They called it the tacky Jesus wall my first year of seminary I got to my dorm and discovered that some of the upper-classmen in grad school for pastors Had found their only outlet for overexposure to Jesus study Was to go to local nickel and dime stores and yard sales and Lay their hands on all the tacky art about Jesus they could get and and hang it on the walls of our first floor hallway the tacky Jesus wall it included such fines as the national inquirer cover That had an artistic rendering of the 50-foot tall Jesus that was seen in downtown Miami There was a Velvet Jesus to compete with velvet Elvis, I guess But the crown jewel of their collection Was the last supper alarm clock Which was a large replica of Da Vinci's last supper Where where at each hour on the chiming of the hour one of the apostles would light up and let you know what time it was It took me a couple of years to realize That my annoyance had turned into a gift that they had given to us to have a low tolerance For exaggerations or misconceptions of Christ See there would be an element of truth behind some of these paintings and depictions, but they were so grossly exaggerated It was horrible. I kind of had a little bit of arrogance built into me from that as a pastor thinking I had a great ability to sniff that out and I certainly had a better Conception of who Jesus was and what he actually looked like with all these paintings of A six-foot-four Scandinavian man with long hair and a beard Holding tenderly a little lamb while children dance toward him. Oh, there was a little bit of arrogant scoffing As a student of the Bible, but I was reminded again I've how far afield my thoughts about Jesus are just in his appearance Recently I read an article this year After much scientific study on the region and finding three male skulls in Jerusalem from the first century, they came to the conclusion There a composite sketch that this is what the average first century male Jew looked like and there was a picture And the picture alone stunned me because even though I arrogantly had thought well certainly he didn't look like that I hadn't thought of him as looking more Like a first century Jewish male Even though I told myself I had And when they went on to tell me that the average first century Jewish man was five foot one and a hundred and ten pounds Well, the thought of Jesus a foot shorter than me raised my eyebrows But the underlying push is not what he looked like but the misconception of his character that I have And I know it when I'm stunned by something I read in the Bible see Everybody loves the Jesus who shows up and makes a hundred and fifty gallons of wine like we saw last week But what do you do when Jesus shows up with a whip? It begs the question Do you want the real Jesus? Or one that you've concocted
John 2's where we're going is page 1648 in your pew Bible How can the same guy who made all that wine Now make a whip well, let's hear from God beginning Verse 12 here God's word
After this he went down to cappernum with his mother and brothers and his disciples and There they stayed for a few days When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover Jesus went up to Jerusalem In the temple courts he found men selling cattle sheep and doves and other sitting at tables exchanging money So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple area both sheep and cattle He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables To those who sold doves he said get these out of here. How dare you turn my father's house into a market? His disciples remembered that it is written Zeal for your house will consume me Then the Jews demanded of him what miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this Jesus answered them destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days The Jews replied it's taken 46 years to build this temple and you were going to raise it in three days But the temple he had spoken of was his body After he was raised from the dead His disciples recalled what he had said then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken This is God's word Let's pray Thank you That you are not a complacent God
Show us your face show us your passion this morning so that we would not be a complacent people Draws to you in your name. We pray Amen Why is Jesus so mad? I mean don't you want to know why he's so mad? It'd be a lot easier To deal with his anger if we understood why it was mad, but Jesus acts Before he explains to them why he's angry He blindsives them so I want to let that aggravate you a little bit this morning So instead of answering the question why? We'll go like this what he does why he does it What it means for us? Look at what he does here. It It's so surprising especially if you're somebody who's never really read the Bible Maybe you've heard different things about Jesus to sit down and read and see Jesus with a whip in his hand Cracking it and kicking over tables Especially if Christians claim this guy It's perfect now If there's only been one perfect person in history We really don't know perfect people So it should it be surprising That Jesus surprises us But still It aggravates Ephesians says in your anger do not sin there is an anger That can happen without sin, but it's very difficult for us to know because our brokenness is so intertwined our mixed motives are so intertwined What would righteous indignation look like what would a pure? True godly anger look like some people really like this picture of Jesus They kind of like an angry God Even those people maybe aggravated to know the word here in the Greek It says a whip of chords literally what he's doing it says he picks up rushes Or reads think of it maybe more like this He's walking along and he's picking up the haw the haw the haw the straw and the hay for the animals and He's entwining it This isn't a whip made out of leather This isn't the kind of weapon that you could actually hurt people with this is more like a child's toy It's not so much about his physical stature and violence being done as it is a symbolic prophetic action and they clearly respond to it I mean he scatters them with a whip made out of straw. I want you to get this image Imagine this morning We know what people who live in town are like we know people who live in the country are like and then we know people who live in the Sticks are like if somebody lives out in the stick. That's how my grandma always put it They live in their real country if somebody real country Somebody who clearly lived in a different fashion came into the service this morning Walked down front without regard to what's going on grab the flower set here and started ripping off the pedals and Intertwining them together to form this long whip like thing stepped up to the pulpit and ran me off in the choir We were up here Then he kicks over the pulpit Comes down flips over the communion table and starts getting people out of here Well, how would you respond Get the deacons get a moment, you know, we'd call the police. There's a guy a crazy guy in the sanctuary during our service If it was the Easter service I mean, this is the biggest feast of the year and crisis doing this if He was an imposing threat you would expect there to be Police notice who's can speak you can speak you're sleep absent where the Romans Where these soldiers you'd expect to come and put down any riot, especially with this kind of gathering I want you to rethink how you consider this passage if Christ is able to run these people off But it's not a riot It's not the kind of violence that soldiers would come running to take care of It's the reason that there's a curiosity even among the religious leaders to come back and ask Jesus Where the professionals who are you? What do you think you're doing? What right do you have to do this? I want Jesus to take us to edge theologically before we get into Before we get into why he does this
When God comes into your life and he kicks over the tables Without explaining to you what he's up to When God gets up in your business and knocks things around and you don't know why Well, how do people normally respond? God, if you just explain to me what's going on here be easier to handle If your God has to explain to you Before you can let him do stuff He's not really God You're the one holding the linchpin. Let me flip that on its head if God is big enough and powerful enough For you to blame him when bad things happen if he's in that much control if he's that sovereign For you to be able to say what are you doing then understand? He's also big enough and powerful enough to have every right to do that without explaining it to you Now that is aggravated we really really really like it when Jesus comes to the party and we run out of good stuff and he brings more Like you did last week But what do you do with the Jesus who kicks over the tables? How can this be the same guy? How is he not schizophrenic? What if he's doing the same thing? I want you to think about this I told you before when we were finishing up John in the spring that the gospel writer John has chosen just 21 days of Jesus life He is selective about what he chooses and he purposefully puts these two things side-by-side to aggravate you Just in case after last week you were thinking well, God's my caterer All I got to do is go ask for some stuff and he brings it This passage is laid right alongside of this episode and their life with Christ To go to the opposite extreme Everybody likes it when you're at the wedding and Jesus comes as an invited guest and He provides to save you from embarrassment But you notice the difference between That passage in this one Seeing the last passage Jesus was an invited guest But now in the temple He's the host This is his house See a guest comes over to your house. There's only so much they can demand of you rightfully But if the owner shows up We had two visitors from Chattanooga in our house last week If I were to drive home after church and find them out front throwing my furniture onto the lawn and Taking a sledgehammer and gutting different parts this wall needed to come down rust We wanted to put in a new stairwell for you I Would be lit. What are you doing? You have no right to do this. Get out of my house If you invite Jesus in As a guest It is not the same thing as having him take up residency as owner in the South we talk Christian we use Christian ease we throw terms around Is Jesus a guest in your world? Is he accountable to you? Or is he the owner Whose house are you living in spiritually? I guess if I can put this to you is It's aggravating as I know how Can Jesus Come into your world and point at something and put his finger on it and say that's got to go No matter what it is I want that gone Can you look back in the last year in your life and see things Jesus has put his finger on that you didn't want to let go of?
that are now gone That maybe even you can celebrate they're gone are there things in the coming year that he's already put his finger on and said That's got to go That's aggravating Christians like to hear about grace that Jesus died for my sins and saved me for my sins and now I'm okay with God. Yes But Christ doesn't want you to stay Filthy Repentance is the Christian life As the owner he comes and he has a passion to do something to cleanse us What is he doing on? Friday My poor wife on Friday. I I I got home and we had had a small problem with the toilet So we called the plumber and the plumber had had had come over and I'd said a man Did you want me to come home early so I can be that now? It's okay. So I'm coming in And the plumber's already there and he made a mistake. I mean it happens people make mistakes but He had taken the snake to clean our line out the this met metallic coil and My wife and son were sitting I came in right after this happened my wife and son are sitting in the den All of a sudden they hear this horrible racket that's getting louder and louder and louder and she walks up into the house back toward the kitchen and there Dancing around our dining room is this huge metal coil The plumber thought he was pushing it away from the house out the line and steady was pushing it back into the house It had come up through the toilet out the bathroom through the bedroom back through our laundry room and in to the dining room and it was dancing Around there Your laugh. I wasn't She comes to you'll never guess what happened and then the realization hits this thing is a rusty metal coil that has been up in raw sewage and now is danced all over your house The guys and first I mean the young guy He didn't have as much experience, but he said he said we can we can get some some resolve
Now we're gonna call the cleaners here But think about that we had perfect they paid for professional cleaner to come take care of they were great To us no problem with that plumber, but that but the thing that struck me is When Christ comes and puts his finger on something that says it's got to go It's ridiculous to think I would stop and say no I want that raw sewage to stay right where it is That's part of my house. I want my kids playing in that filth That's how we live here and don't you mess with it see If he's got an agenda that's better than mine Even if I can't see what he's up to even if I think there is no way you should be messing with that I Mean this will press it out for you Do you have a living God or do you have a Lego set have you just Built up various things that you kind of liked into a nice shape That have no power in your life, but actually looks kind of like you or whatever you want it to look like Or do you have a God who can come and say? Uh-uh. I love you enough that even if you want to live in this filth, I'm not going to stand for it
That lead us into why he's so angry Why is it that Jesus is so upset and I've said this kind of thing before I don't think I can say it enough especially Knowing that we live in the South I grew up in the South and it's our tendency to think opposite from this when Jesus Gets upset if you look across all the gospels but even right here What is it that's got him so angry? You don't see him getting angry at the Romans. They were the terrorists who were oppressing God's people who had moved in and were Over them in an inappropriate way. That's not who he's mad at who's he mad at? The religious establishment The good people the people who should have known better He's living why
I want you to the other gospels really draw out the fact that there's corruption going on here And that's certainly part of it But John focuses on something else the only hint we get of exactly The the avenue that John wants us to see Before he makes this cryptic statement about the temple He says how dare you turn my father's house into a market and the Greek word there Can mean imporium. There's an image of racket and noise and distraction Let me give you a little context The Passover is the big feast of the years the big gathering and they said Jerusalem at that time was roughly about 80,000 people a sizable city Not the largest, but it's the capital of the region. It's pretty big But Jews have spread all over the Roman Empire in the world and Much like Muslims do today where they make a hodge a pilgrimage back to Mecca at the biggest feast of the year a lot of Jews came from Around the empire back to Jerusalem. It's swelled from 80,000 to somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 the place was Packed and where do you think everybody was? It was a time of worship It was happening at the temple the place was Absolutely slam full of people now in the midst of that Here comes Jesus and he is aggravated that in the temple courts There are money changers and their animals being sold Now before you get all down on these people recognize this if people are traveling from all around the world to come It's not really feasible And it's very difficult at the least for them to bring their own animal from that far away to the temple for sacrifice and They had to pay a temple tax which I have shekel which meant they had to change their currency So they needed money changers and they needed to buy an animal these were necessary tools For them to worship Christ is not upset primarily that That there are tools there in order for people to worship. He's upset because of where they are and what they're doing They're acting as distractions in worship. They're actually impeding worship You know imagine if we're sitting here in worship this morning and in the back there a couple of people going Ah, that's too much to pay for that And there's coins jinglin and animals bleeding you it'd be really hard to sit down and pray It's really hard to get focused But the busyness the religious busyness the exercise of the temple was encroaching it had moved from outside the temple into the courts And guess what courts it they were in I mean the temple was built with a holy of holies in the middle then the in the area for the priests then the area for the men Then the area for the women and on the far outside Was the area for the non-Jews the Gentiles the outsiders God fears who might want to come and find out about this God being his presence You know why Jesus is absolutely livid the only way that stuff got in the the courts of the Gentiles as people said out of Gentiles Who cares? Who cares if their worship areas got the stench of animals and they're filled from the ground and all this noise going on? It's a big deal. It's a distraction from the main point
When I was roughly about eighth grade my sisters are a lot younger than me the oldest one was six and And My mom would comb her hair in the morning In front of the mirror my mom's bathroom and the story. I wasn't there when this happened But of course I heard the story is will be evident in a second My sister who's six is standing there in front of the mirror and she raises up her right hand it begins to gesture in a particular fashion with one of her digits It's an inappropriate gesture and One it's not too natural for a six-year-old to be doing so my mom looked at her and Said Where did you see that? She said Russ When was he doing that? Normally on the way to church See my mom would get me out of bed to get me ready for church And in my sinfulness as a middle schooler I just kicked back hard against everything and she would push push push and so the way that I would rebel is On the way to worship as my hardest being prepared to InterGod's presence I'm behind my mom's seat with my sister sitting beside me with two hands gesturing at my mother as she talks That was my older brother demonstration all right I Tell that to you not to celebrate it But I want you to hear loud and clear. I know there are distractions as you come to worship I know there are other things that impede On your grounds as you approach to interGod's presence together Understand why Jesus is so upset He has one main thing in mind and that's our relationship with him and These people have turned it into a market place They turned it into a mechanical place of interaction Not a place it's easy to pray now plays it easy to think But when you come it's what you do. It's just part of the process culturally It's what if you are one of these people you show up you go to church on Sunday then you go to lunch afterward You know what anything that comes in the way that's a little bit aggravating It was about convenience. Honestly, it was sort of a laziness among the worshipers Because it was most convenient to have those things right there Then have to go outside the city to buy them When you come to worship we can worship all week long But when you come to the time that's set aside to worship together, are you in preparation and thought? About what's happening Engage you with God his goal is relationship with us to draw us in with him I mean understand what the temple is You know We don't we don't really have so many temples today You might think about it in the ancient world the temple of Zeus or Artemis these other people But it was a place where the divine intersected with the human It was a place where you went to have fellowship with something completely separate than us I mean even as we read and saw made before it's a place that feels like Home where you're meant to be there's been something broken in that relationship and
Really the problem here partly is is the thought and identity that's supposed to go into Doing worship. I mean if you were to do it as the Bible called you to was an Old Testament Jew You raised your own animal and it was the best of your sheep Which functionally meant it was probably the favorite family pet and Then you took the favorite family pet with you all the way to Jerusalem into the temple and you went to the priest And you gave your family pet to the priest And you put your hand on that pet and you prayed and thought to the Lord here are all my sins Here are all the things that I've done wrong. Here's everything I can think of Now by your grace put that on this animal instead of me And then you watched as the priest took and sacrificed slaughtered Fido Christ wanted us thinking About the problem in the relationship we have with God and the answer See Adam and Eve had fellowship in the garden. They had unfiltered fellowship They turn their back on God, so we'll do it our own way. Thank you very much and After that it was surely God's grace that he would come down and be among us people at the mountain would shake It was a fearful thing the Shakana glory comes down. It might break out against you people could die if it touches you But then there's a tent Attempt where we can go and approach then there's a temple a Place an actual building where we can have an appropriate approach to interact and now here we are All this time later and the temple is just a mechanism as just part of cultural life And Christ comes and shows up and the reason he's live it is he's He's here He's here. He is the answer to all that that was pointing to He looks and says I'm the sacrifice. I'm going to be the sacrifice and you're missing it. You're missing the very point because it's just become mechanical You're missing what the temple is for It's for interaction with me and you've just made it a social event You've made it part of your cultural norm And it's very evident that you don't care about other people that I care about because my heart is for the Gentiles and you're abusing them if you were Dating somebody Maybe engaged getting ready to get married and you you get an horrible accident where you're you're okay But your face is disfigured. They do reconstructive surgery Your fiance says ah I don't know about this marriage thing anymore You know when it comes down to it You know, I'm out. Well, there's no way around it. You feel incredibly violated It came down to whether or not you were outwardly attractive. It wasn't about you If you were very wealthy and approaching getting married and all of a sudden you lost all your money if you were famous and suddenly You're your fame turned to notoriety and you were shamed publicly and the person who supposedly loved you for who you are Said now that that's gone up. I'm done It wasn't about you. It was about what you could do for that person See if we come to the temple to have God do for us what we'd like for him to do It's a reason we if you just like the God who fixes you wine when you need to party and maybe takes care of some tough things in your life They were too hard for you to take care of We're not dealing with a living God And his agenda is different from that Because the temple is the place of the holy the place of the pure and Since we are broken we are not pure and his agenda is to make us pure see the reason these guys come and they're very Almost timid approaching Jesus. They knew their Bible Malachi 3 prophesied that God becomes suddenly with passion for his temple and they come and Ask Jesus it kind of are you the one? The Messiah is going to come do these kinds of things and it says in Malachi 3 that he will come and be a refiner's fire Now think about what a refining fire does It makes the conditions such That purity and impurity can't live together It pushes them apart. It pushes a part that your fault self and your real self in other words If you are out for God to make your life as comfortable as possible and his goal is to be a refining fire You're gonna be agitated with God a lot Because his agenda is different than yours He's pushing in a different way his goal is to set you in the fire not to cook you It's not that you're fried chicken. He's dumping in the grease His goal is to get rid of the impurities All right at the risk of stepping on some toes here a Difference between a surgeon and an anesthetist a Surgeon there's no way around it a surgeon does violence to your body in Order to fix you There is some injury done if whether it's removing an appendix or something more there is cutting there is entering there is violence done to Fix you An anesthetist job Is to make you comfortable with the violence Now I don't want to step on any anesthetist's toes, but spiritually Spiritually that's deadly. I'm thankful for anesthesiology When it comes to the modern practice of medicine, but understand spiritually why this is so deadly the American dream is to be comfortable God looks and says the American dream is to be comfortable as you die as you move towards spiritual death That is directly contrary to what I'm after that I am a surgeon and I am out to fix you If we want God to make us comfortable dying We've missed the whole point his goal is relationship He is more passionate about my purity than I am because he's more passionate about my relationship with him than I am Understand that anger is not the opposite of love Anger is love in motion. When do you really get angry when something you love is threatened when something you love There's an obstacle put between you and that and Jesus comes in and he kicks over the table and says I will have that I will take you and make you what you won't even make yourself His anger is a passion of a refiner To repeatedly put you in the fire not to make your life horrible But to bring you into the only real joy there is relationship with him We need to be holy to be with the holy we can't make ourselves holy It's what Christ is up to It's what he's after. It's why he's so angry We were meant for more than we want to settle for Let me press this out. What does that mean for us if he won't rest until he accomplishes that
Andrew basically told you the heartbeat of this passage when earlier in the service If you're here and you're not a Christian you want to know the difference between Christianity and every other religion and this passage It's most clearly seen with the nature of temple every other religion every other religious founder of every other major viable religion Build the temple points to a temple says this is the way that you get to God
Jesus comes and says I'm the end of temples. I am the temple Every other religion has you make a sacrifice. I am the sacrifice for you You don't bring a sacrifice you come empty handed I had a professor in college who said I'm a Buddhist Christian I think Buddha and Christianity they've just meshed nicely together if you strip Christianity wave It's heart-meaning maybe you can do that But if you understand that at the end of his life Buddha looked up as he's dying and said strive without ceasing and Jesus as he was dying said it is finished They are opposites They are opposites Every other religion says work really hard to bring your sacrifice if you bring the right kind of sacrifice you could get in with God Jesus says you can never bring the right kind of sacrifice. I Am that sacrifice all of this has been pointing to the day that I would come and fix the relationship by dying in your place By living the life you can't Dying the death you deserve and bringing the life that you could never get I mean understand this when he says Destroy this temple rebuild it in three days and they think building It would have been a pretty awesome thing if Jesus with his mind had shattered the temple in that moment and bricks flew everywhere And then at the snap of his finger over the course of the next three days bricks flew through the air Reassembling right back into place the temple went up. They would have said that is impressive Nicely done But barring some other supernatural miracle that building would have eventually fallen Understand what Christ does is so much more powerful than that so much more powerful than that
John one says that the word became flesh and Dwellt among us it tabernacled among us. He templed with us. Do you understand what that means? He comes in the lives with us That's a kind of glory that used to kill people now comes in the lives among us How in the world can that happen Through his sacrifice he brings life out of death it transforms us See if we think religion is about our efforts we're always going to be cranky If if you're not a Christian or you're not a religious person you're just visiting There's a reason religious people are generally cranky. They're generally curmudgeon You can tell if somebody gets grace versus if they are still struggling with it, especially somebody like me if I'm edgy if I'm cranky It's probably because Some were down deep. I think it comes down to my performance It comes down to how well I do And I'm always on edge because I'm insecure I've got to prove myself and even if I'm doing well today if tomorrow doesn't go well if today's sermon is bad Well, I'm out with Jesus If I don't do what I'm supposed to do well It means it's an incredibly insecure place to live. It's a reason so many religious people are just always on edge But somebody who's living in grace That things happen and they are upset by them But they're not cranky Because they live in the security of what Christ has done Not in the insecurity of what they are accomplishing Let me explain that differently Liz Curtis Higgs was a well-known radio DJ back in the 70s and 80s and her morning show Was one of the most lued Vile radio shows on the radio as a matter of fact she opened Before Howard Stern back when he was first getting started and Howard Stern said to her look You're gonna have to clean it up a little bit Your life Your show I mean Howard Stern is telling you you need to bring up your moral standard if he gives you an idea where she was coming from But she was a very angry woman who had had some horrible things done to her and she was living with this chasm between her and God And fighting against it and she said she had a friend who really just kept pursuing her and loving her who said come to church with me Just come to church with me. Just come to church with me Finally she said listen. I'm not interested in that junk But if he'll stop you from pestering me. I'll go one time and So here this angry feminist comes to church and guess what it is the fastest preaching on wives submit to your husbands You know, of course. She's just I rate sitting there, but then he said something that she didn't expect Husbands love your wives as Christ did the church and gave himself up for her And as he was explaining what it meant to die For your spouse she leaned over and said to her friend sarcastically if I ever met a man who would die for me I'd submit to that man She said I know that man and that was the beginning of An absolute trajectory change and Liz Curtis her day's life It took a long time, but now she is a Christian author who tours and shares her testimony Because she understood there was a brokenness between her and God and was just angry at everybody else who was failing to fix it Because it's a broken messed up world But Christ had entered in and brought life out of her death He had brought temple to her He had templeed among her Are you experiencing that? I want you to understand what this House cleaning is for us Paul said do you not know that you yourselves are the temple of the Holy Spirit? If you are a Christian if you ask Jesus to take residence in your life Acts 16 says the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus the Spirit of Jesus comes and lives inside you and pursues your purity In ways that you weren't even ready to let him do in the In the 1920s and 30s There was a hill and But Montana That they found copper in and in between World War one and two a third of the United States copper came out of that hill It was incredibly productive. They were digging and digging and digging and Then in the 1940s after the war the copper price plummeted and The business went belly up So when they stopped mining They backed off they turned off their machines that were drawing all the water table out to keep to keep it dry And slowly but surely over the next 40 years the water level just kept rising inside this huge Mine it was a basically just a gash in the side of this mountain and the water rose up until the 19 early 1980s It basically would look like a mountainside lake, but The exposed ore in the walls of the mine and the air and the water mixed To form I'm not a scientist, but some kind of pie right that led to Sulfuric acid being the primary makeup of the water the liquid now was just this horrible acidic Lake it would look like red from the air and They moved in people that would became a disaster spot They moved them put fences around it. There's a company put in charge of taking care of it and 1982 over 300 Canadian geese came and they landed on it And they did what geese do they thought it was a lake they swam in it and drank it The next morning 342 carcasses were recovered now the company in charge of the cleanup didn't want to get sued So they did a study and they came up with a reason of virus that just happened it was just happenstance that these that these geese all died So another independent study was done by Montana and They in the digestive tract of these geese had lesions throughout them. It was very clear the acid had eaten them up This water was death anything that went in it died. It was a place of death. It was a pit of death and These two scientists who had moved to the area to study something completely different Who were doing research one day a man comes down the mountain tomb and he comes up. He says you got to see this and It's this driftwood It's been floating in that water and It's got This slime on it this fungus or something that's growing He said you'll never believe where this came from it was underwater about a foot underwater floating in the lake and I said No way There's no way that any life could survive and that I mean it's an unlivable circumstance And so they started studying this slide they've left their old study and started studying this because the best machines that we have now The best machines we've got if we hooked them up to that water and started cleaning it To get to pull the metal and impurities out of that water. We don't have a 10 to 15 percent return But as they studied this sludge It was purifying the water and it was purifying the water at a return of about 85 to 90 percent They had never seen anything like it. It was just cleansing the water And so they started studying it trying to figure out where did this life come from? How could this survive in this situation? And after extensive studies and inter-interconnecting the science world there was only one place they found where this bacteria grew
They found it on a lab on a swab it had been The rectal swab of a geese of a goose These geese had landed in that water It had killed them and they had left behind a gift They had brought life out of death That they had left behind something that would clean the water the very water that killed them
Understand Christ is much more important than a goose and you are much more important than Berkeley pit the pit of death and mute Montana But spiritually that's exactly what's going on Christ comes into our existence and makes us His temple This sanctuary is not a facility. It's a sanctuary because People in whom Christ is tabernacling come here once a week to worship. This is temple You are temple Because of what Christ has done. He's bringing life out of death That's why we come together Understand That the raw power that used to kill things on contact in the Old Testament now has been set loose in your life with the agenda of making you His and bringing you into relationship with him Bringing you into the temple bringing you home the God who raises his whip Doesn't do so just to beat you
And he's not in spiritual anesthetics He's a surgeon who is more passionate about your cleanliness than you are
And he will put his finger on things that you thought could not possibly be let go of and say I'm taking that away To save you the Christian life It's simply living in God's forgiveness And letting him do the surgery that only he can do
Is Jesus your guest or your owner as Paul said you were bought with a price
You were bought with a price if you're if you want in on the only only master who will ever serve you And not abuse you There's only one he's our owner He's our temple He's our sacrifice. He's our priest. He's our God
He's the lover of your soul. Let's pray
Lord now there are people here who Who really like that you make wine but Really don't know about this whole mess of you Taking over Father show us that your agenda is better than ours by what you did on the cross That you pay the price that we can't that you are the sacrifice that would kill us
Lord show us one of the God who made wine now takes up residence And that same celebration now becomes a refining fire A passion to purify us
Lord make us your temple Draw us into your presence Draw us together Help us keep the main thing the main thing
And cast everything else out Everything else Lord Let it be the pain the painful joy of the surgeon's heart that leads us to run to you again And your name we pray Amen