This past Sunday at Westlake, we began a new sermon series. For four weeks we are going to study and glean God’s eternal truths from the Old Testament book of Haggai. Chapter 1 is God taking Israel to task for the disobedience in not rebuilding the Temple since being released from their 70 year captivity. Since we were talking about the Temple and Israel’s disobedience, I thought this would give me an opportunity to address a very common misunderstanding that occurs in many churches today. The misunderstanding comes from the phrase “the house of God.”
Many people still use the phrase “the house of God” when speaking of the physical church building. While it is true that God’s presence used to dwell in the Temple during the Old Testament, that has changed as part of the new covenant. The “house of God” today is not a physical building, rather it is the body of each and every believer. There are a few Scriptures we can look at to show this. The first would be Acts 17:24 where the apostle Paul is speaking in Athens in the Areopagus and says, “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwellers not in temples made with hands.” It is true that in the Old Testament, in the tabernacle and the Temple that God’s presence was there. God’s shekinah glory being over the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant was proof for Israel that God was with them. Subsequently, when the glory of the Lord departed from the Temple, Israel knew she was in trouble. However, again it should be stated that this is not the case today as Paul said there in Acts. Then we can go to another writing of Paul’s that says, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which you have from God, and ye are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19). When a person surrenders to God’s grace through faith and is saved, they are given the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell them. The Holy Spirit leads a believer, convicts a believer of sin, and helps a believer grow in their faith to name a few things. Paul later adds in Ephesians 1:14 that the Holy Spirit is an earnest, or down payment, of our inheritance that we will receive when we die. We get to experience the presence of God now while we wait until we get into the presence of God for all of eternity. One final verse that shows us that the “house of God” is each believer is found in 1 Peter 2. There in 1 Peter 2, Peter says that believers are living stones that are being built into a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:5). Each believer is a living stone, and God is taking those living stones and building a spiritual house. That spiritual house is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 16 when He said, “I will build My church and the gates of hell shall not prevail.” That is why we say that as Christians we don’t go to church, we are the church.
There is nothing super spiritual about the buildings that we gather in every week. That doesn’t mean that they are not important or that we should not take care of the place God gives us to meet in and worship together as the church. How we take care of the building we meet in for corporate worship, prayer, and Bible study is a matter of stewardship. That building is a gift from God, and we are expected to take care of, and use it in a way that glorifies Him. The building is set aside as Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us as a place where we regularly assemble ourselves together for worship and to provoke one another to do the good works that God has preordained we should do. Taking care of the building we meet in reflects our spiritual priorities and our love for Him.
So let us remember as we plan for worship this weekend, that the building we go to is the place where the local church gathers to worship our Lord and Savior, to proclaim His eternal truths to sinners and saints. We want to take care of that building because it gives us a central place to meet for fellowship, breaking of bread, prayer, and worship. But if that building was gone tomorrow, the church would still carry on and the Gospel would still go forward.
Pastor Justin