April 3, 2016 - Temple Worship

Tony and Michelle Pawlak

MEMORY VERSE

Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? (I Corinthians 3:16)

How important did God consider the temple in Jerusalem?  The temple in Jerusalem was extremely important for worship to the Jewish people. When King David wanted to build the temple, God deemed him unworthy.  Instead, God had David’s son, Solomon, build it.

When King Solomon completed the temple, he moved in all of the temple articles: the altar of incense, the table for the show bread, the seven tiered candlestick/Menorah, and of course the Ark of the Covenant. When all this was done, God filled the temple with His Spirit in the form of a cloud so thick that the priests could not do their work.

This was God’s way of showing the people that He approved of the temple and that His presence would dwell within it. God intended the temple to be a place for people to pray to Him.

Approximately 1045 years later, a new Temple stood in Jerusalem but it was still sacred to God. During the Passion Week (the last week of Jesus’ life), Jesus visited the temple.  When He arrived, He was greatly offended by what He saw.

It was the week of the Passover and Jews from all over came to make sacrifices. Many of them decided to buy their sacrifices there in Jerusalem. Jesus was not happy to find people selling animals in the temple courtyard.  Also, many people did not have the right kind of money. 

They had money from the countries they came from, which had to be exchanged for local money.

There were people called money changers who would take the people’s foreign money and give them local money. However, they would cheat the people and not give them back the correct amount.  The people could not do anything about it because they needed the local money.  Jesus saw that the money changers were robbing the helpless people. He became very angry.

Jesus grabbed some chords and made a whip from them and used it to chase the money changers out of the temple courtyard. He also flipped their tables over and told them to get the animals out of there. Jesus said to them,  “It is written, My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves!” (Matthew 21:13)

Christians today do not need a temple to meet with God.  After Jesus ascended into Heaven, God’s Holy Spirit came to live inside of us. God’s word tells us that our bodies are now His temple.  Do you think that God holds our bodies just as sacred as the temple? Of course He does! 

Our bodies are now the dwelling place of His Holy Spirit. If

Jesus thought it was so important to keep wrong things out of the temple, shouldn't we find it just as important to keep wrong things out of our temples (ourselves)? 

So we should take good care of our bodies by eating well, exercising, practicing good hygiene, and not putting bad things in it.  But even more important, we need to keep wrong things out of our minds and spirits! We need to watch what we see, what we hear, what we believe, how we feel and so on.  

Satan will try to get us to let down our guard and fill us with anger, hatred, sadness, jealousy, and many other bad things.  We need to clean our temples the way Jesus did and chase those things out! 

All Christians together are also God's temple.  So we need to watch out for each other and the entire church.  We need to stick together and take care of each other so that our brothers and sisters in Christ aren't deceived, hurt, lonely, afraid, hungry and other such bad things.  We are all in this together!