It's worth the Weight

PART ONE The Desire Of Heaven 0:00 – 0:25 · Genesis 3 · Exodus 25 · Revelation 21 THE READING “And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of YAHWEH before thee... And YAHWEH descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of YAHWEH. And YAHWEH passed by before him, and proclaimed, YAHWEH, YAHWEH God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” — Exodus 33:18–19; 34:5–6 Be seated. THE QUESTION AT THE BACK OF THE ROOM There is a question I have been asked in a hundred different ways across nearly forty years of ministry. The service is over. The room is emptying. And somebody is still standing at the back — they have not moved, they are still trembling, their eyes are red. And they come to me quietly and they ask: “What was that? What happened to me in there?” THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 1 They are not asking about the music. They are not asking about the preaching. They are asking about the weight — the thing that came into the room and pressed against them until their knees would no longer hold them. And for years I did not have a good answer for them. I could tell them it was the Presence. I could tell them it was real. But I could not tell them WHY it happens, or why it happens HERE and not when they are alone, or what it is FOR. That question is what this entire teaching is answering. Everything I say from here is walking toward that man at the back of the room. And I am not going to answer him yet. Because the answer will not hold unless you understand three things first — what YAHWEH has wanted since the beginning, why we think He is far away, and what He has been building all along. AND IT BEGINS WITH A LONGING Before there was a tabernacle, before there was a temple, before there was a law or a priesthood or a sacrifice — there was a desire. And the desire did not begin in the heart of man. It began in the heart of YAHWEH. AND BEFORE WE GO FURTHER — A PROMISE Now hold me to something before this teaching is over. There is ONE WORD in your Bible that you have been reading wrong your entire life. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 2 One word. It sits in your Bible more than two hundred times. You have read it, you have sung it, you have prayed it, you have heard it preached over you since you were a child. And every single time you read it, your mind fills in a picture that is not what the Hebrew says. It is not a small word. It is not a minor word. It is the word that describes what happens in this room when He comes. And because we have been handed the wrong picture of it, we have been asking Him for the wrong thing — and wondering why our meetings feel empty. I am going to give you that word before we are finished. And when I do, I believe some things are going to open up in you that have been closed for a long time. One mistranslated word has cost us our understanding of His Presence. But the word will mean nothing to you until you see the longing behind it. So let me show you the desire first. HEAVEN HAS ALWAYS WANTED THE EARTH We have been taught to think of salvation as our search for God. Man reaching up. Man climbing. Man striving toward a distant heaven, hoping to be noticed. But read your Bible again. From the first page to the last, it is not the story of man seeking God. It is the story of GOD SEEKING A PLACE TO DWELL. Listen to the very first question ever asked in Scripture after the fall. Man is hiding in the trees. And YAHWEH comes walking in the cool of the day — THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 3 And He calls out three words that reveal everything about His nature: “WHERE ART THOU?” Not because He did not know. He is YAHWEH — He knew exactly where Adam was crouching. He asked because He MISSED HIM. That is the question that drives the entire Bible. Every page after Genesis three is YAHWEH working His way back toward a man who ran from Him. AND HEAR WHAT HE ASKED FOR When He brought Israel out of Egypt, He did not first ask for their obedience. He did not first ask for their money. He did not first ask for their armies. Hear what He asked for: “And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.” — Exodus 25:8 That I may dwell among them. Not that I may rule over them. Not that I may inspect them. Not that I may be worshipped at a distance by them. THAT I MAY DWELL AMONG THEM. The Almighty asked for a house. The One who fills heaven and earth, who holds the oceans in the hollow of His hand — asked a band of freed slaves to build Him somewhere to stay. That is not the request of a distant deity. That is the request of a Father who wants to be near His children. AND HOW DOES THE BOOK END? THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 4 Now go all the way to the last pages of your Bible. Past the prophets. Past the gospels. Past the letters. To the final vision given to man. What is the great cry of the consummation of all things? What is the announcement that heaven makes when everything is finally set right? “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” — Revelation 21:3 The tabernacle of God is WITH MEN. Do you see it? The Book opens with YAHWEH walking with man in a garden. The Book closes with YAHWEH dwelling with man forever. And everything in between — every tabernacle, every temple, every altar, every appointed feast, every drop of blood — is Him working His way back into the house. THIS IS THE DESIRE OF HEAVEN Heaven is not indifferent to the earth. Heaven is not distant from the earth. Heaven is leaning toward the earth. Heaven wants INTIMACY with the EARTH. How does a longing God get back into the house? THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 5 PART TWO The Arm We Think Is Shortened 0:25 – 0:50 · Isaiah 59 · Acts 17 · Jeremiah 23 But something has gone wrong in how we think about Him. I am not speaking of the world now. I am speaking of the church. I am speaking of believing people who love Him and yet carry a picture of Him in their minds that is not true. THE MISTHINKING Here is the picture most of us were handed. YAHWEH is out there. Far away. Up beyond the clouds. Beyond the stars. Beyond the reach of anything we could call near. Seated on a throne at the far end of the universe, attended by beings we will never meet, occupied with matters we will never understand. And from that unimaginable distance, He extends an arm toward the earth. And the arm is long — but the distance is longer. So we pray, and we imagine our words traveling. Rising up through the ceiling, through the sky, through the dark between the stars, hoping to arrive somewhere very far away where Someone very busy might hear them. That is how most believers pray. And they would never say it out loud, but they carry a quiet suspicion underneath it: “He is too far off to reach me.” THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 6 AND THE PROPHET ANSWERS IT DIRECTLY Isaiah confronts that exact misthinking. And notice — he does not gently suggest it. He commands them to behold, because they had stopped seeing correctly: “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear.” — Isaiah 59:1 Understand the picture in that Hebrew phrase. A shortened arm is an arm that cannot reach. An arm that falls short of the thing it is stretching toward. His arm has not fallen short of you. And His ear is not heavy — that word means dull, hard of hearing, straining to catch a sound from too far away. He is not squinting to see you. He is not straining to hear you. He is not reaching and coming up short. HE WAS NEVER FAR Paul stood on Mars Hill in the middle of a city full of idols — people who had built statues to a God they assumed was unreachable — and he told them the truth: “He be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” — Acts 17:27–28 Not far from every one of us. We do not live at a distance from Him and occasionally send messages. We live inside Him. We move inside Him. Our very existence happens inside Him. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 7 And Jeremiah puts the question in YAHWEH’s own mouth: “Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off?” — Jeremiah 23:23 A God AT HAND. SO WHERE IS THE DISTANCE? FHaMIly, hear this carefully, because it will reorder how you gather for the rest of your life. If His arm is not short, and His ear is not dull, and He is not far from any one of us — then the distance we feel is REAL. But it is not on His side. Something separates the earthly from the heavenly. We feel it. We are not imagining it. There are gatherings where He seems near and gatherings where He seems absent, and every honest believer knows the difference. But the variable was never His willingness. The variable is the HOUSE. He has never been unwilling to come. He has been waiting for somewhere to come to. And that is not a new problem, and it is not a modern problem. It is the oldest problem in the Book — and YAHWEH has been solving it, patiently, across seven temples and six thousand years. So let us walk through the houses. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 8 PART THREE The Seven Houses Of YAHWEH 0:50 – 1:05 · Genesis 2 · Joshua 18 · 2 Samuel 6 · 1 Kings 8 · Ezra 6 · Ezekiel 43 You know these houses. We have walked each one in detail in this pulpit. So I will not linger — I only want you to see them in a row, because the thread running through them is the whole point. YAHWEH has always wanted a HOUSE. Not a religion. Not a following. Not admirers at a distance. A HOUSE. A DWELLING. A PLACE TO STAY. THE SIX THAT HAVE COME AND GONE ▸ EDEN. The first sanctuary. He walked in it at the appointed hour. Adam kept it as a priest, not a gardener. And we lost it. ▸ THE TABERNACLE AT SHILOH. Three hundred years of the Presence in the land — until the priesthood corrupted itself and the ark was taken. That is the day a dying woman named her son ICHABOD. ▸ DAVID’S TENT. The tabernacle with no veil. Continual worship, day and night, and open access to the mercy seat. Mark this one above all the others — it is the one the apostles said would be rebuilt. ▸ SOLOMON’S TEMPLE. The finished house where the cloud came in and the priests could not stand. And Ezekiel watched the weight leave it — threshold, east gate, mountain — and nobody said stay. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 9 ▸ ZERUBBABEL’S TEMPLE. The returning exiles rebuilt it. The altar worked. The sacrifices never ceased. But the old men who had seen Solomon’s house wept aloud at the dedication, because they knew what was missing. ▸ HEROD’S TEMPLE. The most magnificent of them all. Forty-six years in the building. Stone and gold beyond anything Solomon raised — and not one stone of it left upon another. Hear the tragedy in those last two. They recovered the BUILDING. They never recovered the PATTERN. Six hundred years of ritual without weight — and the more magnificent the house became, the emptier it was. AND THE SEVENTH — WHICH IS NEARLY FINISHED Six houses have risen and six houses have fallen. Eden closed. Shiloh ruined. David’s tent folded. Solomon’s temple burned. Zerubbabel’s stood empty of glory. Herod’s was thrown down stone by stone. And YAHWEH has not given up on the desire He had in the garden. There is a SEVENTH HOUSE. Ezekiel was carried in the Spirit and shown it — measured gate by gate, chamber by chamber. And do not let anyone tell you he was shown a pile of future masonry in the Middle East. He was shown US. And he was shown something that has not happened since the day the weight walked out of Solomon’s temple: “And the glory of the LORD came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east.” THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 10 — Ezekiel 43:4 It comes back in by the EAST GATE. The same direction it left. The weight that paused three times on its way out is coming back through the very gate it departed by. AND HEAR ME — THAT HOUSE IS NEARLY FINISHED This is not a house waiting to be started. This is not a foundation someone will pour in a generation we will never see. The seventh temple is NEARLY FINISHED. The stones are quarried. The walls are up. The courses are laid. What remains are the perfecting touches — the final fitting of stone to stone, the last of the joining, the finish work that comes only at the end of a build. “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood.” — 1 Peter 2:5 YOU are the seventh house. Not a metaphor. Not an encouragement. The house Ezekiel measured in the Spirit is the house you are sitting in — and it is nearly done. AND HE IS FILLING IT WITH HIMSELF Now understand what He is filling it with. Because this is the thing that separates the seventh house from all six that came before it. In every former house, the weight came and settled and remained a visitor. It filled the tent. It filled the temple. And it could leave — and it did leave. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 11 But YAHWEH is not merely visiting the seventh house. He is filling it with HIMSELF — reproducing His own nature, His own character, His own substance in the PRIESTHOOD of that temple. He is not looking for a building to inhabit and abandon. He is REPRODUCING HIMSELF in the priesthood. The weight is not coming to sit in the room. The weight is coming to be formed in the stones — compassion, patience, loyal love, faithfulness, wrought into a people until the house itself is made of the same substance as the One who fills it. A house made of His own nature cannot be departed from. That is the seventh temple. That is why there is no eighth. SO NOW THE QUESTION If He has always wanted a house — and if we are that house, nearly finished — then everything depends on one question: What is it He wants to FILL the house with? And to answer that, I have to show you a word. One word. It appears more than two hundred times in your Tanakh, and I promise you — you have been reading it wrong your entire life. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 12 PART FOUR The Lie In Your English Bible 1:05 – 1:30 · Genesis 13:2 Now I owe you a word. I promised you one at the start of this teaching, and here it is. And I have to tell you something that is going to sound irreverent until I finish the sentence. Your Bible has been lying to you. Not out of malice. Not out of conspiracy. Out of the simple poverty of translation — because there are Hebrew words that the English language has no vessel large enough to carry. And there is one word. One single word. It appears more than two hundred times in your Tanakh. And every time you read it, your mind does something automatic before you can stop it. The word is glory. And your mind fills in a picture. Light. Brightness. Something golden. Something far away. Maybe a halo. Maybe a sunset. Maybe a cloud glowing at the edges. The Hebrew word underneath that translation has almost nothing to do with any of that. SAY THE WORD WITH ME The word is KAVOD. K A V O D THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 13 And at its root, it has nothing to do with light. Nothing to do with brightness. Nothing to do with radiance. The root verb means one thing before it means anything else. HEAVY. To be heavy. To carry weight. To be substantial. To be the most solid thing in the room. That is what sits underneath every single time your Bible says the word glory. And once you hear that — once you really hear it — the entire concept rearranges itself. Because Scripture is not telling you that YAHWEH is shiny. It is telling you He is the most substantial reality in existence. The heaviest thing in any room He enters. The one Presence that makes everything else in that room feel thin by comparison. DECORATIVE — OR GRAVITATIONAL? Now understand why this distinction matters more than you might expect. In English, glory sounds decorative. It sounds like something you admire from a distance. Something you look at. But KAVOD is not decorative. KAVOD is GRAVITATIONAL. There is a difference between a thing you admire and a thing that pulls on you. Light asks to be noticed. Weight cannot be ignored. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 14 You can close your eyes to light. You cannot close your eyes to gravity. Gravity does not care whether you are looking. Gravity acts upon you whether you believe in it or not. THE FIRST TIME THE WORD APPEARS Now here is what I find remarkable. The very first time this root word appears in all of Scripture, it has nothing to do with YAHWEH at all. “And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.” — Genesis 13:2 Your English says rich. The Hebrew says Abraham was very KAVOD — very heavy — in livestock, in silver, and in gold. The word is describing material wealth. Abundance so substantial you could feel the weight of it in your hands. WEIGHT WAS WORTH Because in the ancient world, value and weight were inseparable. The Hebrew shekel was a unit of weight before it was ever a unit of currency. You did not count your silver. You weighed it. And whatever was heaviest was worth the most. So before this word is ever applied to the Almighty, the language has already established its logic: WEIGHT EQUALS WORTH. ▸ The heavier a thing is, the more real it is. ▸ The heavier a thing is, the more consequential it is. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 15 ▸ The heavier a thing is, the more impossible to dismiss it is. So when the later writers take that same root and lay it upon the Presence of YAHWEH, understand what they are doing. They are making a claim that would have landed like a hammer on ancient ears. They are saying: when YAHWEH shows up, He is the weightiest thing in the room. More real than the walls. More substantial than the ground you are standing on. And everything else becomes light by comparison. HOLD THIS That framework changes how you read almost every passage where this word appears. Scripture is not painting a picture of a God who glows. It is describing a God who outweighs. Hold that, FHaMIly. Because for the next three hours we are going to follow that weight — where it settled, what it did to the people it settled on, where it went when it left, and why it still comes into rooms like this one. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 16 PART FIVE Show Me Your Weight 1:45 – 2:10 · Exodus 33 – 34 There is a moment in the Torah where this word stops being a theological concept and becomes a conversation. And I want you to feel the condition of the man who starts it. THE WORST SEASON OF HIS LIFE Moses has just come through the worst season of his leadership. The golden calf. The shattered tablets. A people who stood at the base of a burning mountain, made promises to YAHWEH with their own mouths, and broke every one of them in under six weeks. And YAHWEH has told him: I will send an angel ahead of you. But I Myself will not go up in your midst, because you are a stiff-necked people, and I might consume you along the way. Feel the weight of that. This is a man who has just been told the Presence is withdrawing. Moses pushes back. He pleads. He bargains. He says — if Your Presence does not go with us, do not carry us up from here. And after YAHWEH relents and agrees to go with them, Moses does something reckless. Something no other man in the first five books of the Bible dares to do. He asks for MORE. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 17 FOUR HEBREW WORDS Hareni na et kevodeka “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.” — Exodus 33:18 Four words. And now that you know what KAVOD means — hear what he is actually asking. “Show me Your WEIGHT.” Show me the full substance of who You are. Not the cloud. Not the fire. Not the pillar. Not the manifestation. Not the phenomenon. YOU. AND THE ANSWER SHOULD STOP EVERY ONE OF US Because YAHWEH does not answer that request with a light show. He does not open the sky. He does not produce a spectacle. He does not give the man a display. He says: I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim My name before you. And then, in the very next chapter, He does exactly that. He passes in front of Moses and He declares: “YAHWEH, YAHWEH God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” — Exodus 34:6 WHAT HE PUT ON THE SCALE THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 18 A man asked to see the full weight of God — and God showed him character. ▸ Not power. He did not flex. ▸ Not spectacle. He did not perform. ▸ Not majesty as we imagine it. He did not overwhelm the senses. Compassion. Patience. Loyal love. Faithfulness. THAT is what YAHWEH considers heavy about Himself. That is what He places on the scale when a human being asks to see what He is really made of. And FHaMIly — if that is what He weighs, then that is what we ought to be weighing. Because we build our lives around the things we believe are heavy. And most of us have been weighing the wrong things for years. THE MOST-QUOTED VERSE YOU NEVER NOTICED Those words from Exodus thirty-four became the most-quoted self-description of YAHWEH in the rest of the Tanakh. ▸ Jonah quotes it. ▸ Joel quotes it. ▸ Nehemiah quotes it. ▸ The Psalms return to it again and again and again. Whenever Israel needed to remember who their God was, they came back to this mountain. To this moment. To the place where a man asked for the full weight — and received a character description instead of a light show. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 19 THE CLEFT OF THE ROCK And even then — even with only His goodness passing by — YAHWEH had to hide him. He placed Moses in the cleft of a rock and covered him with His hand as He passed. Moses saw only the aftermath of the Presence. Never the face of it. “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” — Exodus 33:20 Now hear me carefully. That is not a threat. YAHWEH is not saying I will kill you if you look. He is stating a fact about the created order. It is physics. The full weight of an infinite YAHWEH is more than a finite body can hold. It is not punishment. It is capacity. A vessel can only bear so much before the vessel gives way. Remember that sentence, FHaMIly. In two hours it is going to explain what happens on this floor. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 20 PART SIX Too Heavy To Stand In 2:10 – 2:35 · Exodus 40 · 1 Kings 8 · Isaiah 6 After Sinai, the KAVOD begins to move. And if you track its movement through the Scriptures, you are not reading theology anymore. You are reading a story with a pulse. THE TABERNACLE Exodus forty. The tabernacle is finished. Every curtain hung. Every piece of furniture set in place. Every socket, every board, every thread of blue and purple and scarlet — exactly as YAHWEH prescribed. Months of labor. A nation’s gold. Completed. And then the cloud descends, and the KAVOD fills it. And the very next verse tells us something that should stop us cold. “Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of YAHWEH filled the tabernacle.” — Exodus 40:35 Do you see it? The structure built specifically to house the Presence was so full of that Presence that the man closest to YAHWEH on the face of the earth could not walk through the door. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 21 This is not a man who was afraid. This is not a man who lacked faith. This is Moses — the friend of God, the one who spoke face to face. And the weight in that room was such that his body would not carry him across the threshold. SOLOMON’S TEMPLE Centuries pass. Solomon finishes the temple — a house so magnificent it becomes one of the wonders of the ancient world. The ark is carried in. The priests withdraw. And the same thing happens. “The priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of YAHWEH had filled the house.” — 1 Kings 8:11 UNDERSTAND WHO THESE MEN WERE ▸ They were trained. These were not novices. They had been formed for this from childhood. ▸ They were disciplined. Priestly service was a discipline of exactness. There was no improvisation in that house. ▸ They had rehearsed. They had practiced these rituals for months preparing for this very day. And they stopped in their tracks. Not because they fainted. Not because they were overcome with emotion. Because the weight in the room made it impossible to stand. NOT VISIBLE — FELT FHaMIly, mark this, because it is the key to everything I am going to say after the break. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 22 Something about the Presence of YAHWEH is not merely visible. It is felt. It presses. It fills space until there is no room left for anything else. The Hebrew writers are not reaching for a visual metaphor. They are describing something that behaves less like light — — and more like GRAVITY. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 23 FIRST BREAK Fifteen Minutes Worship returns softly under the room. Do not let the atmosphere drop. If the Presence is already heavy — shorten the break, or cut it entirely and press through. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 24 PART SEVEN Why The People Fall 2:50 – 3:15 · Isaiah 6 · Ezekiel 1 · Daniel 10 · Revelation 1 NOW I CAN ANSWER THE QUESTION Do you remember how we began this morning? A trembling man at the back of the room. Red eyes. A question asked quietly, the same question I have been asked a hundred different ways across nearly forty years of ministry. “What was that? What happened to me in there?” I told you I would not answer it until you had everything you needed to understand the answer. You have it now. IT IS THE SAME THING When a man or a woman goes down under the Presence in one of our gatherings — when the knees buckle, when the strength drains out, when somebody who walked in composed and guarded and arms-folded is suddenly on the floor weeping — We are not watching a psychological trick. We are not watching crowd energy. We are not watching the manufactured excitement of a well-run meeting. We are watching the same thing that stopped the priests in Solomon’s temple. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 25 We are watching WEIGHT. IT IS NOT WEAKNESS — IT IS CAPACITY Go back to those priests with me one more time, because there is a lie in the church about this and I mean to kill it this morning. The lie says that people who fall under the Presence are weak. Emotional. Suggestible. Impressionable. That the strong-minded stay standing and the soft ones go down. But the priests of Solomon’s temple were not weak men. They were the most disciplined religious professionals in the ancient world. They had trained for this from childhood. And they could not stand — not because they were fragile, but because the room was full of something heavier than they were. When the KAVOD fills a space, the flesh simply cannot bear the density of it. The body yields to the greater weight. That is not a character flaw. That is CAPACITY. It is the same truth YAHWEH spoke on the mountain: no man can see My face and live. Not because He is cruel. Because a finite vessel cannot hold infinite substance. THE PATTERN IS CONSISTENT And FHaMIly, this is not one or two isolated incidents. Across the whole of Scripture, the consistent posture in the manifest Presence of YAHWEH is not standing. It is FALLING. ▸ Isaiah, who saw the throne, cried out that he was undone — destroyed, ruined, cut off. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 26 ▸ Ezekiel, seeing the likeness of the glory, fell upon his face. ▸ Daniel, a man greatly beloved, said his comeliness turned to corruption in him, and he retained no strength. ▸ John, the disciple who had leaned on His breast at supper, fell at His feet as dead on Patmos. These were not fragile people. These were prophets and apostles — the most spiritually mature men of their generations. No measure of maturity keeps a finite vessel upright when infinite weight enters the room. BUT THE FALLING IS NOT THE POINT Now hear me, because I have to be a pastor to you and not merely a teacher. We do not gather in order to fall down. Falling is not the goal. Spectacle is never the goal. If a person went to this floor tonight and got up again unchanged, we would have gained nothing but a story to tell somebody at work on Monday. We seek the weight because of what the weight DOES. EXPOSURE. CLEANSING. COMMISSION. Here is the pattern the Scriptures reveal every single time the KAVOD descends upon a person. Three movements — always in this order. ▸ EXPOSURE. Isaiah sees the throne and instantly sees himself. Woe is me. The weight does not flatter you. It shows you what is actually there. ▸ CLEANSING. A seraph takes a live coal from the altar — a burning thing from the place of THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 27 sacrifice — and touches it to his lips. His iniquity is taken away. His sin is purged. ▸ COMMISSION. And then the voice: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And the man who five seconds earlier was certain he was finished — answers. “Here am I; send me.” That sequence matters more than any individual piece of it. Because glory in the Bible does not exist to crush people. It exists to reveal what is real, to strip away what is false, and then to send what remains. The weight did not destroy him. It REDIRECTED him. THE MARK IT LEAVES Consider what the weight did to Moses. He asked for the full KAVOD, received as much as he could survive — and came down that mountain with his face changed. “Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.” — Exodus 34:29 The Hebrew word for that shining comes from the root for a horn or a ray — the weight had pressed so hard against him that it left a visible mark. The people could see it. Something real had happened to that man, and everybody around him knew it. That is what we are after in this house. Not the drama of the fall — the mark it leaves. You do not walk into the substance of YAHWEH and come out looking the same. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 28 You come out heavier. More solid. More real. More aligned with what is actually true about the universe. The falling is only the outward sign that the inward weight has arrived. And Paul names the process exactly — we are changed from glory to glory. From weight to weight. From one degree of substance to the next. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 29 PART EIGHT ICHABOD — The Terror Of Absence 3:15 – 3:40 · 1 Samuel 4 · Ezekiel 8–11 If we are going to be a people who hunger for the Presence, then we must reckon honestly with the horror of its absence. Because that has a name in Scripture too. A DYING WOMAN NAMES HER SON First Samuel four. The Philistines defeat Israel in battle and capture the ark of the covenant — the physical object most closely associated with the visible Presence. When the news reaches old Eli the priest, he falls backward off his seat and breaks his neck. His daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, goes into labor from the shock. She is dying. And with her last breath, she names her newborn son. ICHABOD. The name is built directly from KAVOD with a prefix that negates it. It means no glory. Or as a question — *where is the glory?* “The glory is departed from Israel: for the ark of God is taken.” — 1 Samuel 4:22 And the text tells us she said it twice — as though saying it once was not enough to absorb it. SIT WITH WHAT SHE DID THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 30 A woman in her final moments. Surrounded by death. Her husband dead. Her father-in-law dead. The nation defeated. And she chooses not to name her son after hope. Not after comfort. Not after survival. She named him after LOSS. After the emptiness left behind when the heaviest thing in the nation was gone. When the KAVOD was present, you could not stand in the room. When it was absent — you named your children after the wound. FHaMIly — what have we named ours after? THE SLOW DEPARTURE But there is a departure recorded in Scripture even more devastating, because it did not happen fast. And that is the one that should haunt every congregation that has ever grown comfortable. Ezekiel, roughly five hundred ninety-two before the common era. Jerusalem still standing — but barely. And Ezekiel is given a vision of what has moved into the temple. ▸ At the north gate — women weeping for a Mesopotamian god. ▸ In the inner court — twenty-five men with their backs turned to the sanctuary, bowing eastward toward the sun. ▸ In a dark chamber — seventy elders burning incense to images of crawling things carved into the walls. Every one of those scenes takes place INSIDE the temple complex. The very structure built to hold the KAVOD had been packed floor to ceiling with everything that is not YAHWEH. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 31 THREE STOPS. THREE PAUSES. And Ezekiel, in the vision, watches the weight leave. And it does not happen all at once. That is the detail that should keep you awake at night. ▸ First — the KAVOD rises from above the cherubim and moves to the threshold of the house. And it pauses there. ▸ Then — it moves from the threshold to the east gate of the complex. Another pause. ▸ Then — it lifts from the city entirely and stops on the mountain east of Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives. And it hovers. Three stops. Three pauses. Each one farther from the center. As though the weight did not want to go. As though YAHWEH were waiting for somebody — anybody — to notice. To call out. To say one word. “STAY.” Nobody did. The elders kept burning their incense. The women kept weeping for their foreign god. And the weight that once filled a room so completely that priests could not stand — rose, crossed the threshold, cleared the gate, and settled on a hillside outside the city. SIX HUNDRED YEARS OF SILENCE And the Scriptures never record the KAVOD returning to the second temple. When the exiles came back and rebuilt, the old men who had seen Solomon’s house wept aloud at the dedication while the young men shouted for joy — until you could not tell the weeping from the shouting. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 32 The old men wept because they knew what was missing. For roughly six hundred years Israel worshipped in a house without the weight. The building stood. The rituals continued. The sacrifices were offered morning and evening without fail. But the heaviest thing that had once filled that room was GONE. Hear your Overseer. A ministry can keep every ritual and lose the Presence. A congregation can hold every service on time, sing every song in key, preach every sermon on schedule — and be nothing but a building where the weight used to be. I would rather we cry “Stay” a thousand times over than ever grow so cold that He pauses at our threshold and finds no one asking Him to remain. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 33 SECOND BREAK Ten Minutes · At the Overseer’s Discretion Read the room. If the Presence is heavy — do not break. Press through into PART SIX. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 34 PART NINE The Weight Returned — In A Body 3:40 – 4:05 · John 1 · John 13 · John 12 Six hundred years of prayers rising in a room where the heaviest thing had once been — and was no more. And then John breaks that silence open with a single verse. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory,) full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14 HE PITCHED A TENT The word translated dwelt is the Greek skēnoō. It does not mean merely lived. It means pitched a tent. It means tabernacled. John chose a word that would send any first-century Hebrew reader straight back to Exodus forty. Straight back to the KAVOD that filled the tent. The weight Moses could not walk into. The Presence that departed in Ezekiel’s vision, step by agonizing step, and never returned to the second house. It came back. Not into a building. Into a LIFE. NOW HEAR ME CAREFULLY THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 35 And here I must speak with precision, as your Overseer, because this is the very point at which much of Christendom has stumbled and fallen into error. Scripture does not say that YAHWEH became a man. Scripture does not say the Almighty died. YAHWEH is Spirit. He does not die. He cannot die. He is from everlasting to everlasting. What John declares is that the KAVOD of YAHWEH — the full weight of His character — came to tabernacle in the man YAHSHUA, the last Adam, the Son of YAHWEH. As the tabernacle of old was the tent, and the glory was the Presence within it — so YAHSHUA was the vessel, and the KAVOD of His Father dwelt in Him without measure. The tent was never the glory. The tent HOUSED the glory. And that pattern did not change when the tent became flesh. THE TWO WORDS JOHN SEALS IT WITH Notice how John closes that verse: full of grace and truth. The Hebrew pair beneath that phrase is chesed and emet — loyal love and faithfulness. The very same two words YAHWEH proclaimed over Moses. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 36 John is telling us plainly: the same KAVOD that passed before Moses in the cleft of the rock was now walking the roads of Galilee — tabernacled in the Son. Haggai had promised the glory of the latter house would exceed the former. For six centuries that seemed impossible — the second temple had less of everything. Less gold. Less space. No ark. No visible Presence. How could its glory surpass Solomon’s? The answer walked through its gates on human feet. GLORY AT MAXIMUM DENSITY So when YAHSHUA speaks of His own glorification, the language is jarring. The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified — and in the very next breath He speaks of a grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die in order to bear fruit. His heaviest hour is not the mountain where He shone. It is the hill where He bled. And our doctrine holds here without wavering. It was the MAN YAHSHUA who died — the last Adam, laying down a life He was free to lay down. YAHWEH did not die. The Father cannot die. But in that obedient death of the Son, the full weight of YAHWEH’s character was poured out without restraint — His justice and His mercy, His loyalty and His love, converging in a single act. Ask yourself in the framework of KAVOD: ▸ What is the weightiest thing a person can do? Give their life for someone who cannot save themselves. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 37 ▸ What is the most substantive act of love in the universe? To absorb a cost you did not owe, so somebody else does not have to carry it. When He said It is finished — the KAVOD was not departing. It was being poured out. All of it. Without restraint. The cross is not the absence of glory. It is glory at MAXIMUM DENSITY. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 38 PART TEN The Weight Only Fills A Temple 4:05 – 4:30 · Exodus 40 · 1 Kings 8 · Ephesians 2 · 1 Peter 2 FHaMIly, I need you to see something now that has been sitting in plain sight through everything we have covered today. And once you see it, you will not be able to unsee it. Go back through every account we have handled this morning. Every single one. And ask one question of each. WHERE was the weight when it fell? FOLLOW THE PATTERN ▸ The tabernacle in the wilderness. Not while the boards lay scattered. Not while the curtains were half-sewn. Not while Bezaleel was still cutting. The KAVOD came when the structure was finished — every socket seated, every board joined, every thread in place. ▸ Solomon’s temple. Seven years of construction. And the cloud did not fill that house on the third year, or the fifth. It came when the ark was set in its place and the house was complete. ▸ The second temple. They built it. And this is the sorrow of it — they built the walls but never recovered the pattern, and the weight never returned to that house. Do you see it? This is not coincidence. This is design. The KAVOD has always come to a FINISHED HOUSE. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 39 CONSTRUCTED. JOINED. FITLY FRAMED. YAHWEH has never once in the history of the world poured out His weight into an empty field. He does not fill scattered stones. He does not fill a pile of timber. He does not fill raw material. He fills a house. Constructed. Joined together. Fitly framed. And Paul — who knew his Tanakh better than his accusers — uses that exact language when he describes what we are: “In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” — Ephesians 2:21–22 Fitly framed together. Builded together. A habitation. That is not construction language by accident. Paul is not reaching for a poetic image. He is telling you the pattern has not changed. NOW I MUST CORRECT SOMETHING And here I have to correct something the modern church has taught you — and it has cost us more than we know. You have been told that you are an individual temple. You have heard it preached that each believer is his own house, his own sanctuary, complete unto himself — and that the gathering is merely a convenience. A helpful habit. A place to be encouraged before you go back to your private temple. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 40 Beloved, this is not so. Search the Scripture. Peter does not call you a temple. “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood.” — 1 Peter 2:5 Not temples. STONES. You are a living stone in one house. And a stone by itself — however precious, however well-cut, however sincere — is not a temple. A stone by itself is a stone lying in a field. AND NOW THE QUESTION I CARRIED FOR YEARS FHaMIly, I have to testify to you. For years I carried a question I could not answer, and it troubled me. Why is the miraculous more prevalent in the meeting? I prayed alone. I fasted alone. I sought Him alone in the small hours and He met me there — He is faithful, He is near to those who call. But I could not escape the observation: The heavier things happen when we are together. The heavier healings. The heavier signs. The heavier deliverances. And I used to wonder whether that was merely the encouragement of numbers. Whether it was the faith of the crowd. Whether it was simply that more people gathered meant more needs present. But now I KNOW. It is not the crowd. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 41 THE KAVOD IS ONLY FOR THE TEMPLE. And the temple is not assembled until the stones are assembled. WHY THE SACRED ASSEMBLY This is why He commanded the Sabbath. This is why He set the Feasts. This is why the appointed times were never optional and never arbitrary. These are not religious obligations, FHaMIly. These are CONSTRUCTION APPOINTMENTS. These are the moments the stones are gathered and the house is assembled so the weight has somewhere to land. When you stay home, the house is short a stone. Not because YAHWEH cannot reach you where you are — He can, and He does, and He is merciful to the sick and the hindered and the far-off. But understand what you have chosen when you choose it lightly: A stone alone cannot host the weight. There is ONE purpose in the sacred assembly at the sacred time. One. To create the ATMOSPHERE OF HEAVEN upon the EARTH — so that the KAVOD may enter the TEMPLE. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 42 PART ELEVEN The Fountains Of The Deep 4:30 – 4:55 · Genesis 7 · John 7 · Numbers 21 · Job 36 So how do we create that atmosphere? FHaMIly, it is very simple. We do not invent a method. We follow the pattern. And the pattern is written into the oldest catastrophe in the Book. WHICH CAME FIRST? Everyone remembers the rain. Forty days and forty nights — every child in every Sunday school can tell you about the rain. But read it again. Read what happened first. “The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” — Genesis 7:11 The fountains of the deep are named first. The water hidden in the ground came UP — and the water held in the heavens came DOWN. The weight below opened, and the weight above fell. THERE IS WATER HIDDEN IN YOU Now hear what YAHSHUA said, and hear it as a man who knew that pattern: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” — John 7:38 THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 43 Out of your belly. Out of the deep place. Out of the hidden ground of you. There is a WELL inside of you. There is a well of praise in you that has never been fully opened. There is a well of worship in you that most of you have kept capped your entire Christian life. And Israel knew what to do with a well. They sang to it. “Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it.” — Numbers 21:17 They did not wait for the well to spring up so they could sing. They SANG so the well would spring up. THE VAPOR AND THE RAIN And this is the law written into the created order itself: “For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof.” — Job 36:27 Rain falls according to the VAPOR thereof. No vapor — no rain. The heavens do not pour down what the earth has not sent up. The moisture must rise before the moisture can fall. That is not merely meteorology, FHaMIly. That is the pattern of the Kingdom written into the sky so you would see it every time you looked up. SO WE SOW TO THE HEAVENS And this is what we are doing when we gather. Understand it now: THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 44 ▸ When we lift holy hands in the temple — we are sending up vapor. ▸ When we cry aloud in the temple — we are opening the fountains of the deep. ▸ When we dance and rejoice in the temple — we are singing to the well, spring up, O well. We are not performing. We are not entertaining ourselves. We are not filling time before the preaching. We are SOWING TO THE HEAVENS. And as we sow to the heavens — the heavens sow to the earth. The vapor rises from a hundred opened wells in one joined house, and the atmosphere of that room changes. And into a changed atmosphere, the weight descends. AIR AND GLORY Let me give you the plainest picture I know. As air is the atmosphere of the earth — so GLORY is the atmosphere of the heavenly. You do not think about air. You do not thank Him for air. You simply live in it, and it sustains you, and you would be dead in minutes without it. That is what the KAVOD is in the heavenly places. It is not an event there. It is the medium. It is what they breathe. And what we labor for in the sacred assembly is this: to bring the atmosphere of THERE — into HERE. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 45 PART TWELVE The Zadokite Preparation 4:55 – 5:20 · Ezekiel 44 · 2 Chronicles 5 · Isaiah 59 SOMEBODY PREPARED THE HOUSE Now go back through the accounts one final time, and look for the detail we always read past. In every story where the weight came — somebody had prepared that house first. ▸ Before the cloud filled the tabernacle, Moses had set every vessel, anointed every article, and ordered every thing according to the pattern shown him. ▸ Before the cloud filled Solomon’s temple, the priests had sanctified themselves, the singers and the trumpeters had taken their places, and they lifted up their voice as one to praise Him. And it was then — not before — that the house was filled. The PRIEST prepares the TEMPLE, and then the KAVOD comes. The weight has never once fallen on an unprepared house at an unappointed hour. AND WHO PREPARES IT NOW? Now I want to tell you who you are. “The priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from me, they shall come near to me to minister unto me.” — Ezekiel 44:15 THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 46 The sons of Zadok. Understand what distinguished them. When the rest of Israel went astray — they KEPT THE CHARGE. And because they kept the charge when it was unpopular to keep it, they were granted what the others lost: they COME NEAR. We are that priesthood. Not because we are better. Not because we are cleverer. But because in a generation that abandoned the appointed times, this remnant kept the charge of the sanctuary — the Sabbath, the Feasts, the sacred assembly at the sacred hour. And the promise attached to keeping that charge is not a badge. It is access. They shall COME NEAR. THE STEP BEYOND WORSHIP FHaMIly, hear me carefully, because I do not say this in pride and I will not have it repeated in pride. Many churches know how to do praise. Many churches know how to do worship. There are congregations across this earth with better musicians than we will ever have, and I bless them and I thank YAHWEH for them. But there is one step beyond worship. There is THE GLORY. Praise is what we bring. Worship is where we go. The KAVOD is what COMES. And very few on the earth today know the secret of temple preparation — the sacred assembly, at the sacred time, by a priesthood that has kept the charge, with the wells opened and the vapor rising, waiting for the weight. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 47 May the apostolic assemblies relish our uniqueness in this. Not to boast of it — but to STEWARD it, because almost nobody else is carrying this key. WAIT ON THE WEIGHT And here is where I must be honest about what has gone wrong in the modern gathering. So many churches gather without ever WAITING FOR THE WEIGHT. There is a rushed hurry for a program. There is a clock on the back wall and a schedule in the hand and a service that must be dismissed on time. Three songs. Announcements. A message. A closing prayer. Doors open. Everyone home in seventy-five minutes. And the tragedy is not that the songs were bad or the message was poor. The tragedy is that the vapor never had time to rise — and the house was dismissed before the weight could descend. We must learn to WAIT ON THE WEIGHT. The priests in Solomon’s house did not schedule the cloud. They prepared, they lifted their voice as one, and then they waited. And when it came, they could not even finish their service — and nobody complained that the program had been interrupted. The interruption WAS the point. HIS HAND IS NOT SHORTENED And let no one in this house believe the distance is too great. “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear.” — Isaiah 59:1 THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 48 His hand is not short. His arm has not grown weary. The heavens have not moved farther off since the days of Moses. The distance is not on His side. WE must remove the distance between the earthly and the heavenly. And we remove it exactly as the pattern has always taught us: ▸ By assembling the stones into a house. ▸ By preparing that house as a priesthood that has kept the charge. ▸ By opening the fountains of the deep until the vapor rises. ▸ By waiting — unhurried, unprogrammed — for the weight to descend. And He will come. He has always come to a finished house. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 49 PART THIRTEEN A People Of The Presence 5:20 – 5:40 + Altar · Isaiah 57 · Habakkuk 2 WHY THIS HOUSE DOES WHAT IT DOES So here, then, is why we do what we do. We are not a people gathered around a program. We are not a people gathered around a personality. We are not gathered around a style of music, or a doctrine on a page, or the comfort of familiar company. We are a people gathered around a PRESENCE. We are not scattered stones who happen to meet. We are one house — fitly framed, joined together, assembled at the appointed time by a priesthood that has kept the charge. The same KAVOD that filled a tent so completely Moses could not enter. That stopped the priests mid- service in Solomon’s temple. That departed the first house one grieving step at a time, pausing three times at the door. That a dying mother named her son after when it was gone. That tabernacled in the Son of YAHWEH and was poured out at a cross. That same weight is what we open these doors to seek. HE DOES NOT ONLY FILL TEMPLES And here is the promise that makes this possible for people like us — people without a temple, without an ark, without a priesthood of gold. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 50 “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” — Isaiah 57:15 He does not only fill temples. He fills PEOPLE. And the filling does not require spectacle. It requires access. ▸ An open door. ▸ An honest prayer. ▸ A willingness to let something heavier than your own plans sit at the center of your decisions. ▸ And a house unhurried enough to wait on the weight. THE WEIGHT IS ALREADY HERE Do not treat His glory as something distant — a doctrine in a book, an event at the end of time, a word in a song you sing without thinking. The seraphim did not say the heavens are full of His glory. They said the earth. The whole earth. Right now. The weight is ALREADY HERE. The only question that remains is whether we have been awake to it. THE TRAJECTORY “The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of YAHWEH, as the waters cover the sea.” — Habakkuk 2:14 Not partially filled. Not filled in certain locations. Filled the way water fills an ocean — completely, with nothing left uncovered. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 51 The KAVOD that filled a tent in the wilderness, that filled a stone temple in Jerusalem, that tabernacled in the Son at Nazareth, will one day fill the whole earth. The weight that once drove priests out of a building will become the very atmosphere of a redeemed creation — no longer too heavy to survive in, but the very thing sustaining our life. So when we gather, and the Presence comes, and the strong go down — we are not chasing an experience. We are rehearsing ETERNITY. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 52 THE ALTAR Music comes in under. Nothing driving. Nothing manipulative. Let the room settle for a full minute before you speak again. DO NOT manufacture the fall. If no one goes down, the Word still landed. I am not going to ask you to come down here and perform anything for me tonight. I am going to ask you one question. And it is the same question a broken man asked on a mountain when he had nothing left. Do you want to see His WEIGHT? Not the display. Not the feeling. Not the story you get to tell somebody later. HIM. His substance. His character. Compassion. Patience. Loyal love. Faithfulness — pressed against everything in you that is hollow. A WORD TO THE ONE CARRYING SOMETHING HEAVY If you have been carrying a weight that feels like it might crush you — a diagnosis, a broken relationship, a grief that will not thin out — hear this. Paul’s claim is not that your pain does not matter. It is that your pain is not the heaviest thing in the room. The KAVOD of YAHWEH outweighs it. Not by a little. THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 53 By an ETERNAL margin. AND A WORD TO THE HOUSE Some of you have been living in a house where the rituals continued but the weight had gone. And He has been pausing at your threshold for a long time — waiting for somebody to say one word. SAY IT. [ Open the altar. Say nothing further until the room has responded. Let the silence work. ] THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 54 THE BENEDICTION And now may the weight of who YAHWEH actually is press against everything in you that is hollow, until only what is real remains. Come — and let us be a people of the Presence. Rev. John Shane Vaughn Founding Apostolic Overseer First Harvest Ministries International THE WEIGHT OF HIS PRESENCE · FHMI Pulpit ManuscriptPage 55