Enjoy Life, Enjoy God

MY HOUSE

March 7, 2013

Pronouns can be confusing. We speak of "my church," and pretty soon we risk thinking it really IS ours.

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. "It is written," he said to them, 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a den of robbers."
                                                  --Matthew 21:12,134 TNIV

The cleansing of the temple, we call this, is famous for the surprising "violence" and passion of Jesus. But we miss another element. The people there thought the temple was theirs; they were in charge, that it was like all their other possessions. But they were wrong.

It is the temple of the Lord; it is the church OF Jesus Christ, not the church of US. The invitation is not that the church conforms to us, to our wants and desires, but we conform to the owner, the creator, the Lord.

Joyfully,

Dale Patterson