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!

______________________

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.