You are inhabited

For a thousand years there was one room on earth where the presence of God was said to settle, the holy of holies, deep inside the temple in Jerusalem, sealed off behind a heavy veil. No one entered but the high priest, and only once a year, and only with blood and trembling. The presence lived there, behind the curtain, in the dark, untouchable. Hold that picture, and then hear what Paul writes to a quarreling, ordinary, far-from-perfect church in Corinth, the kind of people who would never have been let near that inner room. Your body, he says, is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Not a building down the road. Not a sanctuary you visit on the holy day. You. The Spirit of the God who raised Jesus from the dead has not dropped by for a visit; He has moved in, settled down, taken up residence in the plain clay of a human life. The veil is not merely torn. The presence has relocated. After a season when you may have felt emptied of God, forsaken, scraped hollow, this is the re-rooting truth that resets everything. The holy of holies has an address now, and the address is you.

In the worst of the upheaval you may have felt utterly empty of God, as if He had withdrawn and left a hollow where He used to be. Hear, then, where He actually is. The Spirit dwells in you. Indwelling is a large word for a simple, staggering fact: the Holy Spirit, God Himself, lives inside you, making your ordinary body the temple where His presence settles. He is not a visitor who comes and goes with your moods, present on the good days and gone on the bad. He took up permanent residence, and residence does not pack its bags when you feel nothing. Consider whose Spirit this is. The very Spirit who raised Jesus out of the grave now lives in you, and the same power that rolled the stone away will one day give life to your mortal body too. So when the emptiness whispers that you were abandoned, answer it with the truer word. You were not abandoned. The presence that once hid behind a veil now keeps house in you. You are inhabited.