A Living Temple

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Well, if you would, go ahead and take your Bibles out and turn with me to the book of 2 Corinthians this morning, 2 Corinthians chapter 6. I was listening to a program this week where a man was talking about a recent trip to Israel, and he was talking about going to the Temple Mount there in Jerusalem, where the temple used to stand, and currently there’s the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and people are fighting over the Temple Mount. And that’s really what he was talking about.

You know, there’s controversy. This man was Jewish. And there’s controversy still among Jews about whether or not Jews should even enter the Temple Mount area.

Because there are some who say, oh no, the whole thing is so holy, we shouldn’t enter. Even though the temple’s no longer there, the ground has been made holy by the temple, and so we should respect the ground and not go there. And there are signs you can go today and look online and there are pictures on the internet of signs that say it’s forbidden for Jews to enter the Temple Mount area.

And there are other Jews who say, no, it’s fine, you can go there, you just have to avoid the area where the Holy of Holies would have been. So they disagree about it, but the Temple was so sacred and so holy that it becomes a cause of great concern for them just about the land around it. The Muslims are so concerned with that place being a holy site that they have special police that keep an eye out if Christians or Jews are praying on the Temple Mount, and they can have them thrown off because they don’t want infidels polluting their holy spot.

As we hear these stories, we get the picture that this area is treated as sacred by a lot of people. And consequently, they don’t want it polluted in any way. Some of the Jewish authorities say, we don’t want the Temple Mount polluted by us entering when we’re not supposed to.

Some of them say, we don’t want the area where the Holy of Holies sat being polluted by us just going in and walking around. The Muslims say we don’t want this area polluted by non-believers going in and having their religious rituals. Because a temple area, a sacred spot, is supposed to be kept sacred.

Now, we as Christians don’t have temples in that sense. I’ve told you before, there’s nothing more or. .

. Let me finish this before you start saying, no, it’s wrong. There’s nothing more or less sacred about this room than about any other room.

What’s sacred is what happens here. But there’s not anything mystical about the carpet or the chairs or the walls. If, God forbid, a tornado were to wipe this building out, totally level it down to the slab, and we were to rebuild elsewhere, this wouldn’t be some hallowed ground that everybody would have to take off their shoes when they walked through.

And we as Christians don’t have temples in the sense that a lot of other faiths do, because God says that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Last week I started talking to you about some of the pictures of the church used in the New Testament. And I want to bring you to a second one today, which is where God describes the church, meaning his people, as the temple.

And from that we’re supposed to get this idea of a sacred space, something set apart, something that’s not supposed to be polluted. So we’re going to look at the end of chapter 6, 2 Corinthians chapter 6, and then the very beginning of chapter 7. 2 Corinthians chapter 6, starting in verse 14, says, don’t become partners with those who do not believe.

Some of your translations will say, don’t be unequally yoked. Okay, don’t become partner. We’re going to talk in just a moment about what that means.

Don’t become partners with those who do not believe, for what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship does light have with darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?

Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? And what agreement does the temple of God have with idols? For we are the temple of the living God.

As God said, I will dwell and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people. Verse 17, therefore come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch any unclean thing, and I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.

So then, dear friends, since we have these promises, let us cleanse ourselves from every impurity of the flesh and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. Now, if you’re familiar with Paul’s letters to the church at all, you’ll know that the church at Corinth had a lot of problems, especially when you read 1 Corinthians. Paul does some theological instruction in there, but a lot of 1 Corinthians is straightening out the problems that the church at Corinth had.

I mean, there was division, there was heresy, there were factions and personality conflicts. There was also just some really gross immoral stuff that was happening among the people in the church, because what they found was that even after they had become Christians, there was still this temptation to go back to their old way of life, which in Corinth, it was a fairly cosmopolitan city. There was all sorts of pagan worship.

There was every kind of evil you could want to get involved in was there, sort of like Las Vegas. If there’s some evil you want to get involved in, you can find it. Corinth was one of those types of places.

And so a lot of these people had come from pagan backgrounds. They had come from really dark backgrounds. They’d been involved in all sorts of things before they came to Christ. And they found those habits hard to break.

And so Paul wrote to them and straightened out a lot of those problems. But still, when we get to 2 Corinthians, there’s still that residual tug on our sin nature of the way we used to live. And so Paul writes to the church at Corinth and describes the church as the temple of God in the sense that we are supposed to be different. We’re supposed to be separate.

Now, the first thing I want to talk about this morning from this passage and about separation is what it says in verse 14 where he says, Don’t become partners with those who do not believe. Now, again, some of your Bibles may say, Don’t be unequally yoked with an unbeliever. Now, we need to understand what that means, that God was warning, God through the Apostle Paul was warning against an unequal yoking, against this kind of partnership with the unbelieving world.

And what the word there in Greek that’s translated as partnership or unequally yoked, what that word describes in Greek is something being mismatched. You know, they’ll say the population of a country like North Korea, where everybody’s ethnic Korean. They’ll say that country is homogenous.

It’s a homogenous population. They’ll say a country like ours where we come from everywhere. Americans come from every corner of the globe.

They’ll say we are a heterogeneous population. And the word that’s translated here as partners or unequally yoked is related to that word heterogeneous, that word hetero, meaning different. And what God was describing here was a mismatched partnership.

And this alludes to a verse that we see in Deuteronomy 22. 10 that says, do not plow with an ox and a donkey together. The Jews in ancient Israel were taught by the law of God that they weren’t supposed to yoke a donkey and an ox together.

They weren’t supposed to hook two different animals together. And if you’re not familiar with a yoke, it was a wooden device that they would put over the shoulders of the animals, and they’d harness them in, and they’d hook them together to pull a plow. And God said, don’t hook a donkey and an ox together and have them pull a plow.

That seems like kind of an odd rule to us, until we realize that a lot of the rules in the Old Testament law, especially the ones that weren’t dealing with any moral precepts, A lot of the rules in the Old Testament law were designed to make Israel understand that they were different from their neighbors. Why couldn’t they eat certain things to keep them separate from their neighbors, to build a separate culture? Why couldn’t they wear a blend of two different kinds of fabric to keep them separate from their neighbors?

And we need to understand that that was the purpose behind a lot of what we see in the law, was God trying to keep Israel separate for his purposes, because you’ll run up against those questions, oh yeah, well, if you Christians are against adultery and homosexuality and whatever else that’s found in the Old Testament law, why do you eat crawfish and shrimp? Number one, because they’re delicious. And number two, because those dietary laws were there for Israel to keep them separate from the other countries.

There were civil laws and ceremonial laws. Why do you wear polyester blends? Because it’s cheaper, and it’s not quite as irritating as wool.

That’s not the same as God’s moral law. Those were there to keep Israel separate, to make them stand out, to make them be different. In our culture, somebody doesn’t eat bacon or other delicious things like that kind of stand out, right?

I’m not putting you down if you don’t eat bacon. I’ve had to cut back on my bacon. it kind of stands out, right?

And so they were supposed to stand out from the countries around them. This rule about the ox and the donkey was another thing to remind them, hey, things that are different, keep them separate. And I talked about this recently, but I want to explain this again.

God was not trying to keep Israel separate from the countries around them for any racial reason. It was not for any ethnic reason. It was not because God said, you are inherently superior to the other countries around you.

It was because God knew and God told them, and sometimes they didn’t heed God’s warning, that there is a spiritual difference between you, because you walk with me and they walk with false gods, and the closer you get to these other countries, the more linked you are to them, they’re going to drag you down rather than you pull them up. And that is always, always what happened in the Old Testament. Israel ended up worshiping idols because they forgot God called them to be different.

So I just want to make that clear. When God talks about separating people, this is not a racial thing. This is not an argument for segregation in 2019.

And if you’re using it that way, you’re misusing the Bible. It’s not an argument for segregation. It’s an argument for believers recognizing that there is a spiritual difference and that God calls us to walk with him and to walk differently.

So Israel was given this warning, don’t put the ox and the donkey together for the idea of keeping things different. It was a picture that they were supposed to be different from their neighbors. I feel like I’ve beaten that donkey enough that hopefully we understand.

So for us to be told, for the Corinthians to be told, don’t be unequally yoked, don’t be mismatched partners with unbelievers. This is not a call for us to isolate ourselves from the world. None of this, none of this is for you to go home and say, well, I have neighbors who don’t believe in Jesus.

I’m not talking to them anymore. Maybe you’ve been looking for an excuse not to talk to your neighbors. This is not your excuse.

This is not a call for us to go and live completely isolated from non-believers. This is not a call for all the Christians to gather up all their prepping supplies and go out into the wilderness and start a new civilization away from those heathen unbelievers. That is not what this is about.

It’s not a call to isolation. It’s a call to distinction. We’re supposed to live in the world, but be different from the world.

We’re supposed to love our neighbors and our friends and our family members and our co-workers who do not believe in Jesus. We’re supposed to love them. We’re even supposed to have relationships with them, but we are supposed to be different from them.

They’re supposed to be a noticeable difference. And so in all of this, God is calling the church to re-examine its relationships with the world. Not to sever those relationships, but to re-examine those relationships.

We see that in verse 14. He’s warning, all through verse 14, he’s warning us against trying to blend into the world in a way that erodes the distinctions. What makes us different is not that we as Christians are inherently superior to anybody.

Again, if we think that, we’re misusing the Bible. Being a Christian doesn’t mean we’re superior. It doesn’t mean we’re better than people.

It means we are sinners who have been saved by God’s grace that we did not deserve. And our job is not to point out to the world how much better we are. Our job is to point out to the world how much better God is, So they can see the joy and the wholeness and the fulfillment and the holiness that God can create in us as we walk with him.

There’s a change in us that is not our, we don’t get credit for it. It results from his influence in our lives. And yet a lot of times as Christians, we want to blend in, right?

We don’t want to stand out. The world’s kind of scary when you stand out. People notice you.

People pick on you. You know, we see that we are, oh, God help us, we are in campaign season again already. Here’s where I’m going with this.

In the primaries, it doesn’t matter what party it is. This year we’re seeing it with the Democrats. Last time we saw it with the Republicans.

It doesn’t matter. Whoever starts to gain a little momentum and go up in the polls a little bit, everybody else in their party that’s running, they all start dogpiling on that person. They start to stand out from the pack a little bit.

Everybody dogpiles on them, right? Nobody wants that. I want to be the one who’s gaining in the polls.

So if Joe Biden starts gaining a few percentage points, we’re all going to take out Joe Biden. And next week, if it’s Elizabeth Warren, we’re all going to take her out. The Republicans did that last time.

It happens every time. When you stand out in this world, that’s when people come after you. So we as Christians, we think sometimes the safest thing to do is just blend in.

We don’t want to stand out from our neighbors and our friends. So we try to blend in. But the problem comes when we blend into the world in such a way that they see no distinction between us and them.

Because one of the greatest arguments for our Christian faith is the change that people see in us. That’s one of the greatest evidences. The fact that Jesus Christ can take what we were and make us into something completely different, make us more like him.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who have said, Yeah, I’ve got friends who know the way I used to live and they see me now 20 years later and they can’t believe it’s the same person. And I tell them it’s because of Jesus Christ. Bingo. That change, that distinction in us is an argument.

It’s evidence for people. It’s part of something that should call them to want what we have and draw them toward Jesus Christ. And we’re kind of short-circuiting that whole design of God when we take that light and we hide it under the barrel. because we want to blend in.

We don’t want to break away from the pack because everybody will jump on us. So he warned us about trying to blend in. That’s what he’s talking about with this partnership business.

It’s not don’t have friends who are unbelievers. It’s not cut your family members who are unbelievers out of your life. It’s not live in isolation from your unbelieving neighbors.

It’s saying live among them, but don’t become just like them. Same message to Israel. They traded with their neighbors and they did things, but they were not supposed to become just like them.

And we see he outlines all these different kinds of partnerships, all these things in verses 14 through 16, where he’s calling the church at Corinth to reexamine their relationships. He uses the word partnership in verse 14. Some of your Bibles may say fellowship.

That means you’re being partakers of the same thing. Brother Greg and I were talking about yesterday, Jesus ate with sinners, but he didn’t go out and join them in their sin later. Okay, he had relationships with these people, but he wasn’t a partaker.

He wasn’t a partner in their sin. He didn’t have fellowship in their sin. All right, verse 14 uses the term fellowship.

Yours may say communion. And it’s this idea of a spiritual connection. The word that’s used there in the Greek indicates a spiritual connection that exists between Christ and his people.

This intimate spiritual connection that we don’t have with just everybody walking down the street. And he says in verse 14, what fellowship does light have with darkness? That first one was what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness?

You know, can they do the same things? What fellowship does light have with darkness? Is there an intimate bond between light and darkness?

No. Are light and darkness the best of friends and the closest of partners? No.

In verse 15, he uses the word agreement. What agreement does Christ have with Belial? That word Belial, that’s another term for Satan.

All right. So he says, what agreement does Jesus have with Satan? And that word for agreement, some of your Bibles may say concord.

It’s a word in Greek that denotes harmony. Like you’re singing a duet together and you’re harmonizing and making beautiful music. Do the works of Jesus and the works of Satan harmonize together?

No, they’re working in opposite directions. Verse 15 says, what does an unbeliever have in common with a believer? That word in common.

Some of your Bibles may say part with. It’s talking about a common cause. Now we can understand, the Bible’s not saying we don’t have anything in common with our unbelieving neighbors.

Some of my unbelieving neighbors cheer for OU just like I do. And some of your unbelieving neighbors cheer for OSU just like you do. All right?

We like the same restaurants. We like some of the same restaurants. We get annoyed at traffic just the same.

I mean, we have some things in common. But when you get right down to it, do we have a common cause when it comes to the things that are most important in this life? When it gets to the things that are, well, most important in this life and the life to come.

When it comes to the things that are most important in life and in eternity, we’re not working in quite the same direction. We don’t share that common cause. In verse 16, it says, What agreement does the temple of God have with idols?

That word agreement means consent. It can be used in the sense of voting on something. We all get together at business meeting, and most of the time, I can only think one, maybe two times where we’ve ever even had a dissenting vote on anything in my time here.

And it’s never even been ugly when there was a no vote. But usually we get together and we talk about things, and we all vote, and we all agree, and that’s what we do. I love this church.

We get along so well. but what does that mean we’ve all consented we’ve all agreed we’ve all consented we’ve all said yeah that’ll work can the temple of god consent to to go along with the things that take that take place in a temple of idols is it right for the temple of god to consent to being filled with idols and say does that really happen solomon did it solomon forgot that he was supposed to be separate from the pagan nations around him. And he married a bunch of foreign women.

And again, the foreignness wasn’t the problem. It was the foreign religion that was a problem. And before you knew it, his, what was it, 300 wives and 700 concubines, a thousand women he had.

I still don’t understand how he thought that was a good idea. But they convinced him to put up shrines all around Jerusalem with idols. He brought idols into the palace, into his own home, and eventually he put idols in the temple.

And God was mad. Oh, that did not make God happen. So we’ve got all these levels of relationship that indicate some pretty strong bonds.

I mean, we go from the bond that’s supposed to exist between us and Jesus. We’ve got relationships that indicate joining in on the same things. We have relationships that indicate we’re bound by a common cause when it comes to the most important things.

we’ve got consenting to what goes on. Now let me reframe each of these questions in those terms and help you understand the argument Paul’s making in case it’s a little unclear. Can good join evil in its ways?

Can good join evil in doing what’s wrong? No, by definition it can’t. Can light and darkness be intimately bound together?

No, they can’t even be in the same room, right? You turn on the light, it doesn’t just light half the room. Can Jesus and Satan harmonize together?

Do believers and unbelievers have a common cause when it comes to the most important things? Can the temple of God submit itself to being infested by idols? We know the answer to all these things is no. There’s a separation there.

And again, that doesn’t mean for us isolation from the unbelieving world. It means distinction. Why does it mean that?

Why is this an issue for us? Because God calls us, God calls the church, his temple. We are his temple.

Now, just to be very clear in this, that does not mean the church building is the temple of God. I mentioned last week that in this day they didn’t have church buildings. For the first few hundred years of Christianity, they didn’t have dedicated church buildings.

They met in people’s homes. They might have met in the back room of somebody’s shop. They met sometimes down in the catacombs.

I remember reading as a child about the catacombs in Rome. The Romans burned their dead. The Christians buried their dead.

And the Romans were scared of any place there were dead bodies. So the Christians would dig underground tunnels with tombs and they’d go down and worship in the catacombs. There weren’t dedicated church buildings.

When God says the church is his temple, he’s not talking about this building. He’s not talking about these four walls that one day will crumble. He’s talking about us.

He’s talking about his people. That’s why it says in verse 16, I will dwell and walk among them. Not I’ll dwell in it.

I will dwell and walk among them. The people of God. The church in the sense of the people of God are his temple.

This morning, if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, you are the temple of God. But guess what? If we dismiss from here, and some of y’all go down and have lunch at Boomerang, I don’t know if they’re open on Sunday, but you go have lunch somewhere in town, you go to Mazios, you’re still the temple of God even if you’re at Mazios.

If you’re out in a deer blind this afternoon, you’re the temple of God. I know some of you are going and I’m jealous. You’re the temple of God if you belong to Jesus Christ. It’s not the building.

It’s us. It’s those that he’s died for and bought and paid for. And the point he’s making is that the church should be distinct from the world, should be separate and set apart from the world, just as surely as all these things in these five examples are set apart from each other.

The difference in the way we live as Christians should be as different from our unbelieving neighbors as night from day. the way we demonstrate love, our generosity, the grace that we treat other people with. Folks, just the way we live our daily lives should stand out like light from darkness.

And he tells us that the church is devoted to him, or he calls us to be devoted to him the way that the temple was. You know, the temple in the Old Testament was so holy. Certain people, certain parts of the temple were restricted to certain people.

You couldn’t just go into the temple and do whatever. Do whatever you want. Because it was devoted to God.

That wasn’t your temple. You could just go in and make yourself at home. That was God’s temple.

Well, folks, in the same way, we are supposed to be devoted to him. It’s not about every little thing I want. It’s about my life and myself being devoted to his work and to his use.

Why? Because I’m the pastor? No, because I’m one of his people.

The church. Not the pastor, not the deacons, the church. is his temple.

His people are his temple. And he says that just as we’re supposed to be devoted to him the way the temple was devoted to him, he also says in verse 16 that he dwells in us the same way he dwelt in the temple. See, what made the temple so holy is that’s where they’d go to meet with God.

That’s why they couldn’t go into the Holy of Holies, but one time a year, one person, the high priest, could go in there and make atonement for the people. Because that’s where the presence of God came down to meet with them. And if you went in and you weren’t holy, you were destroyed.

You died. Now, God’s not going to kill somebody if they look at the temple wrong today. Somebody cuts you in line at lunch.

You know, they’re not defiling the temple, and God’s going to strike them down. So don’t get a swelled head about this. I’m saying, as God came down and dwelt in that temple in the most holy place, God says he dwells in us.

If you wake up Monday morning realizing God dwells in you as his temple, does that have any impact on how your day goes and what you do? I tell you what, when I start thinking about the fact that the Spirit of God is with me all the time, my attitude gets a little different than when I forget. He says he will dwell in us.

He’ll walk among us. He’s not just in us, he’s among us when we gather. He’s with his people just like he was in the temple.

And we see in verses 17 and 18, he says, Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch any unclean thing, and I will welcome you, I will be a father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. We talked about that a little bit last week, about being adopted into his family through Christ. But what we need to understand here is that as his temple, our relationship to him should show up in our distinction, in our distinctness.

The bottom line is, if we’re living exactly like the unbeliever around us, and I’m not trying to pick on our unbelieving friends and neighbors and family members, never forget that we were in the same boat. We were drowning in the same ocean of sin when Jesus came and rescued us and plucked us out. There’s nothing for us to brag about.

So I’m not running them down, but I’m saying with his presence within us, it ought to show up. It ought to make us different. And if we’re purposely trying to be exactly the same, then we’re hiding the light of what he’s intended to do with us.

Our relationship to God should show up in the way we’re distinct and different. Now, this passage of Scripture, again, I just want to be very clear. I know I’m repeating myself, but sometimes my wife has to tell me things multiple times, right?

Heaven knows I have to tell my children everything multiple times. I have to read this multiple times to get it through my head, So I’m not going to feel bad about repeating myself because you might have missed it the first time. All right, this is not telling us.

This passage does not tell us to avoid unbelievers. It doesn’t tell us to keep unbelievers at arm’s length. It doesn’t tell us to be hostile toward unbelievers.

It doesn’t tell us to have apathy toward unbelievers around us. Totally the opposite. That’s totally the opposite of what the Bible teaches.

If we’re following Jesus’ example, we won’t be able to help but love those who are around us, whether they’re believers or not. But what this is telling us, what this told the church at Corinth, and what we can take from this today, is that God’s word calls us to re-examine our relationship with the world and avoid the kinds of relationships that are going to entangle us and take us away from our devotion to Christ. And he says in chapter 7, verse 1, So then, dear friends, since we have these promises, let us cleanse ourselves from every impurity of the flesh and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. We need to look and see if there are places where we are entangled with the world.

If there are places where we have brought impurity into the temple, you absolutely, you absolutely should be friends with unbelievers. You absolutely should be good neighbors to unbelievers. Who else is going to tell them about the love of Christ if we don’t?

But there comes a point where we get so entangled in the relationship that we begin to join them in doing the things that unbelievers do instead of the things that believers do. There comes a point where we allow them to influence us instead of the other way around. If you find yourself trying to blend in, if you find yourself trying to blend in to the unbelieving world, Maybe it’s easy or maybe there are things you miss from the way you lived before Jesus.

His word calls us to re-examine that relationship to the world. I’m not saying necessarily re-examine your relationship to any specific person. Oh, I can’t be friends with you anymore because you’re a bad influence.

You know what? You’re an adult. The problem is not their influence.

The problem is not between you and your unbelieving neighbor. If they’re influencing you in the wrong direction, the problem is not between you and them. The problem is between you and the Lord.

And we need to get that right. We need to get that back where it needs to be. We’re called to reexamine that relationship to the world.

And ultimately, that leads us to reexamine our relationship to Christ. Not that we’ve lost our salvation, but maybe the fellowship isn’t what it ought to be. And in this, we’re reminded of the promises of God that we have in Jesus Christ. I mean, he says at the beginning of verse 1, Because we have these promises. Why do we draw near?

Why do we seek to cleanse ourselves? Because we have the promises of God. We have something so much better than the idols that we want to fill the temple with.

We have something so much better than the empty promises of the world. Why would we want to go back to the world when we can have Jesus instead and everything that he’s promised? Throughout this passage, he calls us.

He calls us his temple. And the temple of God is nothing if not holy and set apart to him. And so we