Re: Love and Temples

The following is an excerpt from George MacDonald's sermon, "The Consuming Fire," and I do believe it speaks plainly into the necessity of consecration and purity in our lives.

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor.... For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected-not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this be hard to understand, it is as the simple, absolute truth is hard to understand. It may be centuries of ages before a man comes to see a truth-ages of strife, of effort, of aspiration. But when once he does see it, it is so plain that he wonders he could have lived without seeing it. That he did not understand it sooner was simply and only that he did not see it. To see a truth, to know what it is, to understand it, and to love it, are all one. There is many a motion towards it, many a misery for want of it, many a cry of the conscience against the neglect of it, many a dim longing for it as an unknown need before at length the eyes come awake, and the darkness of the dreamful night yields to the light of the sun of truth. But once beheld it is for ever. To see one divine fact is to stand face to face with essential eternal life.

For this vision of truth God has been working for ages of ages. For this simple condition, this apex of life, upon which a man wonders like a child that he cannot make other men see as he sees, the whole labour of God's science, history, poetry-from the time when the earth gathered itself into a lonely drop of fire from the red rim of the driving sun-wheel to the time when Alexander John Scott worshipped him from its face-was evolving truth upon truth in lovely vision, in torturing law, never lying, never repenting; and for this will the patience of God labour while there is yet a human soul whose eyes have not been opened, whose child-heart has not yet been born in him. For this one condition of humanity, this simple beholding, has all the outthinking of God flowed in forms innumerable and changeful from the foundation of the world; and for this, too, has the divine destruction been going forth; that his life might be our life, that in us, too, might dwell that same consuming fire which is essential love.

Let us look at the utterance of the apostle which is crowned with this lovely terror: "Our God is a consuming fire."

"Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire."-We have received a kingdom that cannot be moved-whose nature is immovable: let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all, and will have them all pure. The kingdom he has given us cannot be moved, because it has nothing weak in it: it is of the eternal world, the world of being, of truth. We, therefore, must worship him with a fear pure as the kingdom is unshakeable. He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakeable may remain, (verse 27): he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. When evil, which alone is consumable, shall have passed away in his fire from the dwellers in the immovable kingdom, the nature of man shall look the nature of God in the face, and his fear shall then be pure; for an eternal, that is a holy fear, must spring from a knowledge of the nature, not from a sense of the power. But that which cannot be consumed must be one within itself, a simple existence; therefore in such a soul the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a man to flee, not from him, but from himself; not from him, but to him, the Father of himself, in terror lest he should do Him wrong or his neighbour wrong. And the first words which follow for the setting forth of that grace whereby we may serve God acceptably are these-"Let brotherly love continue." To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire.

Often we idealize the love of God as something filled with compassion and tolerance, gentleness and meekness- we love the love of God as it is Jesus picking up children and responding to the thief on the cross next to His own. What of the nature of His love that loves to purity? What of the love that drove men from His Father's house? What of the love that called the pharisees white-washed tombs? Do we desire that nature of His love in our own lives? We have been called to be holy as He is holy. To not be taken captive or succumbing once more to a yoke of slavery once having been set free. We love referring to our lives as God's new temple- the place His Spirit dwells and resides, filling us with His joyous presence and overwhelming love. Have we yielded to the love that will ransack our very lives and drive out all that cannot be in His presence? Do we ask Him to love us in that way? To receive the love that makes it possible for us to be near Him is to ask for and seek out a love that is far more umcomfortable and irritating than the love that we picture so often, yet that is HIS love- can we deny Him His nature? God is love... but God is not tolerant of sin. The definition of grace is not the ability to live in sin, but the idea that we are alive at all. To ask and accept the love of God is to submit to His purification... to allow/invite His removing of all that is not of Him. It is a consecrating love... a purifying love... a sanctifying love... but no doubt a terrifying one at times! Let us press on in His love, all of it, the nature of it wholly, not partially- for the same love that drove Him to purify a temple built with human hands, that which falls away in its temporality, must drive Him to purify that which is built of His blood and Holy Spirit. Are we submitting to that work? Are we counting the cost? Are we asking for the purification that hurts and burns away what cannot be near Him?

We ought to be.

"For our God IS a consuming fire," not that He MIGHT be... He IS. What has He left to consume and what keeps us from offering it to Him RIGHT NOW?

Ref:
Matthew 21
Mark 11
Luke 19
John 2
1 Corinthians 3
2 Timothy 2
Titus
Hebrews 12
James 4
1 Peter 1-2