So I want to ask you all a question today. When you go to church, what do you expect? When I go, I expect singing and praising of God, I expect a Biblical message, and among other things I expect fellowship with other believers. All of these things are put in place for a few reasons. One being is that God instituted the church and He wants me there, two, it's one place I can go to get closer to God and thirdly, it's so that I can grow closer to fellow believers and so that I can be there for them as well as they can be there for me. Now, here's the thing, I think that we as Christians tend to hold higher expectations for the church than we do ourselves. I mean think about it, think about your life, think about your secret life now. If I had a nickle for every time just from monitoring facebook I saw a professing Christian talking or doing something that someone who had their whole life devoted to God wouldn't do, I'd be a millionaire. I mean, imagine going to church and during praise and worship all of a sudden a Justin Bieber song comes up. Wouldn't you think that that would be a little odd. I'd bet you'd start to question the motive of that particular church. Or imagine the pastor gets up to the pulpit and starts reading off horoscopes instead of reading the Bible, after all, horoscopes can be prophetic too right? Or what if the pastor got up and started reading the witchcraft of Harry Potter to the congregation and we just learned all the stories of Harry Potter every week? What if after church there was beer in the fellowship rooms? I think you see where I'm going with this hopefully some red flags would go up if all this was going on in your church. Now just insert certain parts of your life into church and see if it fits. I think we may find that very few parts of our lives actually would be acceptable in that building we call church. But here's the kicker, 1 Corinthians 6:19 says, "19What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" You know in the Old Testament the Spirit of God dwelled in the Holy of Holies, in a room that only the High Priest were allowed to go into. In there these men were stunned by God's power so much that whenever they went in that room they would tie a rope around them before they went in in case they were killed by the strength of God's power. If they were the least bit unclean or brought and unclean offering to God, they would die in their shame. These men had to keep a straight and narrow temple or else God would destroy them. Today the temple of God is us. We are God's dwelling place in this earth and we are the light of the world, and it is this Spirit that's only in us on earth that hold back God's full wrath on a world that has forgot about Him. So why do we allow the corruption of the world in us? You may say, will I can be a Christian and do this and do that, and I say really, show me in the Bible where it says that you only have live for God some of the time, but you can have your own little life outside of the Bible or where it says you don't need to give complete devotion to God? This my friends is the difference between emotional highs and true change. I've seen it once, I've seen it a million times, where someone will go on a week long trip to some Bible camp or something and come back charged up to serve God, but they forget one thing. We forget to throw the corruption in our lives out. Sure we may start a Bible study up for a couple weeks out of it, sure we all might start reading our Bibles for a little bit again, and we might even start up our prayer life, but what happens? We forget that Jesus said that any man who puts his head to the plow and looks back is not worthy to follow Him and like Paul said, a little leaven leavens the whole bunch and even though we add on some Christian aspects to our lives we forget to throw out the bad and we hold on to it. And it poisons us, and before long we're back at square one watching all the filth of the world and letting it reign in our lives. Soon all those Christian aspects just become work and we give them up. Sure once a week we'll stay "Christian" and go to church, but our hearts not there. Why? Because we haven't laid our all on the alter, we just gave God some, and friends with God, some of us just isn't enough, He's jealous for us and He doesn't like to share our allegiance to Him with anything or anyone. You see, the enemy pays no attention to these emotional highs, because he doesn't have too. He knows they'll crumble and since he knows that his time is limited, he's more focused on attacking true Christianity. And I'll tell you what else, the world sees this and they laugh at us, because they see right through us. We say we stand for one thing while standing somewhere else. Jesus told us to help the needy, to spread a message, and He said that any man who wishes to follow Him must deny Himself and pickup His cross and walk in His footsteps. And as long as these emotional highs are what we rely on, the work of God will not be made complete in our lives. So I close with these questions. Why do we hold the church the building to higher expectations than we hold our temples? And are you ready to throw ALL of your old life away yet and give your devotion to God? The best way to do that is just to do it and go out and do something for the cause of Christ. Finally, there's a world of lost people out there, so happy about it, some lost who think they're found, some searching, and few found, which are you? And what are you going to do about the rest? Christ should be the focus of your whole lives, not just a little. The world needs light, we're the light, let's not neglect them and start raising our standards of living for God. The goal of every true Christian is at the end of their race to hear the words, "Well done, my good and faithful servant" but very few have a plan on how they're going to hear it. You hear it by going out and doing the will of the Father, that is the one who is Jesus' friend. I'm telling you all, if you don't clean your temples, it WILL fall to corruption, pray to God to show you what needs cleaning and ask Him to help you do it, I'll be praying for you all.
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