God of the Vessel

You've probably heard someone say they're having a "spiritual experience." Living on a mountaintop, totally in touch with the eternal, on fire for the Lord, fully confident in His love for them. In fact, most of us have been there at some point in our lives of faith. These are the restoration weeks, the conferences, the challenges that we don't want to come home from. 

But what if that's not what's going on? 

We think we are human beings who sometimes have these incredible spiritual experiences that draw us closer to the original creation, to who we were meant to be, to the way that God really designed things. But what if, as the old saying goes, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but instead, we are spiritual beings having a human experience? 

That is closer to the truth. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth to hold the experience that He was going to give us. After He filled them with day and night, light and darkness, land and water, birds and animals, He bent down into the dirt and formed the first human being. 

But the first human being wasn't anything; Adam was just dirt. That's even where his name came from - Adam comes from the Hebrew root for "dirt." And the dirt there laid lifeless - formed, but lifeless - until the Lord breathed the breath of life into it, until He filled it with His spirit. 

The body is just the vessel that God created to hold the spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:46).

Think about it for a second. You probably have a number of dishes in your kitchen right now that are named for the kind of food they are intended to hold - a coffee cup, a cake plate, a soup bowl. But if you're anything like me, you're just as likely to drink tea, not coffee; to eat chicken nuggets off the "little" plate; to pour cereal into that "soup" bowl. 

The question then becomes...is it still a soup bowl if it's filled with cereal? 

And the answer, of course, is that it was never a soup bowl to begin with. It was simply a bowl, merely a vessel. Until it was filled, there was nothing else we could legitimately say about it. 

So it is with our bodies. We have these physical bodies, these vessels, but until they were filled, they weren't anything at all. Until there was something spiritual in them, they were just dirt. When that day comes and the spiritual leaves them, they will be just dirt again. 

This human body we live in is just the vessel, holding the true essence of who we are. 

Which means...those "spiritual experiences" we keep having? That's the real life we were meant to be living. That's what we're made of. Those are the moments that really are getting us closest to the original design. It's no wonder we don't want to leave them. It's what we were created for. 

From formless and void to formed but lifeless to the fullness of God's design itself, this is who we are meant to be.