Cleansing the Temple

 

Jesus went into the temple and began to throw out the people who were selling things there. He said, “It is written in the Scriptures, ‘My temple will be a house for prayer,’ but you have changed it into a ‘hideout for robbers’!”

—Luke 19:45-46 NCV

Jesus came to the temple at the time of Passover and saw the following scene: ¹

Filling the Court of the Gentiles, thousands of pilgrims stream past the animal enclosures and money tables, creating a babble of noise broken by shouting merchants and crying children. Cramped against each other in makeshift pens, lambs and goats and oxen mill in nervous circles, the smell of fresh dung scattered by their hooves. Dozens of pilgrims wait for [the man] to inspect their offerings—small lambs tucked under arms, goats led by ropes, doves in reed cages.

We have all read the story of Jesus coming upon this scene, angered by what He saw, and taking authority to overturn tables, scatter coins, and let loose the animals. He felt personally attacked because, unknown to the crowd, this was His temple on earth.

I often wondered what lesson God wanted us to learn from this account. How can we apply this to our world? I doubt anyone reading this has seen such a scene in their churches.

However, I am reminded of these verses from 1 Corinthians 3:16-17:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

Pretty strong words, right? It begs the question, “What would Jesus in anger like to overturn, or throw out, of our lives?” What does He see in us that does not belong? What should be replaced with prayer, or with a strong healing touch of the Holy Spirit’s power? Have we become so accustomed to the sight, smells, and noise of sinful activity that we no longer notice?

Oh, Jesus, You who died so that we might become a temple in which You feel comfortable to live, to pray, and to serve, please have mercy on us! Reveal to us the sinful clutter, the bellowing din and smelly sins that crowd out Your “still small voice” and Your beauty. Cleanse us, purify us. Reveal Yourself in love, rather than in anger. And, heal us, that we may carry Your precious Spirit glowing with light and peace to the world. Amen.

______________________

1 Brouwer, Sigmund. The Carpenter’s Journey to the Cross and Beyond. Nashville: Countryman-Thomas Nelson Publishing Company, 1997. p. 31.

 

 

Tracking in Mud

 

And Moses said, “Here I am.” “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”;

—Exodus 3:5

Nothing makes a mom crazier than having an unaware dog or unaware child with muddy feet run across her newly mopped floor. You can just hear her shout: “Stop! Stop! Stop! You’re tracking in mud! Take off your shoes!”

Have you ever spent time in prayer when you suddenly got interrupted by something or someone? And, before you could get back to prayer, you realized that you had already said or done something for which you needed forgiveness. Our feet get muddy so quickly that we barely notice. We easily become as unaware as that dog or child running over mom’s clean floor.

After the Passover Meal, on the night Jesus was betrayed and arrested, He began washing the feet of His disciples. When He came to Simon Peter, Peter objected to Jesus’ work. John 13:8-10 records what happened next:

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Jesus answered, “A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean.”

What did Jesus mean?

It seems that those who had been baptized into Christ—had accepted the washing He gives to make them new creatures in Him—didn’t really need to continually come back for a thorough cleansing. In contrast however, Jesus realized that feet, in open sandals that walk the dusty roads of Palestine, get muddy over and over again.

We need this same spiritual cleansing today. We go to places we shouldn’t go. We step on others’ feelings. We wander away into enemy territory. We run after things that we don’t need. All our wanderings often act like quicksand to pull us down. We even suffer wounds to our spiritual feet that need cleaning and binding up.

No wonder, in Exodus 3:5, God told Moses to take off his muddy sandals. Like Moses, we need to realize that when we come before God to talk with Him in prayer, our muddy shoes carry the smell of sin. Jesus may not want any part of us at that moment. But, He never turns us away. He merely asks us to allow Him to wash our feet. When we do, we become accepted by Him and enabled by Him to wash others’ feet—to treat them as God has treated us—and to share fellowship with Him.

Like the hymn reminds us, we are “prone to wander, prone to leave the God we love.”¹ How marvelous it is that Jesus, even before He took our sins to the cross, reminded us, through this incident with His disciples, that our feet get dirty more often than we realize.

Daily, we personally need to take account of our sin and submit to the washing before we enter His holy presence. Likewise, when our church congregations come together in His presence, we corporately need to take account of our corporate sin by the “Confession” and receive God’s blessing through the “Assurance of Pardon.” In so doing, we remember that we need the “washing” by the hands of our Savior. Jesus wants to use us with clean shoes and feet!

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1 Robinson, Robert. “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Public domain.

 

 

Dismembered

 

“I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you… This is my body, broken for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

—1 Corinthians 11:18, 24

Ann Voskamp, in her little book of poetic essays, Be the Gift, writes a lot about brokenness, as it has to do with our individual lives and as a people of God collectively. She writes:¹

We are all a body, we belong to one another, we are one … We live a horror story of distortion and dismemberment. To be the re-membering people—this is the work of life in a brokenhearted world.

When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper and Paul wrote about it in his letter to the Corinthian church, they each spoke about Jesus’ broken body. The whole thrust of Paul’s writing, in the verses at the beginning of this blog post, concerns the church as the broken body of Christ. We all have broken lives pulled apart by sin, selfishness, hurting, and the misunderstanding of each other.

Especially during this Season of Lent, we need to consider deeply the body of Christ with whom we share this sacramental meal. We belong to each other. As we prepare to partake of the elemements of Communion, we must think:

I see my sister down the row in church. She is elderly, wearing tattered clothing, but alive in her love for Christ. I see my brothers sitting across the aisle. They are smart-looking in their business suits, but they are also struggling with broken and sinful habits. I see children growing up in a culture ever anxious to pollute their innocent minds and pull their spiritual arms and legs from them in an effort to own them, absorb them, and turn them away from a relationship with God.

We come, a dismembered people, to the Lord’s table. Jesus wants us to see the selfless, tortured mind and body that He gave for us. He wants to remind us that He longs for us to be that kind of broken for our brothers and sisters in Christ. He wants to see us re-joined together—“re-membered,” if you will—healed, complete in Him, and completing each other, as we join hearts, minds, and hands and follow Him.

Ann Voskamp, again:²

Our call is to be compassionate, to be a community, a communion, of broken bread and poured-out wine, to live cruciform, formed like a cross. Our call is to take the form of reaching hands, open ears, listening hearts because our God is with us and we’re called into communion with Him and with each other.

And sometimes, we must simply absorb the pain of living in a body with sinful members, like our very own. We simply need to forgive and bear the burden. Noted author Karen Mains refers to a quote she once read:³

Forgiveness is being willing to bear the pain of another’s misdeeds against us.

This seems far easier said than done. But, such a mindset is required, if we are to allow the Body of Christ to function with all its members intact.

As we struggle to bring the broken pieces together in a healthy whole, may we see the model of oneness in Him that our Lord gave us in the reminder of the Lord’s Supper: whenever we eat it, whenever we drink it!

______________________

1 Voskamp, Ann. Be the Gift. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Company, 2017. p. 118.

2 Ibid. p. 6.

3 Mains, Karen Burton. The Key to a Loving Heart. Elgin, IL: David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1979. p. 81.

 

 

Congenital Defects

 

“Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”

—Psalm 51:5

We thank God when we see a new baby, healthy and strong. Most little ones appear so perfect in every way. Yet, some parents know all too well the reality of a baby born with a defect of some kind, even if she appears perfectly normal on the outside.

Many times these parents spend the early years of their child’s life in and out of operating rooms, hoping that doctors can repair the problems with which she came into the world. They wait and watch for signs of normalcy and steady growth. If she progresses well, the parents rejoice that the path to healing was worth all the pain.

Truthfully, all people come into the world with congenital defects of the spiritual variety. We have a “heart defect.” In our natural state, we may look normal to the world, but inside we carry a flaw which, unless we get help, will “kill” us in the end.

We are born spiritually blind to the fact that we begin our lives already stained by the sin curse that we inherited from our parents, all the way back to Adam. Unless we get the right “treatment,” we will go through life unable to see our own condition. In fact, the Bible tells us in Ephesians 2:1 that we are actually:

“… dead in our transgressions and sins.”

So, what do we have to do in order to obtain a repair for this condition and recover? There is really nothing we can do on our own. Fortunately, the “operation” has already occurred—the treatment has been completed! Jesus took the pain. He took the punishment for our sinful condition on the cross. By faith in Him we can know His complete healing. As Jesus Himself said in John 5:24:

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”

For our blindness, God has given us a “healing light”—for Jesus is the Light of the World. As the Apostle Paul states in 2 Corinthians 4:4:

“The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”

Even centuries before Jesus walked the earth, the Prophet Ezekiel prophesied, in Ezekiel 36:26, about the “surgical procedure” for our healing:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Hallelujah! God has already provided a “heart transplant.” He has given us light to heal our blindness, and eternal life in place of the living death with which we came into the world. Through Jesus, we can walk in His perfection throughout our lifetime and in the eternity beyond.

 

 

Unspotted

 

“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this … to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”

—James 1:27 NKJV

The principal of the newly renovated school where I taught liked to use my spacious music classroom for faculty meetings after school because I didn’t have student desks, and had plenty of room for adult size folding chairs. In the spirit of Christian hospitality, I enjoyed allowing my fellow teachers to use my room for such a purpose.

However, I cringed to see fellow faculty members balancing coffee cups and stacks of papers as they entered the room. Worse yet were those who would set their cups willy-nilly on the floor near their chairs.

I knew that if coffee spilled and stained my carpet, I would have to wait until the next summer before custodians would thoroughly clean the carpet. By then, the stain might have become so deeply set that it would not completely come out.

For 20 years I had taught in an old building with a room of mixed and matched items. I had an orange-painted desk, a collection of old chairs painted various colors, and a bright green bulletin board. Now, with the recent renovation, I really enjoyed having a newly remodeled room with freshly painted walls and a spiffy new look. I treasured my unspotted carpet.

According to the Scripture, God wants us “unspotted” by the world around us. How easily stains appear when we try to balance too many things and lose our focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. How often we let down our guard and allow the culture around us to get too close and become ever-deeply ingrained in the core of our beings.

We need a spiritual vigilance to remain unspotted. We need the Holy Spirit to examine us and to warn us when our thoughts or actions cause us to stray from the pathway God has laid out for us. We also need Jesus, our Advocate with the Father, to cleanse us from all “spots” as soon as they appear and well before they work their way into the fabric of our lives, making them difficult to remove.

Stains seem to become more permanent the longer they stay in the fabric of our lives. Not only do we see these stains, but others do, as well. The stains blemish our example and blemish our testimony for Christ.

I urge you to make the most of every opportunity to do some scrubbing in the Lord’s presence. Confess your sins. Repent of your sins. Fall back into the life-transforming grace that God offers us through His Son. Jesus stands ready to cleanse us, as the Apostle Paul describes in Ephesians 5:25b-27:

…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

Just think how God will approve when He sees our lives “unspotted” through the cleansing power of Jesus.

 

 

Rattling Bones

 

The Lord set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones… And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone.

—Ezekiel 37:1,7

Talk about bizarre! Perhaps, by the time Ezekiel had the vision of the valley of dry bones, he had experienced the Lord’s visions enough times to not completely freak out. Here he sat, among the exiles from Israel in Babylon, with a message from God and the hand of the Lord upon him. The Jews had been captive there for more than thirty years and, according to God’s timeline given to other prophets, they had forty more years left in their captivity.

The people around Ezekiel appeared as those dry bones—lifeless and ignorant of the God who was ordering their nation’s woes. Yet here, in the most forsaken place, God was giving Ezekiel a message of hope using this strange vision.

Ezekiel, the obedient prophet, did as God commanded. In response to the vision, Ezekiel preached to these dry, lifeless bones. Surprisingly, he heard the sound of the rattling skeletons and saw them come together and reconnect with flesh surrounding them.

Next, God commanded Ezekiel to preach to the wind and ask for breath to come again and revive those dead bones. In obedience, Ezekiel did as God asked. As he watched, Ezekiel saw a huge army of people and he heard them confessing that they were dry and without hope. God responded by bringing a message of hope to all of them, by promising that, with His Spirit upon them, they would live and go back to their own land!

What hope this must have brought the prophet and, as he recounted his vision, to the people! God had not forgotten them. In fact, He acted in their behalf to restore them to life.

Sometimes, when we look at our country in the midst of this pandemic and with the political and cultural unrest all around us, it must feel like we lie in a valley full of dry bones. Can God cause us to live again? What must we do to see that happen? Like Israel, we need to confess that we lie dead without hope and without obedience to the living God.

But, not only does our culture look dry, dead, and useless. Oftentimes, we also look at our churches and see that they carry on without the “life” of the Holy Spirit moving them and giving them health and strength to serve God. We ask, “Can these bones live again?” Once again, can we stand like a mighty army and with renewed energy serve Him? In Robert Coleman’s book on revival from the 1960’s, he writes:¹

Yet there is hope. Dry bones can live again. In other days of crises when catastrophe has threatened, men have turned unto the Lord and found in him deliverance and strength. In fact, our greatest spiritual awakenings have come during the darkest periods of church history. Perhaps again the peril of the age may bring us to our senses.

The church uses the term “revival” as “the return of something to its true nature and purpose.” Certainly, dry bones need to form skeletons, and skeletons need not only flesh and blood, but life breathed in, as God did when He created Adam. From Coleman again:²

In the Old Testament, the word revival comes from a root meaning “to live,” which originally conveyed the idea of “breathing,” inasmuch as breath is the expression of life in all animate beings.

Hence, the word to the prophet in Ezekiel 37:5 refers to this kind of reviving power:

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.”

Let us listen for the rattling of the bones. As it did at Pentecost, let us pray to see the wind of the Holy Spirit come into our own dry existence, into the life of our churches, and into our lifeless culture. Then, may the Holy Spirit’s power within us and our churches accomplish all that God wants to accomplish, to the glory of His Holy Name!

______________________

1 Coleman, Robert E. Dry Bones Can Live Again. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1969. Pp. 7-8.

2 Ibid. Pp. 11-12.

 

 

The Reflection in a Mirror

 

	“We, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory… are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the spirit.”
	—2 Corinthians 3:18

I’ve been thinking about mirrors lately. Mirrors reflect what we put in front of them.

If we consider what Christ sees when He looks into the “mirror” of our life, does He see His reflection there? Think of Moses. When he came down from Mount Sinai, after being in the presence of God for 40 days, the Scripture tells us that his face shown with the glory of God.

Because Moses revealed God in his countenance, those who saw him became uncomfortable around him. Too much light compared to the darkness of their hearts. Responding to their discomfort, Moses put a veil over his face, so the people didn’t have to be confronted with the glory of God.

Learn from Moses. Don’t be surprised if, when you reflect Christ well, others around you become uncomfortable.

I’ve been thinking about mirrors lately. They need cleaning regularly in order to reflect the clearest image. Our lives need the cleansing that comes when we bring our sinful behaviors and thoughts before the purity of Christ. He waits to cleanse us—to wipe the mirror of our lives thoroughly clean.

In 1 John 1:9 the Apostle says:

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”