Are You "Baking" every day?

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Do you bake every day?  I know I don't, even though I much prefer baking to cooking!  Today's blog has everything to do with baking, but not the kind that you and I are thinking about right now.  

While reading in Ezekiel 46 I came across a "family recipe,"  one that is as old as eternity past.  It is not your ordinary kind of recipe, but one that will produce the sweetest aroma you can imagine, and it reaches to the highest heavens!

As God is concluding His instructions for His chosen people through the prophet Ezekiel regarding the Millennial Temple and the ministry to be carried out in it, He speaks to Ezekiel about the daily sacrifices that will take place in the future.  Ezekiel 46: 13-15 describes the sacrifices as daily . . . morning by morning . . . a continual burnt offering.  On the surface it sounds like the offerings God spoke to Moses about when the very first temple (the Wilderness Tabernacle) was being initiated.  How strange to think about that offering as one that will also be taking place in the Millennial Reign of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, after tribulation!

As I pondered this sacrifice, my thoughts turned to the here and now.  Was there a way for me to offer this kind of sacrifice to God . . . now?  I went back and read the verses again and the Spirit began to open my eyes to this passage's relevance to me today.  This is what He showed me.

The first and most important sacrifice is the sacrifice of the spotless Lamb, without which I have no reason to offer a sacrifice to God.  Jesus is the focal point of my worship, worship which should be happening every single morning, on a daily basis.  With my eyes firmly fixed on the altar of His sacrifice, the old rugged cross, I can see Christ the Lamb as who He truly is, and I also can see myself in light of the that, humbled in my sin and need of Him daily. 

Now I will be able to bring God my proper and true worship, the grain and the oil.   When you "moisten the fine flour" of the Word of God, which is the truth God has given us,  with the "oil" of the Holy Spirit, you only have a sticky, gooey dough.  But when you bake it in an oven (Ezek. 46: 20), you create bread,  baked daily, as you bring the right ingredients together!

Our daily life is the oven in which the bread bakes.  Even as the priests took the flour and the oil, mixed them together, and baked them outside of the temple, so we, the chosen, royal priesthood, are to take the flour (the Word) and the oil (the Holy Spirit) and mix them together. . . daily, morning by morning, for a continual offering!  As we take that "dough" out into our earthly walk, it bakes in the heat of this world and becomes bread.  This bread is the fruit of our walk, which others can then partake of!  This is true worship!

John 4:23-24 says this:

"But an hour is coming, and NOW IS, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in SPIRIT and in TRUTH; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.  God is spirit, and those who worship Him MUST worship in SPIRIT and in TRUTH."

Isn't it time for the body of Christ to begin to take BAKING a little more seriously?  Make a plan for yourself.  Determine that you are going to mix up a batch of dough every morning as an offering to the Lord.  Then take that dough out into your daily life, and watch how it bakes!  It is time to feed the hungry, but we cannot feed them if we are not, in our own lives, mixing up the batter of the Word and the Spirit and sticking the batter into our lives.  We cannot feed Christ to the world if we are not baking bread!

  

The Distant Sound of the Trumpet Call

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Do you hear it?  It is not the blare of a trumpet, but it is a trumpet call nonetheless.  God is calling this Christian generation to a lifestyle of holiness.  For too long we have been "winking" at our sin or simply turning a blind eye to it.  But God neither winks at our sin, nor does He close His eyes to it.  

One of the biggest problems I see in Christianity today is that we are living lives that are sinful and impure, but we are not attacking our sin and impurity.  We seem to be quite content to peacefully co-exist with unholiness, with a great sense of "entitlement."  We know that we are believers and that our eternity will be spent in heaven, so we tend to let sin off of hook instead of daily dealing with it by surrendering to the Spirit and with the repentance that should follow our surrender.  We are very good at telling God we are sorry for the sins we commit, but are we good in the area of turning around from our sin so that we can walk back to God?  Do we really desire to walk on His highway to holiness?

While reading in Ezekiel the past several days, some truths jumped off the page for me to consider.  Ezekiel's message was to Israel because they, as God's elect and chosen ones, had fallen far away from His commandments, and were guilty of assumption that God would do them no harm.  They even had "prophets and priests" claiming that God didn't really see what they were doing!  My heart has taken notice that it would be easy to think, that because I am now in the family of God, my sin really is irrelevant now because I am covered by the covenant.  It is easy to think that now, and it was easy to think that just prior to God exiling His own people to Assyria and Babylon.  

Ezekiel 16: 1-14 outlines God's merciful grace to Israel when they were nothing but a sinful group, just like the rest of the world.  He declared to them, "Live!"  Then He entered into a covenant with them. Ezekiel reminds them that God then bathed them, washed off the blood on them, anointed them with oil, and clothed and adorned them.  Having done all of that, He made them beautiful, famous, and full of splendor.

Now I have to ask.  Isn't that exactly what He did for you and me?  He offered us eternal life through His Son, and when we accepted it, He entered into covenant with us, and us with Him.  He baptized us into His family, washing away our sin-stained hearts and continues to wash us with the water of the Word of God.  He anointed us with oil by sending the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, and we wear robes of righteousness when we walk in the Spirit, obey the righteous commands of God.  God has made the Gentile believers, who were once no part of God's chosen,  to be beautiful and full of splendor now.

Ezekiel 16: 15-29 tells the sorrowful story of Israel's ultimate trust in themselves and their "beauty."  The result of that was their idol worship that took their trusting eyes off of God, focusing instead on the gods of their own making.  They exchanged the "jewels" of  God, His bountiful blessings, for those activities, thoughts, and beliefs that fed their own flesh.  Having forgotten the place out of which God had saved them, Israel now turned to their selfish ways and began to live again like the world around them, trusting more in the world than in their God.  Chasing every other god and idol around them, and doing whatever they wanted to do, they still seemed to think that their one true God didn't mind.  Yet He said to them just prior to taking them into exile, "Were your harlotries so small a matter?"  Israel never seemed to catch on that they never were satisfied living in the ways of the world.

Have we not, in this 21st century, created the exact same scenario for ourselves?  We trust more in our ticket to heaven than in the God who stamped the ticket with His own blood.  We have exchanged the many blessings He bestows on the repentant and obedient for what the world and our flesh can give us.  We, too, have forgotten the wretched state that our Savior pulled us up and out of, desiring more to jump back into that "miry clay," thinking that our lifestyle of "some" sin is okay with God, because He has saved us from sin and death.  And He is saying to you and me today, "Are your sins and the things you put before Me a small matter to Me?"  The answer seems obvious.

In Ezekiel 16: 30-43 God called His people harlots several times, and also referred to their lovers whom they had chosen far above Him.  Are we not His people, too, who have chosen so many lovers (mostly ourselves) over Him?

Finally, in Ezekiel 16: 44 an old proverb is quoted, "Like mother, like daughter."  For Ezekiel's day Israel was the mother, and Judah was the daughter.  But if we Gentile believers were grafted into the branch of Israel, adopted into the original family, then Israel is the mother, and we are the daughter.  God is saying we are just like them, doing exactly what they did.  He didn't like it then; He doesn't like it now.  If you look at verse 47, He also declares that what the daughter is doing is more corrupt than the mother.  That would seem to be true, given that Israel had no fulfilling Sacrifice, no Holy Spirit and no written Word of God.  We have the privilege to partake of all three, yet we are unwilling to surrender ourselves and turn from the wicked idol worship present in us all.

I cannot speak for you, but I know that this message has convicted my heart and causes me to desire to walk according to the calling on my life, to be holy because God is holy, using the "everything" that has been given to me for life and godliness.

These are the ideas that God spoke to me about in His word this morning.  They are a trumpet call to me.  Maybe they will be to you, as well.  The trumpet is calling me to put away my sin for good.  Is it calling you to do the same?