatives fro Adam’s race to determine the destiny of Narnia, so we as dscendants of Adam and children of God have the authority to open the doors of earth for heaven to come in.

Generally doors are not lifted up, they swing outward on hinges. But tonight, in a spirit of worship, I lifted my hands. I began to sense that I was also—without words—interceding for my students. My hands were receiving what heaven had determined to pour out upon them. Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century French monk, practiced the presence of God in a very simple way—he kept his heart lifted up to You. Many times I have done that, humming to You, if possible, and Your anointing has come and brightened faces, healed differences between students, and caused lethargic students to run after me, eager to turn in an assignment which normally they wouldn’t bothered to do. So our hearts and our hands, the actual doors that welcome the King of Kings, don’t swing outward, they “lift up their heads” so that “the King of glory may come in.”

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With slight alterations, this is a journal entry I wrote in 2002 for a class on "Psalms," taught by Sandy Gulso at Midwest Bible School.

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