Victory Cry!

The greeting "Happy Hanukkah" shouts and rejoices across Facebook, across text messages, across nations.  It is a time of celebrating a great victory.  The book of Maccabees thrills us with the courage and boldness of a team of Jews who mustered supernatural strength and courage to overcome the bloody, violent siege of Antiochus Epiphanese and his armies.  They had captured the Holy Temple and violated it by sacrificing swine on the altar and destroying all the holy things. "Happy Hanukkah" is a victory cry of faith overcoming fear and of righteousness ovecoming evil! But it is so much more. The deeper meaning is one that must be embraced by every believer in Yeshua in our own time. 

Now it gets personal! In the Hanukkah account, the Temple was restored and then re-dedicated to God. So, how does that remarkable, ancient story from Jewish history have anything to do with me?  Paul explains it this way: "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God?" (1 Cor. 6:19)  Now I am a living temple of the Holy Spirit. Is there anything in me that is defiled? Are there any traces of pig's blood, anything that is detestable to the LORD hiding in the recesses of my heart?

I get moved every year by the beauty of a song written by Marty Goetz:
Make my life a temple, Lord, at this season start to pull down every idol I have raised up in my heart.
Take my defiled altar, come and cleanse and come repair, so every time I falter, I can run to meet you there. 
Make of my mortal body a house worthy of Your Name, rid me of what's ungodly and every hidden thing of shame.
And with every candle on the menorah that illuminates the night, comes my prayer that you'd kindle in me Messiah, a desire for your fire, for your light!
Take my supply of oil, not enough to burn long, I fear. But oh! How I pray I may one day say, "a great miracle happened here!"
On this Hanukkah, on this feast of dedication, I dedicate myself to You
My Yeshua, I dedicate myself to You.

You can enjoy this beautiful song on the youtube link below.
It is in this cleansing and restoring of our own hearts that brings the victory cry:
HAPPY HANUKKAH!
​www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtXF0kIR-fg

---