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See clearly. Think deeply. Live fully. Love dearly.
**Transcriptions are generated using Machine Learning. They may contain typos, misspellings, omissions, and mis-heard words. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Please use for reference only.**
[00:00:00] Michelle Jones: Good morning, Imago.
I love that we love talking to one another. It's very cool.
Good morning to you all. Good morning to our online community. And why don't we just say hi to our online people real quick.
Hello, all. That was a little sad, but I'm gonna let it go. I'm gonna let that go.
So I am Michelle Jones for those of you who are visiting here for the first time and do not know or maybe the second time and you still do not know. I'm one of the pastors here at Imago Dei and welcome. If this is your first time here, welcome to Imago Dei Community.
If you get a chance, let us know that you showed up. Let us know whether you're online or whether you're not, whether you're in person. Fill out a connect card and let us know that you stopped by. Let us know your name, let us know if you want to get connected, all of that good stuff. I have a few things that I want to draw your attention to today, and they are all things Easter.
As Chris mentioned earlier, Easter is going to be one service, 10 o'clock, here in the sanctuary, and it will be a family service, which means all the kids are invited, and I have to say, when we have all our kids in the service, it is so much fun. For those of you who are parents going, yeah. I'm just saying, I love your kids, probably because I can give them all back at the end of the day.
But I do love having them around and we'll have bags for them to keep them busy and let them color and hang out with us and stuff. And then also Good Friday service is going to be at seven o'clock the Friday before here in the sanctuary. So we're looking forward to that. And also we're going to have baptisms on Easter.
That is my jam. I love baptisms.
If there is anyone here in this congregation or online who would like to be baptized, please go online and fill out the form so that we know that you are there and that you want to take our baptism class which is going to be on the 24th, the week before Easter, in 101 across the way in the Wagner building.
I am excited about that because that is like my favorite thing in the world. All things Easter, baptism, Easter service, Good Friday service can be found on our Lent page. If you go onto our onto our website and look where, see all of those events there. What I'm going to do is ask you all to stand up as I'm going to pray for our speaker before he comes up.
And when I say amen, I would like for you to remain standing because we are going to hear the reading of God's word right after with Abby Reeser. Okay. Does that work? Shout out to our youth. Look at that big old crowd of human beings over there.
Yay.
I love seeing you guys. I need a cooch a little bit later.
Okay. All right. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this place to gather to see you, to hear from you, to love one another. We ask you, Lord, to open our hearts this morning, to open our hearts to all that you say to our speaker. We thank you, Lord, for the privilege of knowing you. We thank you also for the privilege of being able to be with people who don't know you so that they might know you better.
I thank you, Lord, that you would open our hearts, open our minds, open us up to being changed by your word. And it is in the name of your son, Jesus, that we pray. Amen. Remain standing. Where is Abby? There she is.
I love you.
Let's welcome her up here.
[00:04:09] Abby Reeser: Hi, my name is Abby and I have been going to Imago for my whole life and I have just now been asked to read a piece of Scripture. I will be reading Ephesians 2:18-22:
_"For through Him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets._
_Jesus Christ Himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows in a holy temple in the Lord. In Him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit."_
For this is the Word of the Lord."
[00:05:04] Chris Nye: Thank you.
You can be seated.
Amazing.
Let me ask you this question as we begin. What do you think it costs to build something great?
When you think about the great things that have been built, whether they be something like a university or some piece of culture, a great album a wonderful building like the Sistine Chapel or something, what does it cost to build something great?
Certainly some things take incredible financial capital to start a company maybe. Others are built with an insane creative ingenuity to like pieces of art and architecture. Some just tremendous leadership is required. That's what it costs to build something great, a great community, a great church, or a great movement of culture.
A strange and uncommon case of something great being built is the Order of the Jesuits, which is a Catholic priestly order That I was surrounded with my, a lot of my life. I grew up in the Catholic education system and around a lot of these priests that were of the Jesuit order. They're called the Society of Jesus.
They were founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the middle of the 1500s during one of the more strange technological and cultural revivals in Europe. Just an incredible time in human history. And he was a former soldier. He was in the military, and then he became a priest, and he grabbed this band of disciples around Him to form this society called the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits.
And this order today holds some of the most influential spaces around religious life, education. Even policy and politics and even sports. If you're following college basketball, you know about Gonzaga, which is a Jesuit school. Look at what Chris Lowney says about the Jesuits:
_"Founded in 1540 by 10 men with no capital. They had no money and no business plan. The Jesuits built within little more than a generation, the world's most influential company of its kind. As confidants to European monarchs, China's Ming Empire, Japanese Shogun, the Mogul of India, they boasted a Rolodex unmatched by that of any commercial, religious, or government entity. And by the late 18th century, Jesuits were educating nearly 20 percent of all Europeans pursuing classical higher education."_
This guy who wrote this book, _Heroic Leadership_, is a former Jesuit himself. He was a Jesuit novice for seven years and then he left the priestly order to become a corporate CEO.
Interesting transition. As he became a corporate CEO though, he started to realize some of the things he had learned as a Jesuit were absent in the corporate culture of America and in the West. And he explored the history of the Jesuits to try to pull leadership lessons from them. from the Society of Jesus.
Now it's often that church leaders and pastors like myself learn from the business community, but it's very uncommon for the business community to go back to the church and say, there's actually something maybe you've done right here that we can learn. And Lowney wrote this book, and he came up with four pillars of what the Jesuits did to build this great thing, even though they had no money and no business plan.
And some of them you might guess. There are things like ingenuity, they were actually very adaptable to changing culture. They were incredibly courageous, that's where he gets the title of his book, _Heroic Leadership_. They energized themselves to be just insanely ambitious during a time where it was, like, probably not the smartest thing to do some of the stuff they did.
But the two pillars, he says, most businesses miss, and most just leaders miss, that the Jesuits had was self-awareness and love. That actually built into the society of Jesus. They had love. They viewed every person through the lens of the Gospel, that God has so loved them in a particular way through Jesus self sacrificial death.
And they had a level of self awareness, of introspection, that they were able to just have in their leadership culture. And what Lowney's, What I'm pointing at is that great things cost greatly, but sometimes the great cost we pay to build something great is not capital or some remarkable business plan.
But what happened with the Jesuits is they leveraged their very lives. They gave their lives. And they leveraged their love. Jesus is actually building something right now. I don't know if you're aware of this. Jesus is building something great. If you're new to Christianity, Jesus, by the way, not dead, okay?
Currently alive and reigning, all right? Jesus is alive and he's building something. And he told us that he would build something great. He would build his church. He says this in Matthew 16:18. This is towards the end of his life, by the way. I will build My church. That's a future tense statement. One day I will build My church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
Jesus says, I'm building something that will be so great, even the greatest forces of darkness, evil, and evil. Sin, betrayal, and selfishness, and death itself will be unable to stack up against the very thing I'm building that I've called the church. Jesus is building something great. What is it costing Jesus to build this great thing?
If Jesus is building something right now, we, the people of God, the church that he is building, should probably ask this question. How is Jesus building this thing? What are the mechanisms he's using to build such a great thing like the church? The Jesuits built what they built according to Chris Lowney on things like self awareness and love and ingenuity and courage.
What are the attributes that Jesus is using, the building blocks, you might say, of his church? And how will we know what's most important to Him, to Jesus, as he's building something? Because the truth is, this statement makes me think, the project he's about to embark on after his death, when he ascends to heaven, the building project of the church, is something he's gonna do whether you and I are involved or not.
He'll do this thing. He'll build his church. But it's important for us now to ask how is he going about this building project? It might be helpful to know if God had ever in the past given us instruction on something else he built. If he's building the church in the future, what else has God built in the past?
He built this world. There's something we can learn from creation. But there's also a metaphor employed in the teaching text that we're going to look at today. Another thing God built, the temple. The temple is a primary metaphor that scripture uses to teach us about what it means to be a part of the church.
And we're in this series right now in Lent called Images of Us. And this series during Lent is all about the Lent is the 40 day period leading up to Easter. Lent is about repentance and renewal. And for this year in Lent, we are laying down the false images of the church. The backwards ways we've always thought about the people of God, and we're picking up the biblical metaphors of the church.
What is the scripture say that the people of God really are? Were laying down the false images and picking up the images that Scripture gives us images of the body. Last week, Shelby Schutt taught about the family of God, and this week we're talking about the temple. We all know something is off in the way that we're thinking about the church in America.
The question of this series has been, what are we measuring that against? Now let's measure our false images against the biblical image of the temple. Stretch Tell you this metaphor is running so deep throughout scripture that it's almost not even a metaphor. Here's what I mean. The Bible does not talk about the church and say it's like the temple from the, from Jewish time.
It actually says that it is the temple. Let me say that again. It's, the metaphor runs so deep in Scripture. It's not saying that the church is like the temple. It's saying that the church actually is the temple. Look at some of these scriptures. This is outside of the teaching text that Abby so beautifully read.
1 Do you not know you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy and you are that temple. Two weeks ago, I gave a solid context on Corinthians. I don't have time to give you that solid context again to repeat myself, but all I'll say is for Him to say that they are the holy temple of God is quite the statement when you consider the context that Paul was writing to this church.
If I could just summarize the context of Corinthians, I would say It was a hot mess. That's what he says to them, though. You are God's temple. Even though you're a hot mess, you are God's temple. 1 Peter 2, here's another apostle of Jesus, writing after Jesus death and resurrection, writing to churches across a scattering of churches.
He says this, As you come to Him, to Jesus, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen, and Precious. You yourselves, like living stones, are being built up into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Notice the relationship in both of these passages between holiness and the temple.
The temple shows us how God builds things. To understand God's heart and love for the church, we have to see the temple. What was it? What is the temple? The temple was the space of worship for the Jewish people. And God dramatically worked through the people of God in Israel and Jesus Christ, the ones that we worship and that we follow here at Imago Dei, was a Jewish person.
And he worshipped in a particular space. Called the Temple. The Temple was constructed two times actually, because it was destroyed once, and when Jesus was living, he was living around a period we call the Second Temple Period, where the Jewish people were living in this and living around this temple.
Look at what Norman Perrin says.
_"The Temple, at that time, was the social nerve center of ancient Judaism. The hub of all Jewish religious activity across the Diaspora..."_
Now that's a way of talking about the way that Jewish people were scattered across the Middle East at that time and even into Asia. So people would travel from all over the Diaspora to come to the temple to worship.
_"In any account of pre AD 70 Jewish life..."_
So think about Jesus died around AD 33 the temple was destroyed again in 70 AD, but if you think before that,
_"...it would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the temple in Jewish life." _
Here's Robert Webber:
_"The temple symbolized, like the worship sanctuary symbolized the hearing ear of God, the resort of the stranger. They had made room for people who were not Jewish to be entered in and receive alms or like generosity and the house of prayer for all people to the end that all nations of the earth should fear God."_
Now, when we think about the temple, and we think about it as Norman Perrin says, the social nerve center of the social life of Jewish people, and we think about the church inhabiting this metaphor called the temple, we can ask this question, if the temple was so important to Jewish life now, or Jewish life then, Could it be that one of the primary things Jesus is just trying to tell us through this metaphor is to prioritize the church the way that the temple was prioritized in ancient Judaism?
Yes, that's probably one thing. But I think deeper than that, the temple was given to promote a worship culture in Jewish life. How does God go about building this temple, and how might it teach us how he's building the church today? Because the last great building project God had before the church was the temple.
How does God go about building his church, his temple of his holy people?
Three words.
He builds a place of presence, a place of consecration, and a place of worship.
First, just a place of presence. The temple was the place where God was tangibly experienced in His presence.
Now, the Jewish people always knew and believed that God's presence permeated the earth. It says that the earth is filled with the glory of God in the Old Testament. But the temple was a place in which God's presence was tangibly felt. And likewise, when this metaphor is employed in our teaching text in Ephesians 2, Paul says, "For through Him, Jesus, we have access to one Spirit, to the Father. In Him, you are also being built together into the dwelling place of God. You're being built together into the dwelling place of God."
For Jewish readers who read that letter, When it was written in the early 1st century, the temple and the presence of God were almost synonymous. So they understood why Paul was using this language, because Paul himself was a Jew.
Yahweh to them, the God of the Bible, existed enthroned in heaven, his presence permeated the earth, but he made the temple his place of dwelling. is tangibly felt there. Before the temple, there was a thing the Jewish people constructed called the tabernacle, which you can think of as a portable temple.
It was this place of worship that as the people of God were moving around nomadically, wandering in the wilderness, and then finding their land in Israel, before they ever constructed a physical space to worship God, they had a temporary physical space called the tabernacle. Think about Moses's time and Joshua's time.
Those early years in the biblical narrative around King David and King Solomon, they construct a temple, but even Solomon himself admits the limits of the temple because of the limitless nature of God's presence. First Kings eight, Solomon says that the Lord would dwell in thick darkness, but I've built this exalted house for you, but then he prays later.
Look at this verse 27,
_"But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the highest, or heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain you, but just have regard for my prayer." _
. The temple and the tabernacle, this is what I need you to hear, they were always generous accommodations to a broken world.
Because when you really rewind the tape all the way back on what the temple's significance is, and why did they ever have a temple, you really have to rewind it to creation. God wanting to dwell with his people. God building a space wherein his presence would be tangibly felt. The first place is not the tabernacle, it's not the temple.
It's Eden. It's the creation order, that God actually created a world wherein he could relate with his people. But when his people fell away and distrusted his voice, and through this famous biblical narrative of Adam and Eve, the relationship between God's presence and God's people was fractured. And so God created generous accommodations through the tabernacle and through the temple, wherein people could still meet with God and find themselves to be alive.
Because if you met with God in your own sin, in your own iniquity, you would be destroyed. You'd be undone. But God, through his own generosity, threw down the tabernacle and the temple as two places where you could have a generous accommodation. But the people of God even mess up and ransack the temple and the tabernacle of God.
They even take what God has given as a generous piece of grace and accommodation, And they throw it away. They start to compromise the space wherein God lives. And that's why the prophets begin to speak up. Here's Jeremiah, saying they've, one of the reasons God's going to throw judgment towards Israel is because they've set up detestable things in the house that is called by My name to defile it.
Ezekiel, this is God speaking through Ezekiel. Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, Surely. Because you have defiled My sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, I will withdraw. And one of the dramas of the book of Ezekiel is the glory of the Lord leaving the temple in Ezekiel chapter 10.
And even as the temple is then taken over by Babylon and the people of Israel are pushed into exile, God mourns the loss of his temple and he sends his people back. They come back from captivity, and the temple is completely destroyed to rebuild the temple. This is the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
And also the book of Haggai, which we preached on a couple weeks ago. The book of Haggai tells the story of God's people rebuilding the temple. But even in rebuilding the temple, they compromise it again. And they start to fill the temple with commercialism and greed. And exploitation of the poor.
And this is again, the pattern of God's people that God dwells with them and they distance God dwells with them and they distance themselves. And when Jesus Christ comes to earth, he finds the temple in this condition and has one of Jesus's most viral moments as the Messiah, when he turns over the tables, here's the account from John chapter two, the Passover of the Now, he would do that as a Jewish, at the temple.
Again, Jesus was a Jewish person who worshipped Yahweh. In the temple, oh, there's the temple. Okay, what did he find? He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. That's not good, by the way. And making a whip of cords. Yeah, that's, by the way, you're getting the pronouns correct.
That's Jesus making a, you're like, who's making a whip of cords right now? Jesus drove them out of the temple with the sheep in the ark. Not the sheep! Gosh, spare the sheep, Jesus. In Portland, you would spare the sheep. And he poured out the coins of the money changers, and he flipped tables, overturned tables.
And he told those who are selling the pigeons, not the people selling the pigeons, spare them. They're just selling pigeons. Pigeons. Take these things away, do not make My father's house a house of trade. His disciples then remembered what it was written. Zeal or passion for your house will consume me.
Verse 18. So the Jews, they said to Him, What sign do you show us for doing these things? Like, why are you acting the way that you're acting? You're going a little overboard here. It's just the temple, Jesus. Jesus. We can worship God and sell stuff. We can worship Jesus and have our way, right?
Why are you doing all these things? Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple and in three days I will rise it up again. And they're confused. It's taken 46 years to build this temple and you're gonna raise it up in three days? But he was speaking, look at this, verse 21. Jesus was actually speaking about the temple of his own body.
Jesus's own body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Jesus death, resurrection, and ascension unleashes a community that is committed to prioritizing the presence of God. Because Jesus carried the presence of God.
He was God, very God, and the fullness of deity dwelled with Jesus bodily is what scripture says. And when Jesus shows up, he says, you'll wreck this temple of mine, but in three days I'm going to raise it up into a new temple. And what he's saying is through his death and resurrection, he would begin the church.
To begin the dwelling place of God. To make a new temple, a different temple. I should have warned you we were going to do a theological deep dive, but we're done now. Okay? Are you okay? Okay? Alright. That was a lot of Old Testament. We just went through the whole Bible. It was like 12 minutes of my 35. We just went through it all to find Jesus saying at this moment, after going totally berserk, that he has zeal for his house.
He has passion for his house, and the way he's going to construct his house is through his life giving death. What does it cost to build something great? What does it cost to be, to use the teaching text term, built into the dwelling place of God? It requires a reception of God's presence. A reception of God's presence.
In order to be built into the temple that God has for us as the church here at Imago, to carry the presence though, We can't just be simply people of the presence. We actually have to realize what the presence requires, which is consecration. The temple was not just a place of presence, and the church is not just a place of presence.
Secondly, it is a place of consecration. Consecration. Do you know what consecration is? When was the last time you used that casually in a sentence, you know? Having coffee with a friend, and they said, what do you do on Saturday? Consecrated my house. What does that mean? Consecration is a way of setting aside something for sacred use.
You consecrate things all the time. You just don't really know it. You have that nice dish set in your house that you do not use unless your children are handcuffed. Or unless mom comes over because she gave you that set and you're like, we use it all the time! You set it aside for sacred use for a specific thing.
Or how many of you grew up with that birthday plate? This is my generation, why did we have this? It was weird, it was red, it said, it's your birthday on it. It was consecrated for special use. It was set aside for the use of your birthday. And that was the only time you ate off that plate, for God knows what reason.
I don't know. It was consecrated. Jordan Sang says that consecration refers to the way we dedicate ourselves to the things of God through specific acts. The teaching text in verse 19 says that we are no longer strangers, but because of Jesus we become fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
We become members of his house. And in his house. Set ourselves aside for specific use. This is how people would have thought about this passage, because it's how they thought about the temple. If they heard, Jewish people heard in the first century, we are now the temple, they would think we're carrying the presence of God, but because we're carrying the presence of God, we actually need to consecrate ourselves, set ourselves aside for the use of the special presence of God, because the tabernacle was consecrated.
Leviticus 8, Moses is he's going around anointing everything with oil. He's pouring oil on the head of Aaron, the priest, and he's saying, you are set aside for the specific use of worship. It's dramatic, kind of bizarre activity. Then later in Leviticus 11, Moses actually consecrates the people.
And he says, because God's set apart and holy, we actually need to be set apart and holy. We have to be different. We have to be set aside for a. It doesn't mean we're going to be better than everybody. In fact, they're often morally worse than most nations. But the fact that we're going to set ourselves aside and do bizarre practices and strange moral behavior and kind of things that are grating against the culture, we're going to do that because God is holy.
And so the refrain in Leviticus is, Be holy. Because I am holy, God says. So I'm consecrated and set apart, so you should be consecrated and set apart. And you think Chris, that was Leviticus, and boy, don't get me started on Leviticus. I don't really ever read it because I don't think it's very applicable.
Your New Testament would disagree with you. Because your New Testament loves Leviticus. Have you ever heard the command to love your neighbor? Have you ever heard the command to welcome the stranger? That's Leviticus, baby. Jesus is just quoting that book that you despise.
Yeah.
And Jesus Himself, when he comes and he gives this prayer at the end of his life in John 17, look at what he says. He's praying to his father, he says, As you've sent me into the world, so I have sent them, My disciples. Now look at this, And for their sake, the sake of the disciples, I consecrate Myself, that they also may be consecrated in the truth.
I'm setting Myself aside for holy use. Why? Why? Why would he do that? Just for the sake of being Jesus seems like something Jesus would do. The reason Jesus set Himself aside for holy specific use for the things of God was so that His church would be so that we would be set aside for specific use. Jesus set his life aside so that we might set our life aside, that the consecrated son of God would create a consecrated church.
All through scripture, hear me, God's presence permeates the whole earth. God is everywhere. His presence is everywhere, but tangibly resides in consecrated spaces. Guess where He's residing now? Right here. God has always resided in consecrated spaces set aside for Him. And the radical teaching of the New Testament is not that the church is like the temple and we should take a from the like them.
It is the temple. He's so chosen you to dwell. He's so chosen you to give Him his presence and to give you a consecrated existence, an existence that doesn't look like Portland, an existence that doesn't look like America, an existence that doesn't look like. Whatever cultural upbringing you may have come from and the expectations that come from that cultural upbringing.
He has chosen you to set you aside for specific and different use. You are not, Imago Dei, just like the temple. You are the consecrated space in which Jesus Christ has chosen to dwell. Which is why the New Testament loved quoting Leviticus. Don't you see? Because, if God chose to dwell in the people of Israel, and they were called to radical holiness and radical obedience, the New Testament believers were like, it's even bigger that we embrace the obedience that God has asked us to do.
If we're really carrying the presence of God, and God has really consecrated us, And set us aside? We better set aside our lives. We don't own our lives anymore. That's why you get these dramatic passages in like 1 Peter 1. Okay, therefore, preparing your minds for action. Prepare your minds for action. I know you got less of an hour of sleep.
I'm running on no sleep. I've got a new baby. I'm like, one less hour? Bring it. Alright, I'll bring the energy today. It's fine. Prepare your minds for action. And being sober minded, set your hope fully on the grace that was brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.
But as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since it's written, classic Leviticus quote coming at you on a Sunday morning, You shall be holy for I am holy. That is not a command to be left in the Old Testament and dismissed. It was actually brought into the New Testament to be given a whole new meaning.
That you do not have to be a person of Israel to be holy anymore. That you don't have to go to the temple to be holy anymore. That you don't have to offer sacrifices to be holy anymore. You can be holy because of the relationship you have with Jesus Christ, the Holy One, the consecrated One who's consecrating you.
Prepare your mind for action, church. Look at what Titus 2 says. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people. Hey, that's wonderful news. Why did the grace of God show up? To train us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions. And to live self controlled, upright, and godly lives. Do you see the operative function of the Gospel?
You know what I mean, the operative function? Like, why did the Gospel show up? Why did Jesus show up and release salvation onto the world? Just so we can feel good about ourselves? Jesus came. He said, I consecrated Myself so I might consecrate My church. The grace of God appeared for what reason? To train us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions.
A great loss in the American church is the complete disregard for holiness. We in America championed for the last 25 years You can look around at any kind of church different denominations and movements You'd find different emphasis, but take the whole body of Christ Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, the many Protestant denominations, non-denominational stuff that outfalls from that We have championed every social justice issue imaginable In some ways we've said we would do stuff.
We said we would be a kind of people. So we've championed it. But we wince and we critique, and sometimes rightfully, holiness. We think that we can do justice and do good social action but not be morally pure. That we actually can go do great things for God but, eh, we'll just excuse the selfishness and greed within our own hearts.
And we champion all of these things we're going to do, but we wince and critique. And again, these critiques are actually somewhat right. The critiques of purity culture, the critiques of the hypocrisy of leadership in the church, the critiques of insensitive ways the church talks about and handles money, the failures the church has had with the LGBTQ plus community, all very needed critique, yet.
In that critique, I find a neglect of a call for ourselves to display what the New Testament calls holiness, a consecrated and set aside life, set apart, consecrated unto God, a moral fortitude. Not just sexual purity, but financial integrity and generosity, chastity of the true, pure way that word means, an alignment of desires, a stringent discipline of your desires, uncompromising truth telling, enemy forgiving love.
This is holiness. Where, I wonder, where, I wonder, are the social justice warriors who also wage war against their flesh? Where are the sexually conservative and pure who are liberal with their money and give to the poor? Who are the people marked by prayer and fasting while also boldly evangelizing their neighbors?
Who are the contemplative ones who are also sharing the Gospel with the person across the street? Where are the courageous ones of conservative chastity who liberally receive the refugee?
I don't know many. I'm not this way. I pick and choose my holiness.
I don't live consistently. I need Christ to consecrate my life so that I might live unto Him. You know where some of these folks are, by the way, that I just rattled off? A lot of them are hiding out in monasteries. You ever been to a monastery?
I used to go quite often before I had children. Don't really hang out there much more anymore, but would love to go back. Out at a monastery, you'll find the most confusing holiness. People consecrating their lives. I used to go to this one past Dundee, the Trappist Abbey Monastery up there. And these men were they, no money.
They cut themselves off from society. They just lived this radical life of chastity and celibacy. And then you go around their campus. You're, like, walking around trying to be quiet and holy like they are. You're walking around and there's this room and you're like, what are they doing in there? Oh, they're making fruitcake.
And you're like why are these guys making fruitcake? They're like, oh, it's a business and they leverage the funds of their business to support their monastery and then they give the rest to the poor. Like, wow.
Hey, what's going on over there? Oh, they're binding books. Oh, they're making wine. They have these business ventures inside the monastery.
You're like, what are these guys doing? Supporting their own livelihood as the monks, and they're also then giving every proceed away to the poor. They're the most conservative liberal people you'll ever meet. They're confusing. Why are they confusing? They consecrated their life. They set it aside because Jesus Christ set his life aside for them.
And yeah, you can leverage a million critiques against the monasteries and the monastic life in this country and across the world and across history. There are so many critiques, but let's consider for a second that often we leverage our cynical critiques of the church's moral failure as a kind of smokescreen that excuses our own.
Calling for the church to change can be a convenient way for us to stay unchanged. It's Lent after all, Imago. Repentance is needed. And the question before you today is not how can the church be better, it's how can we live consecrated to Christ. Because when we consecrate ourselves, and when we receive the consecration that Jesus offers, we become a place of worship.
As you might say, why did he have to do this? The presence, the consecration. Because in God's presence dwelling in a consecrated space, do you know what happens? God's given worth. And that's the final point. It's a place of worship. To be the temple of God is to be a place of presence, a place of a consecrated community, and that brings God glory.
Because people look at a consecrated community filled with the presence of God, and they have questions. The life of worship in the temple in Jewish time, the life of worship, it wasn't singing songs. Okay, I love that when we sing songs we call it worship. It's really more praise is actually how I would think about it.
Because in, in ancient Judaism, if you were to tell an ancient Jew, let's go worship, they'd say, I'll get my knife.
Because worship was about bringing an animal into the consecrated space and slitting its throat. It was disgusting. It was, imagining some of the physicality of those actions is just strange and astronomical, but because it's so strange, worship involved the point of it was that worship involved a sacrifice that then reminded the community that they were consecrated, that God was actually giving Himself to the people apart from their own action.
It was a moment of surrender. The closest thing I can think of by the way. Is it be like you bringing cash to church and lighting it on fire? You see it was like today we have giving and generosity and we talk about what's my return on my gift I'm gonna, I'm gonna give, and then I want to know what's the return on the gift, right?
And there is a different form of worship to those consecrated that said, Look, I'm gonna take a part of what I own and just kill it. They just let their, the livestock go. That was money. That was their livelihood in, in, in ancient Judaism. It was an agrarian society. They didn't have credit cards or cash.
Your capital was your livestock. And you brought that to the temple, and you offered that, and just ended its life. To remind yourself that every other piece of cattle you had was God's anyways. And worship wasn't an experience so much. You lost something in worship. You lost something. To remind yourself that God has given you everything.
Worship, it involved a killing. It involved a surrender. But friends, this is the Gospel.
The Lamb has been slain, is what the New Testament says. And actually, the sacrifice has been given on our behalf, through Jesus Christ, here at the table. And now, we are given a different category to worship and experience consecration, which is this.
We are given Jesus Christ, whose blood cleanses us and consecrates us. And who gives us his presence through the Gospel. That Jesus Christ actually did on our behalf all of the things that God has asked you to do. So that we live in response to what God has done. The New Testament puts it this way: "We love because Christ has loved us."
We are consecrated because Christ has consecrated Himself unto us. Which is why Paul makes this appeal to the Romans. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Holy, there's that word again, and acceptable to God. That is spiritual worship.
Spiritual worship is about leveraging yourself because of what God has done. And notice what he says, How is he appealing to you? By the mercies of God to present your bodies as sacrifices. Our teaching text would put it this way. It grants you this metaphor, the temple that God is building here at a Mago, the temple God's building in his church, the consecrated space of presence and worship.
That space is being built upon a cornerstone is what the teaching text says Jesus Christ Himself is going to be the cornerstone, which is You won't be able to successfully live the consecrated holy life without consistently dwelling upon the consecrated holy life that Christ gave you.
Everything built on has to be built upon Jesus Christ. Which is why we pray every day. To receive and to remind ourselves that we are the temple of God only because God has laid his life down first. He went first. He placed the first stone, and upon that stone, the whole church is being built. And my friends, the question Where are you upon and what are you building in your life?
Let's go back to where we started this sermon. What does it cost to build something great? What does it cost to build the church? Apparently, it costs the life of Jesus Christ, God Himself. Christ is building his church, but what did it cost Him? It cost Him his life. In and through Jesus death, you and I become the temple upon the cornerstone that he is constructing.
He is the cornerstone. The confession of His Lordship over death is the rock upon which the whole church is built. And we are the structure. What gives us God's presence? Jesus gave up His Spirit so we might have it. What consecrates us? Jesus blood washes us clean of our sin, and then enlivens us every day to live righteously and holy, fleeing from sin.
He's freed us from it. And what is our worship? Our worship now becomes a laid down life in response to the laid down life of Jesus Christ. I appeal to you, Imago Dei, by the mercies of God, to consider your life a living sacrifice. To consecrate yourselves today. Amen. To come to the prayer doors and to the table and ask God make me the temple make us the dwelling place God Not because we're good or we deserve it, but because You have granted us the command to do so.
Let me pray for you.
Father, our whole hope is in you now Lord, and we need You We ask You God to fill us afresh with Your Holy Spirit and God, I pray for the word that has been spoken and the scripture that has been quoted and thrown out there, Lord.
Oh, my prayer, Holy Spirit,
plant the seed of Your word into the soil of our hearts. We can't make ourselves clean, but You have made us clean. How might we live in response, oh God? Teach us. Today, this way we pray in Christ's name. Amen.
Would you stand with me as we conclude worship and the tables are open here to receive communion and during Lent now and again, we're going to continue to offer litanies of confession and an assurance of forgiveness.
And so here at the close is our litany of confession. I'm going to say the words in italic, and if you agree with those words, just Say, in bold, what is in bold, Christ have mercy. Here's our confession.
Lord, we have not thought your thoughts, nor have we consistently desired your will for your people. We confess our sin to you, God.
Christ have mercy.
Forgive us for the ways we have desecrated your temple, your church, and for the ways our sin and selfishness has dishonored your dwelling place. Christ have mercy.
Forgive us for the false images of your church that we have adopted and even profited off of. So we confess that we have sought financial, material, social, and political benefits that only satisfy our flesh and do not renew our hearts.
Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.
And now let me offer the assurance of forgiveness. The God of all grace, the Father of mercy and kindness, has died for your sins and for all. While we are sinners, Jesus Christ's death satisfies, atones, and forgives us of our sin. Because of this cross, you are forgiven in the name of Jesus Christ.
May you receive now, Imago Dei, the body and blood of our Lord, as a mysterious interaction with your salvation, as you call upon the name of the Lord. All together now. Father in heaven, grant us the grace of your forgiveness now, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
Amen.
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Produced with love by Carl + Angela Nicolson of klaario.