The Temple of God

I. Introduction
 A. 2Corinthians 6:14–7:1 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? 15 What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 17 Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, 18 and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” 1 Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
II. Review of last week
 A. Change of subject from opening your heart to me to not being unequally yoked with unbelievers?
 B. No, he has the infiltrators in mind. Start listening to us, stop listening to them.
 C. Ended with 16a What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
 D. Then Paul goes on to explain more about the temple.
III. We are to be in the world, but not of it.
 A. One of the most difficult questions believers must face is how to relate to the world.
 B. There are many things we have in common with the people of the world. We are family, coming from the same first parents. We are fellow creatures, created by God in His image. We are fellow sinners, in need of the redeeming work of Christ. We are neighbors, living in the same place, struggling with a lot of the same problems.
 C. It’s clear we are supposed to be involved with the world and not isolated from it. In 1Cor.5:9-10 Paul says “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.” God does not want us to go out of the world. God wants us to live out our faith in the context of the unbelieving and immoral people of this world.
 D. But, living in the world, we get influenced, we get tempted, our thinking and living are affected.
 E. And so 2Cor.6:14-18 tells us that we must also fight to remain distinct from the world. The world runs after dead idols, we worship the living God. We serve Christ, they serve Satan (usually unconsciously). We are children of the light, they are children of darkness. We are the sons and daughters of God, they are the children of the devil (John 8:38, 41, 44).
 F. Though we are supposed to be involved with the world, and interact with the world in the love of Christ, we’re also supposed to maintain a form of spiritual (not physical) separation from the world:
  1. "Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." (1John 2:15) (see also James 4:4)
  2. We’re supposed to love the people of the world, but not love their worldliness. We’re not to be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds – Rom.12:2
 G. And yet, God calls us to be spiritually separate, to refuse to participate in this world’s idolatry. We need to be in the world but not of it.
IV. Moral exhortations are always backed by gospel realities.
 A. After exhorting them about not being unequally yoked with unbelievers, Paul says (16) For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
 B. Paul doesn’t just exhort them to not be worldly, he explains why.
 C. This is so important. The Christian life can so easily slip into a morass of morality, when we work hard to do the right thing but lose sight of why we do it. 
 D. We can see this in 2Cor.7:1 “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.”
 E. It is so easy to forget the gospel at the heart of it all. And so we need to keep going back and reminding ourselves of it.
  1. “It is good to declare Your lovingkindness in the morning & Your faithfulness by night.” -Ps.92:2
  2. The Bible is not content to keep exhorting us about how to live without reminding us over and over again of why we’re supposed to live that way.
V. We are the temple of God.
 A. “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them.”
 B. God prepared us to grasp this concept in the OT.
  1. The tabernacle or tent of meeting
  2. David’s palace in Jerusalem
  3. David’s desire to build a temple for the Lord, for what is a temple? A house for a god.
  4. Nathan’s temple prophecy
  5. Solomon’s temple
  6. But that temple wasn’t actually the temple God promised. And Solomon wasn’t the son of David God promised. That temple didn’t last. It was destroyed 400 years later by Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, when they conquered Judah. 
  7. And the temple they built under Zerubbabel when they returned after the exile wasn’t God’s promised temple.
  8. And when Herod renovated and added on to the temple in the first century before Christ wasn’t the temple God promised. That temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, as Jesus predicted.
  9. But God had a much better temple in mind, and a much better son of David.
 C. Jesus, the son of David, came to build the true temple. It is not a physical house but a spiritual house (1Pet.2:5). It is not built by human hands, as all these other temples were, but by the greater son of David who is also the Son of God. It is no longer built of lifeless, inanimate stones. It is built of redeemed human beings. Peter calls them living stones (also 1Pet.2:5).
 D. When the Samaritan woman asked Jesus about where the proper place of worship was (the Samaritans worshiped on Mt. Gerizim, the Jews at the temple in Jerusalem), He referred to the transition that was then occurring between OT Jerusalem-temple worship and NT worship:
  1. "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You [Samaritans] worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:21-24)
 E. No longer does God reveal Himself according to a certain location. Now He reveals His presence according to a certain association, a certain relationship:
  1. "Where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst." (Matt.18:20)
  2. The temple of God where He lives is no longer a place but a people.
  3. Believers in Christ are the NT temple of God. We "as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house." (1Pet.2:5) If someone wants to find God, He ought to be able to do so by going where God’s people are gathered in His name. For God has said: “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them” (2Cor.6:16).
 F. “I will...walk among them.”
  1. Not only does God live the temple of His people, but He walks among them. This also represents something of a shift.
  2. We expect that in His temple God would be sitting on a glorious throne. And He does.
  3. But here God is not just sitting on His throne, He is up walking among His people. He is relating to them; He is interacting with them.
  4. The Lord doesn’t just rule over us from on high, though He does do that. He doesn’t just send love notes, though He does that big time in His word. But He also comes among us. He comes into our midst. In other words, He shows Himself.
  5. Now He doesn’t show up physically. Jesus ascended to heaven in His human, physical body. And He is now at the Father’s right hand, hidden from mankind.
  6. But He is present with us spiritually, through the Holy Spirit.
  7. Now sometimes we say, “We’ll be with you in spirit.” But that’s not the same thing.
  8. When we say, “We’re with you in spirit,” we mean that we wish we could be there, we are thinking about you in our absence, maybe even we’ll be praying for you, we’ll be with you as much as it’s possible for a person who can only be present at one place at one times, and who isn’t actually present there.
  9. When we say that Jesus is with us spiritually, on the other hand, Jesus is actually with us. He’s not just thinking about us from afar. He’s not just rooting for us from heaven. He’s actually with us.
  10. Jesus, you see, is human, but He’s also divine. And in His divine nature, He is not limited by location. In one sense, He is everywhere. In another sense, He has the ability to make Himself manifest in one place and not in another place.
  11. And that’s what we’re talking about here with this language of walking among us. Jesus makes His presence known to His people. He allows us to feel His presence, to experience His love, to know His nearness and lovingkindness.
  12. It will be as if He is walking among us. as if He’s there physically in our midst. That’s the reality.
 G. It will also be as if He is at home with us, and we are at home with Him.
  1. My home was shattered when I was in high school. I thought we were a happy family, together for good. Others envied our family. But suddenly my parents weren’t married to each other anymore, and my mother was married to another man, and my siblings no longer lived in our home. I
  2. t could have been shattering, but God had prepared me. Six months before the big crisis, God had drawn me into His family. He gave me a new home before my old home blew up: a home with God and His people.
  3. Think of all the people who came from dysfunctional homes, or broken homes, or violent, tyrannical homes, and yet have found a strong, secure, loving home with Christ.
  4. Some of you had much worse experiences than me. And in spite of your experience with your earthly home, God has brought you into His home. It’s such a beautiful thing.
VI. God is our God, and we are His people.
 A. Perhaps the happiest and most wonderful thing that human beings can ever hear from the mouth of God is these words: "I will be your God, and you shall be My people."
 B. God doesn’t speak this way to everyone (e.g. Nahum 3:1–5).
 C. This precious promise that God is our God and we His people is found in many places throughout the Bible. And though the vast majority of them are in the Old Testament (OT), almost all those OT verses are references to the way God would relate to His people in the New Testament (NT).
 D. In the OT, when God wants to communicate to man about the glory of the day to come when God’s Spirit would be poured out upon mankind, when the law of God would be written upon the hearts of His people, when God would enter into a new and better covenant with His beloved ones, when God would take away their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh, when God would cause His people to walk in His statutes, when God would set His sanctuary in the midst of His children forever, the language He chooses to use over and over again is this language:
  1. "They will be My people, and I will be their God" (Jer.24:7)
  2. "I will be their God, and they shall be My people." (Jer.31:33)
  3. "They shall be My people, and I will be their God." (Jer.32:38)
  4. "Then they will be My people, and I shall be their God." (Ezek.11:20)
  5. "You will be My people, and I will be your God." (Ezek.36:28)
  6. "I will be their God, and they will be My people." (Ezek.37:27)
  7. "I will say, ‘They are My people,’   And they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’" (Zech.13:9)
 E. The future is now. This is us. This is what Christ has done! God is our God and we are His people!
 F. Do you realize what a remarkable privilege it is to have God say that to you? The God of the universe looks at you through His beloved Son and says, "I want that one to be Mine." And in Christ He gives Himself to us to be our God.
 G. If we have Christ, we are not alone! We are not lost and wandering, trying to figure out what to do and how to live and why you’re here. We have been made for a reason.
 H. There is a good God on the throne. And He is ours.
 I. The big question of life in the minds of most is, “Is there a God? Is there some ultimate goodness? Is there some purpose for things? Is there some destiny after death?”
  1. But there’s actually a more important question than this: Is God your God?
  2. You can have all the right answers about those former questions, and even enjoy a lot of comfort from feeling like you know the answers to them, and yet still be godless and empty and doomed.
  3. But if God is your God, that changes everything.
  4. For if God is for you, who can be against you? (Rom.8:31)