First Love

Announcer: Welcome to First Love with Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas, where faith meets real life. In this weekly broadcast, you'll discover practical and spiritual keys to reclaim God's story in your life, deepen your relationship with Jesus, and encounter Him as your first love, whether for the first time or all over again. No topic is off-limits as we make Jesus real, relevant, and relational. Stay with us; your journey back to first love starts now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Hello everybody and welcome back to First Love. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas and I'm sitting with Dr. Robyn Kassas. Dr. Robyn, how are you?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I'm feeling fine, really good.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It was a powerful episode last week. We got to finish with the debut of my beautiful daughter, Keren Kassas, and what an anointed daughter I have. Keren Kassas singing a very, very powerful song, "The Alabaster Box."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, it was really beautiful.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We just want to give Keren a shoutout as she's going to be listening to this. She had her debut concert at Torch New York, our church in Times Square, last week, and it was a beautiful turnout. What a beautiful concert showcasing her abilities as well as her calling. We were just so blessed to be able to house that and tabernacle that in our space and allow God's presence to minister through Keren's voice. She has such a unique call to be an ambassador for the children, and we are so proud and privileged to watch her step into that.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Very much so. I was so impressed with her testimony when she was being interviewed. It always led back to Jesus. Eleven years of age she is, and she is speaking about allowing God to go through her to come back to her. That's very powerful, very, very powerful. Even at her age, the personal tests that she went through to do with this, and would she stand in the background or would she be that ambassador that God wanted her to be.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: She definitely educates me even at a young age. Like Samuel, Samuel heard the voice of the Lord at a young age, and I just think it's a sign and an indication of this generation. God is really touching them. Not just Keren, but I have Keren as the physical example in my life in proximity to her. So, Keren, we just want to give you a shoutout. We're so proud of you. We're so excited for all that God's going to do. If you are listening to this, you need to get used to the name Keren Kassas or Kika, as she's being known in her artistry, because it's going to be a name that you're going to hear quite often.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, I guarantee you will.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: So, Dr. Robyn, we're moving into now, we've come to the final step. We've gone through the entire Tabernacle journey from the outer court to the inner court, then the most holy place, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant. We covered authority last week with Aaron's budding staff. Today is just a revisit quickly, but also the purpose of the Tabernacle, the overview of why it's so important to discuss this in this day and age for the believer. So, I'm going to throw it over to you because I know you've got some real powerful gems you want to give our listeners.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Well, I think it's important that we look at this again to see the journey, the purpose, but also the journey is just as important as the final part of the journey. If we replay it back in our minds, we can understand it, and so I've just clarified it a bit more simple way of doing it, summarized it better.

Before that, there is a checklist that we do in Exodus that really is important that points to the Holy of Holies, which was really that place of authority and also that place of God's choice, the budding rod of Aaron. That was the budding rod that came forward. It was God's choice. When we go into that, I want to talk about some points here in the Old Testament, or what we call now the First Testament, and then of course the New Testament was the Second Testament.

In that First Testament, when Moses would approach God, he would approach Him a certain way. He would stand or kneel before the Ark of the Covenant, and then he would choose to put in something in that room or even in that box. It would be put in there, something that would show him God's image because, after all, it's all about God's story. That's where I'm leading as I finalize my part to play in this broadcast.

Something that God chose to show not a graven image out of a man's mind, but something that would be representing God. Who better to choose what represents Him is God Himself. So that New Testament, there is something in that image of God that God would have chosen for us, and that possibly is the cross, the cross of Calvary. Of course, that also would be the image of the invisible God, which is Jesus.

The Bible says we fix our eyes on Him, Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith. So that's the image that God would have chosen for the New Testament, and also the cross. Those are the images that represent God. In both Old and New Testament, or the First and the Second Testament, God has specifically declared that He has given us an image that we can fix our eyes on as we approach Him in prayer. I want to tell you, that image and those pictures are a language of our very heart. We can live in that language of our heart. We can live out of pictures because it's visual. God knows the power of pictures.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Pictures bypass the cortex of the brain that has to reason and figure out everything logically, and it also locates directly through emotion, the heart. Pictures trigger emotion and feeling and they touch the heart.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's really important that we know why God chose these things because He put before us a Tabernacle with living experience in the Old Testament. It was a living experience and they had to go through that living experience to experience those pictures.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think if you don't have pictures in your salvation process, journey, in your Christian walk daily, that's a sign that your walk is going stale. You need pictures to keep you refreshed and alive.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think these are the pictures, and so I'd like to just replay these pictures as a few thoughts here. First, the altar: we are a living sacrifice. That's the one. Now we can look at the laver. We can say we have been washed or washed ourselves by the applying of God's word.

Then we have a table of showbread, which is another image. What does it say? It means our will has been ground fine before God and we are living in fellowship, living fellowship with the body of Christ. That's something that we need to have on our journey. The lampstand is God illuminating our mind and giving us the revelation to be able to read His word.

Then of course we come to the altar of incense. We are continually thanking God and He is bringing ourselves and our emotions under His control. The very last one, of course, is one that we did last week. This is the conclusion of the Tabernacle experience, and the Ark of the Covenant. We can walk in immediately into His presence in silence and receive His spoken word into our hearts.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That's a very, very succinct way of putting a wrapping up statement of importance on each of those articles.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I paraphrased all that and I felt that that was important to do. So why don't we go to the break and then we'll come back and we'll continue this overview and this capping off of the Tabernacle journey.

Announcer: You're listening to First Love with Dr. Robyn and Dr. Nathan Kassas. The story isn't finished yet, and neither is what Jesus wants to reveal to your heart today. Let's jump back in and pick up right where we left off.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Well, Dr. Robyn, that was a powerful first segment. A great way to wrap up the journey that we've been on and to summarize for the listener, simplified understanding of each article. You have something else that you wanted to say before we add a little bit to what you were saying in the beginning.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, bringing some scientific evidence to this even through the body. I would like to say, what is the purpose of the Tabernacle experience? This experience is to do something very special. This is to bring each one of us into His story. After all, it's all about the one who started the journey in the first place.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I love that saying that you've been using in your counseling in the last two weeks. He started it. If you could start it, or if you did start it, you could have a say.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But we don't have a say because He instigated the first move. He grabbed us before we even took a hold of Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Paul says to lay hold of why He first took hold of me.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Now we understand something that finally we might be able to work with, rather than it doesn't work. That is always trying to get God into our story. That's why it doesn't work, because it's His story and He wants to bring us into His story, into His heart field. This is why we've done this journey.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That kind of goes to what I was going to add, which is literally Jesus is every article in the Tabernacle. He's the laver, He's the altar, He's the altar of incense, He's the showbread. He not only wants us to be a part of those things, but everything points to Him being those things, and He's the whole Tabernacle.

The purpose, like you said, is to give us the image of what Jesus is in our lives and then to stir us to faith every day to go on that journey from the outer court to the most holy place every day with the Lord afresh. We can sometimes think that I've gone into the outer court or I've gone into the inner place today and I don't need to do that tomorrow, but we've got to realize every day it must be continual, a continual pursuit of relationship.

You talked about the power of imagery and I, again, am going to add some science. We talk about mirror neurons and why they're so important. Mirror neurons are how, when you're teaching a child to smile, there are certain neurons in the brain that activate only by looking at something and mirroring it. Other neurons are fired in synapse through learned information, but these mirror neurons are how children learn emotion and they really are how identity is formed relationally. Belief and behavior are shaped by mirror neurons.

Neuroscience confirms what scripture already knows, which is that we become like what we behold. By learning the Tabernacle and by beholding it visually, we can actually transpose that into our relationship with the Lord. We can become like that Tabernacle, which fulfills the scripture that literally says, 2 Corinthians 3:18, my favorite scripture, "We all with unveiled face are beholding the glory of God, being transformed into that very same image."

The scripture that literally says we have become the Tabernacle, "Do you not know," 1 Corinthians 3:16, "that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you?" To answer your question from my perspective, the cross was the fulfillment of the First Testament's Tabernacle. Now we are the fulfillment of the Second Testament's Tabernacle. He came down, did not see it robbery, but He came down, took off His glory and He tabernacled with men, then He died for men so that we could tabernacle with Him forever. We are that living Tabernacle now. That's why every day the believer needs to go on that journey to go through the Tabernacle process. We can't skip straight to intimacy. We have to go through the outer court. The only difference is there's no veils.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And also, as I said before, we are the shell. We are the channel. We are the vessel. We're the vessel that He can move through. We are the channel that His spirit goes through and we are the one that holds Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I want to recenter on that statement. Even though there's no physical veils, now the journey is to break the emotional and the spiritual veils that we've put in place through pain and trauma. There might not be a physical curtain separating me from the presence of God, but there might be a spirit of hard-heartedness, there might be a spirit of rejection.

We’ve got to understand, when we get exposed to glory without integrated steps, it actually overwhelms the nervous system and it traumatizes us more. You can't have revelation without regulation. That's a very important thing for the believer today because the believer is living on all of this high of revelation but they have no integrated regulation. Regulation is literally what brings the safety and feeling that security.

The word of the Lord at the beginning of this year, 2026, was, "I want to secure you before I actually reveal my will for you." You would think that God would reveal His will and then work to secure.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Well, you would need it that way because unless you're secure, you can't even hold on to what is being revealed.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That goes to show us that salvation, yes, it opens the gate, but formation and transformation is what actually walks you home. You can't just live in the gate, you've got to walk home and you've got to keep going on that journey. Very important thing here with the science is that we see that if we don't go through each step every day, the process of the Tabernacle, and we don't go through integrated regulation and formation, then we're actually not reaching a real transformation. As we go through each step, that union that takes place in those steps, it attaches us to God.

I'm all about attachment. We've got to have more focus on attachment than attention. Attachment is what the church is missing. This is why we keep thinking that it's about our performance. This is why we keep falling when we don't do things that we think God's pleased with. This is why we don't come back because we're not attached. We just want attention. If you just want attention, you're just performing. You're not really surrendered, yielded, or in union with the person that you're in relationship with.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And so we would need to be, in other words, a living sacrifice.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Living stones, living sacrifice. Romans 9, Romans 12, all these scriptures come into play now because we're coming for that mentality in the believer that says salvation is enough. Salvation, the outer court, it represents the first feast, Passover. But you’ve got to move from Passover. You’ve got to go to the next feast, which is the inner court, which is Pentecost. Then you’ve got to move from that. You’ve got people swinging from the chandeliers still like that's the culmination of God's presence, speaking in tongues, signs and wonders. No, the final feast is Tabernacles. He's got to come down to tabernacle with you.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And that's because He's the hope of glory and He lives within us. When we get that real revelation on that, all this effort can change.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: The important thing here, I think is, remember, the heart repositions its shape based on how you live. If you live a sedentary lifestyle, meaning you're not very active, your heart will get smaller. It doesn't expand. If you live a very active lifestyle, the heart gets larger and it thickens its muscles. It gets tougher.

Spiritually, if we don't every day apply these things to our physical and our spiritual walk with the Lord, we're not shaping, literally, because what we behold daily is what we become neurologically and spiritually. If we go on that journey with the Lord every day, we're shaping us into that image that 2 Corinthians 3:18 talks about, and then it shows you that transformation is not instant, it's intentional.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: In actual fact, if we don't exercise our heart, it atrophies, literally. You'll lose it. Use it or lose it. The muscle, you have to exercise it every day, and the heart has to be exercised every day as well. This is the way God made us to be.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: So, you don't skip the Tabernacle. You're shaped by it. Jesus fulfilled the Tabernacle so we could live in it, and the journey that you would avoid is often the glory that you're asking for. In culmination here, the Tabernacle was never abolished, it was actually embodied. Jesus became the Tabernacle, went to the cross so that we could become the Tabernacle of His presence and God's spirit, and that He could live in us. That's it. That's what you've been talking about this whole time about Christ in us, the hope of glory. If we get that visual and we look at that First Testament visual and we apply it, then we will see the journey that we've got to go on every day. I think that's exciting. When salvation becomes a journey, it's exciting.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think when people start to realize this is not a place of work, this is a place of rest. When you're holding something, you can rest that His expression will come forward out of it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And just to finish off before we go to the final word, Tabernacles, the feast of Tabernacles, is all about entering into rest. That final place where Jesus says, "Enter into thy rest." That's the feast of Tabernacles. Throwing over to you for your final word as we wrap up this series.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think the word we would say, "rest," is an unusual name or an unusual word to be used to do with Christianity, because it's always the word "work." But if we did the work with a different attitude, we would rest. Yes.

Announcer: Thanks for spending time with us today on First Love. If today's message spoke to you, share it with someone. And if you're looking for more teachings, visit www.torch.org. That's t-o-r-c-c dot org for more. We'll be back next week, same time, same truth. And as you go, don't forget: the one who loved you first is still loving you best.