Nineteen.

This week is a celebration of thanksgiving.
We have been doing this Belonging House adventure
for nineteen years.
There are some amazing things about this story,
and how so many of the things that I did in the beginning
became part of our DNA
and part of our life together.
We began praying in tongues together for fifteen minutes
in my living room in Akron, Ohio.
We celebrated holy communion together daily.
We sat and listened to God together.
We ate together.
And all of this happened before we "formed"
an organization.

In July 2006 the Lord shocked me with 
an encounter with heaven in my living room.
And part of that encounter was interacting 
with an angel
who brought a message from the Lord:
Raise up an army of artists who will build Jesus
a throne in the earth.
I had no idea what that meant,
or why God called me.
It has taken a long time to work out what the
calling was:
it was a calling to make disciples.
It was call to transformation.
And God called me to be a father,
and before you can be a father,
you have to learn how to be a son.
I am still learning.

There are challenging pieces to this call.
I was given instructions on how to do it.
Do not do conventional fundraising.
Do not network.
Give up all your old ministry contacts.
Tell the story of all that I am doing,
and I will move people to give.

And then on August 12, 2006
I had another dramatic encounter
at a church in Masillon, Ohio,
and the risen Lord Jesus came to me 
and said he was calling me to be an apostle to the artists,
and that he wanted his mother involved in my ministry.
As you can imagine,
I thought this was the kind of thing that would get me
burned at the stake,
and that I would not be able to tell anyone about it.
And I didn't for about nine years.
These are all the big ideas and ingredients
that God put into our pot,
and that he has been simmering for almost two decades.
I am just now
starting to understand 
and put all the pieces together.

And these big ideas 
all come back to the theme we have been 
exploring:
God made us in his image.
We are the image of God.
And the image is about substance.
It is not about performance or attributes.
Jesus Christ is the Image
of the Invisible God.
God created Adam and Eve
to be his image in the earth.
They were to be God in the flesh to the created world,
to the animals and the plants,
and to the things seen and unseen.
As you know,
that story became a tragedy,
and God raise up Bezalel
who symbolically, and artistically,
created a model of heaven
and a model of eden 
in the desert.
As I mentioned last week
Bezalel was a symbolic image of a New Adam.

Exodus 37:1
says,
Bezalel made the ark.
And what was the ark?
It is referred to as the ark of the testimony 
and the ark of the covenant.
It contained manna,
the rod of Aaron that bloomed,
and the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
And these things pointed to the testimony of all
God did for Israel
in the period after the Exodus.
They were a reminder and a witness.

Let's fast forward
to the book of Luke.
In both Luke, and in Acts,
Luke uses a number of stylistic devices
to connect dots between the Old and New Testaments.
Where Matthew refers back to verses from the prophets,
Luke does something a lot more artful.
Luke uses literary alllusions.
He takes words and phrases from
the Greek version of the Bible,
the Septuagint,
and he inserts them into his story.
And he does it in a way that the reader
and listener would recognize.

So, in Acts 2,
Luke inserts phrases from Genesis 11
into the story of Pentecost
and makes a clear and direct reference that
the reader understood.
God divided the nations at Babel
and now the divided tongues of fire
are bringing the nations together
into the Kingdom of God.

Luke does this again
in Luke Chapter one.
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit,
and she exclaimed with a loud cry.
The phrase here
uses the same device Luke uses in Acts,
and it comes from the reading we heard from 
I Chronicles 15.
David has taken the old Tabernacle at Shiloh apart,
and he has brought the Ark,
which had been taken into Exile and was being cared for 
by Obed-Edom
and he is bringing it into Jerusalem.
David is setting up a worship revolution
and that revolution in I Chronicles
involves a tent
where, instead of blood sacrifices,
there is a continuous sacrifice of praise
before the Ark of the Testimony.
They are going to dwell in a tent 
of the Lord's Presence.
And Luke takes a phrase from
I Chronicles 15:16,
and puts that into the mouth of Elizabeth.
Just as the people 
raised a shout of joy for the ark,
and the testimony,
Elizabeth shouts for joy for Mary.
And Elizabeth cries:
blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And blessed is she who believed that there
would be a fulfillment of what was spoken by the Lord.
The new covenant
is not about a wooden box.
The new covenant is about human beings
and now God's ark
is a person.
And instead of the Law and the Priesthood
and the manna,
this person contains
the Word made flesh,
the Great High Priest,
and the Bread of Life.
The Kingdom of God
is not about things or buildings or objects.
The Kingdom of God 
is about being a tabernacle for the Holy Spirit.
And this woman
through her "yes"
becomes a new Eve,
who instead of releasing death into the earth,
obeys God and releases eternal life.
Eve was to be the mother of all the living,
and Mary would be,
as it says in Revelation 12,
the mother of all the redeemed.
And when we go to Revelation,
God's temple in heaven is opened,
and the ark appears.
The ark Moses saw.
And the ark is a woman.

So what does this have to do with you and me
and what does this have to do with artists?
First,
the plan for you and me
is to be the image of God,
to be a bearer of the testimony.
Later in that chapter in revelation
it says they overcame by the blood of the lamb
and the word of their testimony.
God became a man
through the flesh of a virgin,
that is a powerful testimony.
And God became flesh through Mary
when she said yes.
God becomes flesh through you
when you say yes.
God wants you to be a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit
and God wants you to be his yes on the earth.

Mary's yes
was the greatest creative act in human history.
After God creating the world ex nihilo, out of nothing,
God created a baby in a the womb of a virgin.
But he did it with her permission.
And she agreed.
And in her agreement
she made answer for the creation
to the redeeming will of God.
Light,
fire, and life
joined to our nature
you have brought forth
that to the glory of God the Father
heaven and earth might be restored.

And finally,
we are back to a key idea
an idea that many Christians have lost
and artists and creative people also have lost.
We are called into relationship.
God is the most relational being in the universe.
There is always room for you at the Father's table.
Jesus has a mother.
God has a mother.
A human mother,
and this new covenant is not a covenant of tasks
or information, or even doctrine.
This new covenant
at its heart is a covenant of relationship.
Revelation twelve ends 
saying that the dragon has gone off to make war
against the children of the Woman.
We are called
in the spirit
to be a family.
And wherever you see breakage in relationship
you are not seeing the work of God,
because
just as Israel is a physical tribe of people
the Body of Christ is a new nation.

The name Belonging House came from the teaching
of Ingrid Trobisch, who taught a lot on marriage and family.
She said that one of the greatest needs we have 
is for "geborgenheit."
Geborgenheit is the german word to describe
the emotion you feel when you are held in the arms 
of your mother and lean against her breast.
It is a feeling of safety, security, and belonging.
It is the place of complete and total rest.
It is shalom.

Of course,
Geborgenheit would look weird on a logo,
so we went for Belonging House.
You cannot create
and you cannot go into a big battle
as an artist and creative people
in a global psychological war
if you do not have a place to belong.

I believe this is why God calls people 
into our fellowship who are not artists.
We need a support system
and a family.
And out of that place of the Presence,
around the Ark of God,
we can create
and we can go forth.

I do not put my Substack behind a paywall, so if my work has helped you, consider buying a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/christjohnotto or support our community, Belonging House at https://belonginghouse.betterworld.org Thanks.