Our Theme for this weekend is Heart Improvement…
Scripture tells us that Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. Eph 3:17
In the Old Testament the temple was the dwelling place of God. Well since Christ came as a sacrifice for sin, he has made it possible for God to live in our hearts.
That is why 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 tells us that we are the temple, the Holy Spirit dwells in our bodies in our hearts. We are the dwelling place of God.
I dig on that, have for a long time. The fact that Jesus Christ the Son of God lives in me. If you cut me open you wont find him, he is not some little man that lives inside my chest. The word tells us that God is Spirit. Cant see him can’t touch him here on earth. But you can see the effects. And the Spirit of God lives in me and through me. That gets me ampped. To think that the God that Created the world lives in me. He is present in me. And he wants to live in the hearts of His creation. Let that blow you away a little bit. Because if that doesn’t something is wrong. If you have received Christ, GOD LIVES IN YOU.
I discovered something that I want to share with you. God loves us mucho, much more than we can ever know here walking on this globe. Everything God is he is to the fullest: loving he is 100% loving, gentle: he is 100% gentle, peace: he is all the peace there is, holy: He is the definition of holy. But as much as God loves us, keep in mind: that is some big love…. to that same degree He hates sin. Absolutely hates it, he has hated it since the garden. He didn’t say Adam and Eve, you did a little messy wessy, but I tell you what I want you to be better. OK? He didn’t tell Noah, “Noah, I am going to make everybody tread water for a couple of minutes…He didn’t just turn the heat up in Sodom and Gomorrah to 95 degrees, God Hates Sin and He punishes Sin. He has hated sin since page 1 and he hates it all the way to the maps. Romans 6:23.
Illustration: A family had a pet boa constrictor, and one night as everyone was sleeping the boa escaped from its glass cage and slithered three rooms down the hall to where the family’s 10-month-old child was sleeping. That snake crawled into the crib and crushed that child. When the father went to get his baby the next morning he found the snake in the crib with the mangled baby. That Father took the snake out in the back yard and proceeded to hack that snake with a pickaxe until it was far beyond dead.
I think it is big that we understand God’s hate for sin. It was why Jesus hung on the cross. God’s feelings about sin are pretty evident in John Chapter 2.
12After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.
13When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15So 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. 16To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"
17His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me."
All the locals knew Jesus well; I imagine that they knew him as the best carpenter around. But now he had stepped out of bounds. He had already accepted John the Baptist’s claim that he was the Son of God and now he had stirred the city up by booting all the moneychangers and cattle dealers from the temple. Think about it, for 30 years Jesus had been to the temple and watched those men pollute the house of God. He was furious at their disrespect and greed. He was disgusted that the floor was carpeted with the animal manure and the smell of urine burned his nostrils. THIS IS MY FATHER’S HOUSE. The sin of the cheating moneychangers and the greed of those men broke his heart. So he cleansed the temple…he drove them out. He told them to “Get out!”
The only way to explain the cleansing of the temple is that a “Zeal for your house will consume me”
Jesus had zeal.
What is zeal? Zeal is passion, it is love on fire. It is a consuming dedication to a purpose. Jesus was passionate about the Father. He was passionate about purity. He was passionate about the things of God.
But Jesus knew one truth; the presence of God doesn’t dwell in impurity. And as he cleansed the temple he was pleasing God.
As we talked about earlier our heart is the dwelling place of God. For years I prayed over and over that Jesus would work in my life, but Jesus response is “I can’t do it, I’m sorry; I can’t work in you and dwell in your hearts unless I can be there alone.” You see I had sin there, and I let it remain there and it caused me to miss out on what God had for me.
Some of you need to cleanse the temple. You need to get busy and clear it out—drive out the cattle and upset moneychangers and shovel out the dirt and manure that is keeping Jesus from working.
You see I went to the retreats, I sang the songs, and I have experienced that spiritual high that comes from the retreats. But there are no R movies at Epworth; there is no Limp Bizkit or Eminem playing in the background. We go to these retreats, get right with God and then go back and pollute it again.
Examine: our lives to see if there is any unclean thing there. Too many of us go through out our day our week our months our years and our lives without examining ourselves and letting Jesus examine us through His Word.
Garden: Our heart is like a garden and sin is as quick to pop up as weeds are to make grow up in a garden. If we stop examining our lives and asking God to search us out we will quickly be overcome with the weeds. The Spirit doesn’t dwell in dirty temples. As Jesus absorbs the sin, the ecstasy of the Spirit explodes inside of me. There is no shortcut to being alive in God; it comes as you confess your sin in silence. You need to go off by yourself. Give Jesus 15 minutes of silence. Be still and know that I am God. In the stillness let me invade you, when was the last time you were still and let Jesus purify you/ cleanse you.
Expel: Suspended vs. Expelled, This involves repenting. U-Turn
Pull the weeds up by the roots. We expel these sins by confessing and repenting. what Jesus wants us to do is to name them to confess them: the Bible says if we confess our sins he is faithful and just and he will cleanse us, cleanse us cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Believe in the forgiveness of sins, belief wont cut it. You can believe in the forgiveness of sin, but the question is have you been cleansed. Have you surrendered, have you allowed Jesus to penetrate you, to absorb out of you to drain into his own body.
He who knew no sin on the cross became sin for our sake. He who hates sin absorbs sin. Jesus wasn’t crying in Gethsemane because of the pain he wasn’t crying because of the agony. He was torn because he knew he would take on all our sin.
Embrace: Don’t dwell on the sin you have confessed. Some of you have committed sin in the past and you have allowed it to hang around. If you have nailed it to the cross the Word says that God casts it as far as the east is from the west. That is a long way. When the sin is absorbed the lid is lifted. What lid? The lid called sin quenches the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has no mileage if it is quenched. If Sin is smothering the Spirit, If Sin is a wet rag on the Spirit.
Enjoy until you surrender to the Jesus that reaches across time and will penetrate you, the Spirit will never be alive in you. That is why the Methodist symbol is a cross with a flame, because through the cross of Christ the Holy Spirit causes a fire, zeal, and a deep passion to well up within you. Walk in it, let the Spirit of God dwell within you strongly. Be passionate about Jesus, let that flame burn bright in your heart. Does zeal consume you?
