Seeking His Presence
The midnight hour is rapidly approaching!
The only way to survive in the midnight hour is to be sure your lamp is ignited and full of oil.
For a lamp to function as it should it must have two things:
Oil and Fire.
With out oil there can be no fire, and with out fire the lamp is not doing what it was created to do.
Do you have enough oil - for the midnight hour?
Are you filling up, or just burning out?
I’ll say this up front: The Oil is the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist said this in Luke 3:16
Jesus begins the parable of the wise and foolish virgins by telling us that all the virgins were going to meet the bridegroom. (The ten virgins represent the church).
The Bridegroom that the virgins in the parable were waiting for was Christ Jesus, himself.
He recounted that the five foolish virgins had their lamps but took no oil with them, but the five wise virgins had flasks full of oil for their lamps (25:4).
Proverbs 20:27 tells us that the spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord.
But it isn’t really the lamp itself that illuminates, but the flame, that is fed by the oil that is in the lamp. The lamp is a vessel for the oil, and the oil provides the fuel for the illuminating fire.
The Church/the Bride is the vessels that are intended to be filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit that sustains the passion and the fire.
The foolish virgins didn’t understand that they couldn’t “borrow” the Holy Spirit from the others, nor could they “purchase” him in the marketplace. Remember Simon the sorcerer?
They had not personally received the infilling of the Holy Spirit, (the Baptism that pours out directly from heaven), and so their lamps were going out.
They couldn’t sustain the fire “with their own oil” or in their own strength.
They were burning out.
“Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you’” (25:11).
When we become fascinated by and filled with the things of the world, we don’t leave any room in our lamps for the Holy Spirit, and without his abiding presence, the blaze of God’s holy fire cannot continuously burn within us.
Our spirits are simply too weak to sustain the fiery power of His presence.
We must have the Holy Spirit, married to our spirits, so that our lamps are continuously filled with precious oil.
The parable concludes with Jesus instructing his disciples to “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (v. 13).
We don’t know the day or the hour that the trumpet will sound and the call will ring out that the Bridegroom is coming for his Bride.
But even if that call comes in the midnight hour, if we are filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, when He calls us home we will be ready to meet him.
Isaiah 55:6-7
“Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call on Him [for salvation] while He is near. Let the wicked leave (behind) his way And the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the Lord, And He will have compassion (mercy) on him, And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.”