God's Holy Temple [Part 1]

Allen Wright, pastor, Bible teacher, and author of his latest book, The Power to Bless.

When you accept Christ, you become the inhabitation, a temple of the Holy Spirit. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Belonging to God, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAllen.org or call 877-544-4860.

877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Christians, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are going to look at one little verse, two little verses in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, where Paul is addressing some of the sexual immorality that should not be tolerated in their midst, and he's giving the deepest rationale, the most powerful theological argument for why they should avoid doing such things with their bodies. And he comes to verse 19 of 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and says, Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own, for you are bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. There were two wicked brothers, both of them thieves and scoundrels, and one of them died, and the living brother came to the pastor and said to him before the funeral, he said, I have brought a million dollar check as a donation to the church capital campaign, the pastor said, well thank you very much. He said, but there is one condition upon me giving the gift, and that is at the funeral, I want you to say my brother was a saint. Pastor, will you tell that? He's a saint. The pastor said okay, and he took the check for the capital campaign.

At the state service, the pastor surprised everybody by standing up and just speaking unvarnished truth. He said the deceased was a scoundrel and a thief. He was unfaithful to his wife. He was wicked. He abused everybody.

It was no good. But compared to his brother, he was a saint. We have been learning about what it means to be holy means to be set apart to God. Holiness and the New Testament picture of it is not about reaching a certain level of moral purity or rising up to meet a level of ethical standards, as important as those things might be. But instead, to be holy means to be set apart to God. So it means belonging to God, and we have discovered that not only are we holy and that we are God's treasured possession, but Hebrews 10 says that we have been sanctified or we have been made holy, that this is not something we've done ourselves. That one of the most important things you could understand about what holiness really means is that it's something that God has done for you in the same way that He has saved you by the gift of Christ on the cross. It is by this same gift that He has set you apart unto Himself and therefore you're holy. And what we have realized is that further, we are the ones that are called saints by Paul and throughout the New Testament because if you are set apart unto God, holy unto Him, then Christians, that means you are the holy ones. So you are a saint, and what we're discovering is that you'll get far further in your spiritual growth and in your victory over sin and in your maturity in the Lord if you will daily remind yourself of who you actually are, that you're actually a holy one of God.

So you are a saint. But today we come to a text that is even more mind-bending than anything that we have seen so far about what holiness means. And this is where Paul comes to us and says that we in Christ are the very temple of the Holy Spirit.

That's not the only place where he says it. In 2 Corinthians chapter 6 he says, What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. For God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them and I will be their God and they will be my people. In 1 Corinthians chapter 3, do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? And in Ephesians 2, Paul explains this that you are no longer strangers and aliens but you're fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple.

It means that you, though otherwise ordinary, are now by every measure extraordinary because when you accept Christ, you become the inhabitation, a temple of the Holy Spirit. We have a dear lady in our congregation who teaches second grade at Summit School here adjacent to the village campus and she's Susan Schombach, one of the greatest teachers ever and one of the things she does is every spring she has her second graders write a little note and then they put a generic little letter in and they put it into a bottle and cork it and she takes it down to Wrightsville Beach and gives it to a sea captain that she knows and he takes it out 40 miles and drops it into the Gulf Stream with warm waters that can travel all the way to Europe. And do you know that in 2014 one of her bottles showed up in Portugal, somebody found it and then in 2016 a bottle showed up in France and last month another bottle showed up. A man, a retired grandfather named Jean Pierre was walking along the beach in Normandy and he saw a bottle that was tangled in nets and seaweed and he reached down and looked and he saw there was some messages inside the bottle and it had barnacles across the top that had grown over all the many months that it had traveled over there and he brought it home and opened it up and there was a generic note from Ms. Schombach and it said that this was all activity with her second grade class and it had her email address in there and it had a note from Ben, the second grader and he had drawn a picture of Poseidon's trident and a picture of a bottle and he just put in the words, you found it, exclamation point.

The journalists came and interviewed little Ben and said, you know, how do you feel and he was like, I know it's just a chance in the millions but sometimes it happens and they said the only thing he'd like to do is he said the next thing he said I'd like to add a little camera to it so that it could capture all the different sea animals that it would see on the way over that was Ben's idea. And Jean-Pierre found that bottle, right, it's an ordinary bottle but now it is extraordinary because there's a message inside of it. So when you become a Christian what happens is Jesus Christ, who is the living Word, He is the Word of God who became flesh and He comes mystically to take up residence in your life and this is something that is spiritual and cannot be explained in natural terms but when you become a Christian what was dead in you towards God becomes alive and you are alive in the Spirit and Jesus comes in the presence of the Holy Spirit the very Spirit of Jesus and is united with your Spirit and you are engrafted into Christ and you become one with Him. When Paul uses this language here and he speaks of you are a temple of the Holy Spirit because God has given His Spirit in you, it's an interesting sentence in that he grammatically uses both the singular term for you and the plural term for you because he's really talking not just about the corporate entity of the body of Christ we are the temple of the Holy Spirit but he's saying here quite frankly that you also are the temple of the Holy Spirit and all throughout history people have always wanted to know where is it that I could meet with God? Where is God? How do I meet with God? Every culture throughout history in one way or another has been asking that question I got amused by seeing the story of a little boy who's always getting in trouble at his private Christian school and one day they brought him in, he's in trouble again and they brought him into the headmaster's office and the headmaster decided he was going to try something different with the boy this time he said he wanted to try to get him in touch with the fact that God was always with him and seeing everything he did and so the headmaster just looked at the little boy and he said, son, he said, where is God? And the boy just sat there quiet the headmaster asked him, he said, son, where is God? And the little boy got a little antsy and started fidgeting around and the third time when the headmaster said where is God the boy jumped up and took out running down the hallway and another little friend of his said, where are you going?

What's going on? And he said, evidently God is missing and they think I took him Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 were probably originally part of one worship song or one liturgical element and Psalm 42 the familiar words, as the deer pants for the streams of water so my soul pants for you my God my soul thirsts for God, for the living God when can I go and meet with God? It's echoed in Psalm 43, where can I go? When can I go? This is the language of someone who is apart from the temple this is someone who is either in exile or during a time in which the temple has been destroyed and is saying, the longing of my life my soul's deepest yearning is that I could go and meet with God but the understanding was to meet with God in a manifest way it would necessitate a meeting place and God in all of His mercy established with the people of Israel that He was holy, the people who were unholy could not just simply come into the presence of the holy and so God made provisional arrangements in Exodus chapter 19 when Moses goes up on Mount Sinai there is fire and thunder and smoke and the people are not even allowed to touch the mountain lest they be struck down and Moses is allowed to meet with God as a mediator but even then he can't look God face to face and God then gives instructions on building a tent of meeting or a tabernacle in which this nomadic people could have a symbolic presence of God traveling with them and they could set up the tent of meeting and have within it a holy place and then a curtain and behind it a holy of holies and there they could keep the Ark of the Covenant and they could offer sacrifices on behalf of the sins of the people and the priests could meet with God on behalf of the people that was the temporary provision but this mobile tabernacle was deemed insufficient by David when he came and established the monarchy and he secured the borders in fact expanded Israel's borders greatly and he said it's not right for me to be in this palace of cedar and beauty and glory and God doesn't even have a house and he's like Lord I want to build a temple and the Lord says well you won't build it but your son will and Solomon builds this temple, Solomon who's so wealthy and has connections all over the known world and brings in all of these materials and builds it according to specifications of God much like the tabernacle but more ornate and having a holy place and a thick veil and then the holy of holies and Solomon's temple was absolutely beautiful and majestic and every Jewish person their longing always was to be able to join the pilgrims and the festivals and come to the temple and to be assured that through the mediating work of the high priest on the day of atonement Yom Kippur that their sins would be temporarily covered and they could be therefore reckoned as if in right standing with God it was viewed that temple was viewed as the holiest place on earth and what happened was that Nebuchadnezzar and the kingdom of Babylon this empire came in and invaded and sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple and the people were exiled to Babylon and so for a period of time the temple was in ruins the people were in exile and the lament of a nation centered around this not only do we not have our homeland but we do not have our temple we do not have the place where we can go and meet with God and so the great longing was when can I go and meet with God where can I go and meet with God as soon as Ezra and Zerubbabel were able to return with those that were being restored from the exile under Cyrus of Persia as soon as they began to do the work of the temple people began to have hope that once again we'd have a meeting place between God and humanity they rebuilt the temple some people remember the old temple and they wept when they saw the new because it didn't have the same glory as the old but there was great rejoicing over the rebuilding of the temple and then as it came to pass a king named Herod many years later was reigning and wanted to see himself as the king of the Jews and so for political expediency he took on a major renovation project of that temple and made it so much more glorious than it was this is about 19 years before Christ so by the time of Jesus' birth and the time of Jesus' ministry this temple which the Jews would call the second temple was now renovated, you might call it Herod's temple but it really was still the second temple and it was glorious That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series Just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church the Apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace It's called Galatians and that's the gospel Discover the purity and power of the grace of God When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership Call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastoralan.org Today's teaching now continues Here once again is Alan Wright This temple was considered to be the holiest place on earth as one Orthodox rabbi wrote for 830 years from 833 to 423 BCE and again from 349 BCE to 69 CE there stood an edifice upon a Jerusalem hilltop which served at the point of contact between heaven and earth so central was this edifice to our lives as Jews that nearly two thirds of the commandments of the Torah contingent upon its existence and the rabbi continued by saying its destruction is regarded as the greatest tragedy in our history an extraordinary statement it is considered to be the centerpiece of all creation the Jewish rabbis would write another older Jewish tradition in the Midrash quotes Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon and he said the location of the altar in the holy temple is very exactly defined it is commonly held tradition that the place where David and Solomon built the altar on the threshing floor of Aronah is the very place where Abraham built an altar and bound Isaac upon it this is where Noah built an altar when he came out from the ark this is where Cain and Abel brought their offerings and this is where Adam the first man offered a korban a sacrifice when he was created and it is from the earth of this place the dust of this place that he was created so the rabbinical tradition said that the holy of holies in the temple on the temple mount in Jerusalem it was so holy that the tradition said this is the place where God reached down and took dust and formed Adam it was a divine connecting place of heaven and earth it was not to say that the Jewish people had a primitive belief they thought that God was limited to that one location because surely as the psalmist said in Psalm 139 they understood that God was everywhere if I were to rise on the wings of the dawn and travel to the uttermost parts of the sea you are there the psalmist said so they understood something about the omnipresence of God but the manifest presence of God the place of the Shekinah glory of God the place wherein people could meet miraculously with God the place in which God would meet intimately with His people this was the temple and when this temple was one day in Jesus' ministry one day He was there and this temple was obviously being misused because people were there selling turtle doves and animals for sacrifice and that was not the scandal because pilgrims would come and they'd want to have something to offer and it's very hard to have an unblemished lamb it's very hard to have the proper sacrifice and so they'd sell it to you so you'd come to the temple to get the proper sacrifice and that wasn't the scandal the scandal was that pilgrims had come from many different regions and they had different currencies and whenever you would come with your currency and have to exchange it for temple currency in order to buy the turtle doves but the exchange rate that they were charging was exorbitant so they were making tons of money off the fact that people had come from far away, foreign places the pilgrims had come to worship to buy these animals for sacrifice were losing so much money in the exchange to get the temple currency and Jesus saw this whole thing and He got furious, in John chapter 2 He gets a whip, He drives them out of there, He turns over these tables and people are, the religious leaders are just dumbfounded by this shocked by it and angered by it and they come to Jesus and they say to Him by what authority do you do this, you need to show us a sign give us a miracle right now that proves that you've got authority to come in here and do that and it was in that context that Jesus answered them in John chapter 2 destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up the Jews, the text says, then said it's taken 46 years to build this temple and you'll raise it up in 3 days but He was speaking about the temple of His body when therefore He was raised from the dead the disciples remembered that He'd said this and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken do you know that in this moment when Jesus said destroy this temple what I'm trying to get you to see is this was probably one of the most shocking statements that any spiritual leader of any type has ever made in the history of the world destroy this temple the very meeting place between God and humanity the holiest place on earth the very longing of our lives was to have it rebuilt and once it had been rebuilt and never see it torn down and you're going to say destroy this temple and you're going to rebuild it in 3 days as long as it takes to rebuild the temple they were furious and this saying of Jesus was used to mock Him the rest of His life even to the point that He was on the cross the text says people came and wagged their heads at Him and said look at Him He said this is the one who said He'd destroyed the temple and rebuilt it He can't even save His own life even the thieves next to Him on the crosses joined into the mockery destroy this temple Alan Wright and today's teaching God's Holy Temple in our series Belonging to God stick around with us Alan is back in a moment to help unpack some more of this additional insight on this for your life and our final word today imagine for 99 days in a row someone tells you I love you I'll never forsake you wouldn't you feel cherished but what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said I'm not sure you're good enough for me if you don't measure up I don't think I'll love you anymore wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days wouldn't one percent of conditional love poison the other 99 percent well just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace the tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear what if I don't measure up when might I be rejected when the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church the Apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace it's called Galatians and that's the gospel discover the purity and power of the grace of God when you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership call us at 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastoralan.org so Alan we often in the Christian circles we'll talk we're here and we'll talk about being temple of the Lord our bodies are temples of the Lord what is this teaching going to conclude with when we get to the next edition well the extraordinary thing is that not only have we been called holy but we have been called the actual temple of the Holy Spirit which is to say not only does God regard us as holy but the holiest thing in earth his own presence abides within us and just think about that if God is willing to take up residence in your life Christians then doesn't this prove that he regards you as holy and we have to get past the idea that well we've had so much sin and we've got so many problems in our life that we're not the more you see yourself as the holy temple of God that'll change a lot of your behaviors and it'll change a lot of the way that you think but what we're seeing is just how profound this is it goes back to Jesus controversial words tear down this temple I'll rebuild it and he was speaking of his own body but then we the body of Christ on earth has become that temple it's absolutely extraordinary today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries