A Heart For His House

Often it was done by a committee, but realistically, it wasn’t based on any knowledge of what the church income would be.

Sometimes the church would talk about how they were stepping out in faith. But the end result was that the preacher would end up talking about money all the time, challenging people to step up and pay a budget that was not rooted in reality.

Twenty-three years ago, in 2002, the leadership at Cornerstone decided to take a different approach. I would speak on the biblical role of stewardship for a month each year. And it’s an important topic, and it’s an important part of our spiritual lives.

And at the end of the month, we allow the folks who call Cornerstone their church home to respond and provide an estimate of what they believe they will be able to give in the upcoming year.

Our theme this year is A Heart for his House, and we are going back to the story of the building of Solomon’s temple, which is told in the book of 2 Chronicles, the 14th book of the bible.

This morning, we are going to look at some thoughts on temple building.

We are three thousand years apart and several hundred million dollars different in cost.

And yet, even with all the differences between the temple of Solomon and our two buildings, there must be some common ground. A common thread or two which weaves its way through the tapestry of God’s house.

1 Chronicles 22:7 “My son, I wanted to build a Temple to honour the name of the Lord my God,” David told him.

1) They both began with a Dream David started off with a dream, he could see the temple in his minds eye. He wanted to build a building to be called God’s house. It probably started off innocently enough, a word, or a thought, maybe it wasn’t even David’s original idea or thought, maybe somebody said something in conversation that stuck in David’s mind.

And there the thought began to germinate and grow until it became a passion with David to build a house fitting to be called God’s house. And so David began to plan and think and doodle.

Maybe he used to sit at whatever his version of Tim Horton’s was and doodle on the paper place mats. While he was drinking coffee. Maybe he called in an architect and draftsman and began looking at drawings.

We don’t know everything that David did, but we know that this became an all-consuming vision of what could be done. Because we are told that he called in the head prophet in 2 Samuel 7:2 . . . the king summoned Nathan the prophet. “Look,” David said, “I am living in a beautiful cedar palace, but the Ark of God is out there in a tent!”

And that thought gripped him that he was living in a better home than he worshipped in.

20 years ago, that was the reality at Cornerstone. Most if not all of us lived in better homes, then the place where we worshiped God. Which was the Lion’s Den, at the Lebrun Centre in Bedford.

And David began to dream and imagine and envision. He began to build temples in the air because he had learnt the secret, that if you don’t build castles in the air, you won’t build anything on the ground.