The Community Church: Sermons and teaching

Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me this week. For the eagle eyed or the eagle listening amongst you, you'll notice that this bit will look and sound a little bit different to what you'll encounter in about 5 minutes or so. Sadly, we lost the first 5 minutes of me talking on Sunday, but the good news is, is that I still got my notes.

So it means that I can try and recreate them to the best of my ability and give you the introduction for the rest of the talk. So that you can tap into that and listen to that if you don't know me. My name is Harry. I'm one of the leaders here at the church, and one of my main roles is the student working.

And you're going to hear a story from a student in a short time today. I wanted to really talk to you about the Temple of the Holy Spirit. And so we're going to start in the scriptures. If you look, if you want to at one Corinthians six, 1920, I'm going to read from the NIV version, and this is one of the kind of most famous statements of the Temple of the Holy Spirit that we find in the Scriptures.

It says this Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit? Who is in you whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You are bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. Now, I don't know what it's like for you, but sometimes with me, as I'm reading the Scriptures, or from reading or from listening to a preacher, from listening to some podcasts or something like that, sometimes they'll be reading the scriptures and you go, Yeah, yeah, that's really, really good.

Or they'll say, some profound truth, you know? Yeah, that's really, really good. And then you kind of then you're having the one eyed open thing, see if everyone else is thinking the same for you, which is the actually, do I really do I really understand what's going on. And it's it's okay for that to be the case because the scriptures were written in two in an ancient time, in an ancient context to an ancient people.

It's really important for us, despite sometimes finding it quite difficult to understand what's actually going on for us to do the hard work to allow our imaginations to be shaped by the Bible. And what do I mean by that? But what you see time and time and time and time again in the scriptures, how they encourage people to engage, how to interact, how to write is on therefore forwards, how to have it on their heart, to meditate upon it day and night.

Because what the scriptures do is it reflects the heart of God. And as we spend time dwelling in it and praying through it and meditating about it, we find that our own hearts can be transformed by the Spirit into his likeness, because that is what is the relationship like between God and humanity. What what is it to carry the heart and to be image bearers of God in the world?

And so there was a cool story that I would like to share with you about one of our students, Cathy and Cathy, over this last year. She has just really been hungry for the Scriptures and she's been asking loads of great questions and spending more time than she's ever spent before. Reading, reading the Bible. And I saw a couple of weeks ago, and she was just telling me about a really, really difficult situation in a family and this family member, and they're Christian and they were sharing the issue that is going on and they were feeling like they were going to do something.

And because it just felt impossible to do anything other than this. And and they knew that it would probably be contrary to what God would want for their lives. And Cathy is there listening to this person. And she just turns around and says to them, you know, all things are possible through Christ. He strengthens you. And because she has immersed herself in the Scriptures, because she is allowed her imagination to be shaped, she was able to come and bring the word of the Lord to this family member at the right time, in the right way so that they could have a seed of faith in their lives for this particular moment that they're going through

a reminder that through Christ, we can do all things because He strengthens us. And so that's part of the reason why we need our imaginations to be shaped, because as we as we do that, it means that we are prepared for every single opportunity, not just to come and spit out a Bible verse and for what seems like a particular moment, but to bring the word of the Lord.

And so it's really important for us. There's a lot of assumed knowledge in the Scriptures. What do I mean by that? Well, they're writing to a particular context that they're writing in some cases 4000 years ago, and the latter case is 2000 years, years. There's a lot of time that has gone on in between. We've seen the likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and all of these writers come come through since then.

And we know how difficult some of those things can be. So reading in the Sun, I know from my GCSE English language, but what you find is that they're writing into a context and they there is just stuff that they don't feel like they need to explain because everybody gets it, because they're living in that world. It'd be like, say, 2000 years from now.

And people are reading stuff about the the anxiety and the mental health stuff that's going on, perhaps stuff about sexuality and gender and how there's a lot of confusion around identity that's taking place right now. And there's all the self-identification that you've got to go and find for yourselves. And it's a very, very particular moment to our moment in history.

It's not really happened before, but 2000 years from now, who knows what people are thinking, But as they're as they're reading blogs and as they're reading or listening to preachers that are talking about these kinds of things, they might not understand that we're speaking into a context where this is in the media absolutely everywhere. It's in schools, it's in universities, It's it's it's happening in our families.

And and it's really important for us to talk about that in 2000 years. Who knows what will be the thing that is being talked about. So it's a bit like that. I hope that makes a bit of sense. And this is the case with temples. And temples were an important part of the fabric of the ancient world because the discussion is not really is there regard that just doesn't happen in the ancient world.

The discussion that takes place is who is that God or gods and what's that relationship with the world? And temples are part of the the the kind of cultural architecture, the cultural landscape that help people to try and understand what's going on in spiritual realities and so what you find within the pagan world is that temples were a place workers would come and live, and typically they'd be by high places, by mountains and things like that, because it was closer to the sky.

The sky was the the arena which is above where you can come in and you can have rule and you can have authority. And they would come down from these areas into the temples. They would live in there and would be the job of the the priests bishops, the job of the followers to provide, to sustain, to placate all of that kind of stuff.

So you'd see things like they would come and they'd provide food. For instance. Typically people weren't allowed in to the temples there. Some times when you could be taken into the mysteries, you'd have to pay the stories of emperors to do the illusion, mysteries and in Greece, But it's not very common for communists to be able to step into the folds of the temple.

That's important for later. And when you look at the context of Babylon and you see a lot of compare and contrast with Egypt and Babylon within the scriptures, and of course, we just don't understand that within Babylon and they have these steeped ziggurat, so called temples and these active stairs. And at the bottom, that's where the gods come in light.

So you see an inversion of this taking place in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel and Babel being a synonym for Babylon, where the people are building a tower. And in their imagination that would be the cigaret thing, whether the people would be able to ascend into the heavenly realms and be like God and rule, really, really clever, really, really sophisticated stuff that's taking place.

And as we as we're not going to do that, but as we dwell on that, you can see how stuff like that is happening in our lives as well. But the story, the temple in the Scriptures and how it relates to the God of Israel and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, it all begins on page one of the Bible in Eden, but God comes in.

He creates a good world. And in this good world, he fills it with his presence. And his presence is like a laser focused on one particular area called Eden. And in Eden, this is where Adam and Eve will humans. And here God comes and he walks together with them. That's how his presence is. Like I have no idea what it must have been like to walk with God.

All I know is I really, really want it. And what we see take place. A story that many people know that Adam and Eve, they take off the fruits of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil, and they decide that they want to decide what is good in accordance with themselves. And in doing that. And there comes a break in the relationship between them and God, But God in His grace, does something extraordinary, which is important.

When we look at the Tabernacle. Later he comes and he does the first ever sacrifice. He kills an animal and he covers the shame and the guilt that Adam and Eve are feeling with an animal skin. And in some sense, it helps to rebuild and bring a reconciliation between the relationship that they have there. So we're going to fast forward a bit to the time of Moses.

And Moses is an Israelite. He's born into a royal family in Egypt and he becomes a real focal point for the scriptures. He he is one of the if not the key figure and the key human figure that we we see everything kind of coming back to in the Old Testament scriptures. And he is raised up after a period of kind of wilderness and soul searching.

And he comes back into into Egypt and he leads the people out into Egypt, out of Egypt, and into the wilderness. And he does this in a really powerful way through a dynamic relationship with God, where God uses Moses and his brother, Aaron, to systematically demonstrate how God is above and more powerful and more resourceful and carries all authority over each of the gods of ancient Egypt.

And so we see during the course of the plagues, the ten plagues that God is coming up against a God of Egypt, ensuring I rule, I reign, I'm in control, I'm more powerful. And this is why you should allow my people to go. And now we're going to jump back into the Sunday morning message. And eventually he dethroned Pharaoh by undermining Pharaoh's rule.

He has no control, he has no authority, he has no power. It's really awesome. And God comes in a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, and he leads the people into the wilderness. And while they're there in the wilderness and God shows his presence in an even more spectacular way, in many respects, He comes and he descends upon a mountain called Mt. Sinai and a cloud of glory.

We go, Oh, that sounds pretty cool. Them fireworks, Southport fireworks. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty. Go with the with the requiem music and all that kind of stuff. Not even close. Not even close. The Scripture says that the people that were stood at the foot of the mountain trembled in fear and were afraid that they would be consumed. Such was the might and the power of the Lord.

But one man, one man goes up, Let's go and speak to the Lord Moses. And there's a bunch of things that happen where people don't trust God and all that kind of stuff. The famous story is the story of the Golden Calf and where Moses is taken a long time receiving instruction from God and they lose faith, the people lose faith and they construct an idol and God gets really, really angry about it, and He threatens to remove his presence and destroy the people.

But Moses comes and he says, Don't do it. Please don't do it. Who are we if we can't have your presence together with us? Who are we? What's the point? And God and His mercy and His grace, He forgives and Moses pounces. In that moment He goes, Yes, this and save here. God, please show me your goodness. And it's this very famous passage in Scripture where Moses comes back up.

He's got two stones to write the commandments on, and God passes before Moses. And he declares, he says, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. God comes and reveals his goodness to Moses and Moses. His response is He bows down in worship in fear to the goodness of God.

This isn't the wrath of God. This isn't the anger of God. This isn't the justice of God. This is the pure goodness of God And Moses response as he battles because he just knows is nothing is nothing in comparison to God. What we find out happens later in the same chapters in Exodus 34. If you want to go and read it is that Moses comes down from the mountain and people are afraid of Moses because something a bit strange has happened.

His face has become radiant and people are afraid. They fear Moses in a similar way to the way that they feared the Lord. Why? Because he was radiate the glory of God. And there's something about an intensity and a closeness with God that totally transforms our lives. And what we see taking place here with Moses is what it should have been like in the garden.

And Moses comes before the Lord and he's able to go back and he's able to be an image bearer of God. So these people and what God wants to do for the nation of Israel is actually to help that to be the case for the whole community of people. How can we make it so that everyone is fulfilling their vocation as image bearers in the best possible way?

It's all about the presence of God. You're not close to him. It's impossible to reflect that image. And with me, when I spend time with my father and I tend to catch quite a lot of his idiosyncrasies. This turns of phrase to the little action until John's role in his eyes of me.

But when you spend a lot of time with somebody in a very close way, you just start to pick up characteristic ways of saying things, ways of acting, ways of behaving. And when we are close to God, our heart begins to be transformed. And so what then happens immediately after this is God gives instructions for the Torah, for the covenant, for the rules on how the people are to live.

And then he gives instructions on how to build the tabernacle. Now, the tabernacle was to be the house of God, the tent of God. This is where God was going to live amongst the people. Okay. And what's the tabernacle? Looked to answer was, How can a perfect God live together with an imperfect people? How can a perfect God live together with an imperfect people?

And so there were all these rules and regulations that were that were designed to help the people of God understand their moral failure, to understand that their need for holiness and to live together in closeness with God. The tabernacle itself. It's split into three sections. You've got an outer court and they're inside that court, there's a tent and you have the holy place within the tent.

And then the most holy place within the tent there and in the outer court, everyone could come into the outer court. This was unprecedented in the ancient world because it was only priests that were allowed close to God. And this was also a terrifying prospect for the Israelites, because remember, when they were on the foot of the mountain, they were a long, long way away, but yet they could come really close to the presence of God.

And then in the holy place, only the priests, the Levites could go. This is where they'd look after the incense. This is symbolizing kind of worship that's taking place. There you have the lamp stands, which is reflective of the tree of life in the garden. And in talking about the presence of God with his fire as well. It was a all lights.

And then you set the table of presence. And in the table of presence there were loaves of bread. And what's interesting is the bread wasn't there for God to eat. They weren't providing food for God. God doesn't need any provision. God is perfect. Okay. But what would happen is the priests would come in a week later, they would eat the bread themselves.

So what on earth is the point of the bread? The bread was there as a symbol of covenant and fellowship because in the ancient world people would come together and if they were ever making a a treaty, or even if there was a symbol of hospitality, if you broke bread together, it was a sign that I am not going to violate this hospitality.

We are friends. We are together. And God, a creator of the universe, chose to come into that kind of close relationship with imperfect people. It is staggering to us. We can just go, Oh yeah, that sounds nice. But in the ancient world, it's just it's like insanity. There's no way that God would want to do something like this.

And yet this is what He chooses to do in order to protect people from the holiness of. Oh, sorry. No, actually, we'll go into the Ark of Covenant, because in the most holy place you have the Ark of Covenant and the Ark of Covenants with God's footstool. Okay? It was God's footstool. So you'd have to imagine God would be seated on his throne and then His feet would be laid on the Ark of the Covenant.

So this was the place where he would come and he would rule. This was really, really important. And only one person, the high priest, once a year was allowed into the most holy place, and that was for the atonement of the people sins and for the purification of the tabernacle. There's animal skins everywhere. There's blood sacrifices, there's regulations about being holy and being clean.

And this was because God wanted to be with his people, but he needed to do it safely so that they didn't die. And that's what you see taking place in the in the rest of the Torah. It's just how can the people live safely and thrive together with God? And so the conclusion from the entire summary of the Torah, that's the first five books of the Bibles, is that we can't draw near to a holy God on our own merits.

It's impossible. We cannot safely dwell in His presence without recognizing His Holiness and our need to be made clean through his cleansing work. But we also see is the tabernacle is built exactly according to God's instructions. He is well pleased with it. It should remind you of the Eden narrative. There's loads of connections that take you back to Genesis one and two.

Okay, we're going to fast forward 500 years to the building of Solomon's Temple. This was an impressive building, pretty impressive building, showcasing Solomon's wealth and the might and the structure of Israel at the time. When you read passages around it, you can see that all is not well with Solomon. For instance, Solomon employs a Canaanites builder to come and build the temple, but when it was came to the Tabernacle, it was a Jew and it was somebody that was empowered by the Holy Spirit to come and do that.

It was a can wait. Something is a little bit off. Something is a little bit off. You read a bit where Solomon comes and says, Look at this, this is fantastic, isn't it? God? And God comes and responds and says, Don't forget to be obedient to my law. You got to be obedient to my look. Like, Well, something is not quite right in this moment here, but we still see that God comes and He fills the temple with His glory.

And this is a peak moment for the people of Israel. This is them at their most powerful, the most influential and the wealthiest. We read of Solomon's wealth. He had 300 wives, 700 concubines. He had chariots for days and gold that filled all of his rooms. And this filtered down into the people of Israel as well. We fast forward because over time the temple, because of its wealth, became a source of greed, a source of desperation.

For many people. It was plundered at least five times and three of those times by its own kings. And this happens while the nation falls into varying states of idolatry. That's when you worship something other than God and other evil practices. So, for instance, there was a cult around one of the gods that did child sacrifice. Very evil, not good.

God was very, very angry about it. And what we see towards the end of that time is the Babylonian empire rises up and a guy called Nebuchadnezzar comes and stands and says, I'm going to take this place for my own. He comes once and he plunders it and he comes back ten years later and he actually destroys his temple, utterly destroys the temple.

What we read in the book of Ezekiel is that he has a vision of God's presence, leaving the temple before it was destroyed. And one of the things that he shows Ezekiel is that the temple itself became a place of worshiping something other than God. And for God, that's the straw that breaks the camel's back. Actually, it's not straw because it's a really significant thing.

Does enough is enough. And his presence goes from the temple. And this happening is something that cannot be overstated to the people in Israel. Your God leaving and forsaking you, leaving you over to the judgment of the nations, be terrifying, absolutely terrifying. In that particular era, they believe that gods had ruled over geographical areas and around the boundaries.

They might have kind of war with each other and establish a bit more prominence. But generally speaking, gods had ruled over specific areas and and the God of Israel gets up and he leaves. No longer am I here. The people are uprooted and the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar and they're taken over to Babylon. They're in exile, They've lost their identity, they've lost their temple, they've lost their religion, they've lost the family, they've lost their country, they've lost their wealth.

Things couldn't be worse for this guy called Ezekiel. He's just about to turn 30 and he's a Levites. And when the Levites 1030, that would be the time when they could come and they could enter into service of the temple. And so he sat outside Babylon by a river just about to turn 30. You can imagine he's feeling pretty low, feeling pretty down in the dumps.

And suddenly he sees this vision of God and God is sat on his throne and he's got all of these angels, these Cherubim around him with all of these eyes. And the operating these wheels and the wheels can point in any single direction. I mean, if you read it, you think it's something out of the Marvel multiverse or something like that.

It's hard to wrap your head around. But for Ezekiel, it's a sign of hope. Because what God is saying is, no matter where I am, I'm king. I rule. I can go wherever I want and I'm still the king. You can say, Well, how are you up? That all sounds pretty nice, but how on earth does that apply to me?

The physical. A refugee from war sat on a on the banks of the river of an enemy can see a vision of God who comes and says, I see your situation. I know what's going on with you and I want to tell you, you kill. I will. And my kingdom will come and my will will be done in this place.

And so whatever situation you're in, wherever you are at God rules, God reigns. If you're fighting with health, God rules and God reigns. There's situations going on in your family, in seemingly irreconcilable differences that God rules and God reigns. You don't know where your provision is going to come from. God rules and God reigns. He is good. There's a song by a guy called Rich Dicus and the the the Bridge, the Course.

I'm not musical, I don't know which is. But he says if you're walking through the darkest valley, he will pull you through. If you're stranded by the lonely wayside, he will pull you through. If your hope is faint and your heart's in pain, he'll pull you through. Our God is able. He will pull you through. God rules and God reigns.

His presence will come and it will fill everything. After 70 years of exile and under the guidance of a guy called ZAREMBO, the second Temple is built and it's completed. There's lots of issues that happen there. They they neglect building it for six years, and they need a prophet to come and give them a kick to get them to finish it off.

And when it's all finished, the people are very, very disgruntled. The temple is noticeably diminished. It's nowhere near as big as it was before. And when it's finished and they have the inauguration ceremony, God doesn't come and fill the temple with this glory. There's no Ark of the covenant that's lost to history. It's not a great time. And the 300 BC is a guy called Alexander the Great comes in, sweeps over the Western world, and he he builds an empire bigger than anyone's ever seen before.

And after his death, the empire is given over to his generals. It's split into four four different kind of patriarchs and due to comes into the Seleucid empire. And in the one sixties, a guy called Antiochus the fourth, he begins ruling over Judah and he's got serious beef with the Jews, serious beef. And he goes out of his way to destroy the Jewish faith.

He outlaws Jewish practices like circumcision. If you're not circumcised, you're not part of the family. He sets up an altar to Zus in the temple of the Lord, and then he commands Jews to sacrifice pigs in the temple. And if you don't know, pigs are seen as unclean animals. It would have. It would have violated any kind of ritual impurity goal.

And that was in the Torah. Now, this leads to something called the Maccabean Revolt, where a family of priests, they led the Jewish people into this mass revolt. They succeeded. They re purified the temple, and they launched the Hasmonean dynasty. And if you go over 100 years, basically this dynasty goes more and more into corruption, goes more and more into abuse.

There's infighting within the dynasty. And then they come and they invite greats. I dare the Romans to help decide who's going to rule. Who do you think ends up ruling the Romans? Okay. So the Romans, they decide they're going to rule. And then a guy who's got connections with Rome called Herod the great of the I'm going to kill Baby Jesus fame.

He ascends to power and he is seriously wealthy. And one of the ways in which he can show his wealth and he can create a legacy is by embarking on a massive building program, which he does. He builds pagan temples, he builds administrative government buildings, and then he goes about rebuilding the temple on the Mount. And to be honest, it's quite spectacular.

Is it's just enormous. Absolutely enormous. So it's built on this on Mount Zion. And the temple itself is 50 meters tall. To put that into context. It dwarfs the Parthenon in Athens and is just a little bit taller than the Colosseum in Rome. It is massive. It's absolutely massive. And the whole temple complex and there's loads of other stuff that he does in there to show off his wealth and his power.

The temple complex itself was 35 acres. That's about the same as 20 football pitches. It is huge, absolutely massive. It would have been the biggest religious site in the Roman Empire and it was one of the biggest religious sites in the world. It would have been an ancient wonder of the world. It was enormous, spectacular, breathtaking. You could have seen it for miles and miles.

We read when the disciples walk into the temple or they can really describe his look how big the stones are. And so you could think that the Jews would go, this is it's this is the time we finally got the temple to house the glory of God. And yet still there's no presence that comes and fills the temple.

And in fact, a temple tax is instituted to pay for the upkeep of the temple. And it just leads to this swathe of corruption. And you've got to pay in the shekel. Not everyone has the shekel, so they have many changes. And the courts of the temple and they obviously skim off that. And then there's livestock that you can go and buy to do sacrifices and they skim off that.

And this is what really riles of Jesus. When Jesus comes in, he creates this court of whips and he chases people out of the courts, which I was something just the other day. The courts were massive. Jesus must have been seriously angry with them because they they were talking like a couple of football pitches. And he's just they're chasing these people out of these courts.

They were massive, you know, presence into this temple. And so the baby Jesus comes and though nobody knew it, people knew that he was the Messiah. They didn't know that he was God incarnate. And in this baby, suddenly this temple knows the presence of God. 30 years later, the presence leaves the temple as Jesus walks out and He passes judgment when he sees all of this corruption I talked about before and he predicts the demise and destruction of the temple, just as God did.

And the Babylonians came and took that temple. And in A.D. 70, the temple was utterly destroyed by the Romans. But Jesus comes and he does something different. He comes and he, in August, a new way in which we look at the temple is a story in John 13 where Jesus starts to wash the the disciples feet, and then he predicts his death and he predicts the denial of Jesus, predicts the denial of Peter.

And then in John 14, the disciples are quite dismayed to go, What's going to happen? What are you talking about, Jesus? And he says, In my father's house there are many rooms that that line is often mistranslated into my father's house. There are many mansions which has led people to think that when you die, you go to heaven, you're on some cloud and you get a mansion and you play harps and it's great, it's fantastic.

It can be further from the truth because it's so much better than that. So much better than that, he says. In my father's house, there are many rooms and he's talking about the temple. That temple complex had loads of rooms to store all this stuff. Jesus, What? You get it out and he comes and he says, I am the way I am.

The truth. I am the life. And then immediately after he says, I'm going to send my Holy Spirit, and this is where we start to come full circle. The rest is history, because Jesus comes and on the cross He wonders the powers of this world so that we are no longer bound by the powers sin. And he comes in love and he's the perfect sacrifice so that the presence of God is not just accessible for all, but that it comes and lives inside each and every one of us.

It is mind shattering to the people of the day. And at Pentecost you have the spirit comes in tongues of fire on the apostles, and it invokes these images of the pillar of Fire that God comes and manifests in to the time when God comes and fills the tabernacle with His fire. When he fills the temple with his fire, when he consumes the offering of Elijah in fire, This is the glory of God coming to reside in the Apostles, and they travel the world proclaiming that we to become vessels of God.

This is the language of the Temple. It's about power, it's about holiness, it's about worship. It's about presence. And these things, they drive the narrative of the temple throughout the Scriptures. And now they become part of our story, the power of God, not just to equip us, to move in the in gifts of the spirit, like healing and knowledge and tongues.

And Lord, more of that, please. But we have the very same power of love that demolished the stronghold of evil and then raised Jesus from the dead. That's all I was as part of our inheritance. It's not. It's not just in you, but it's at our very fingertips. And if we allow the spirit to transform, our heart continuously will be able to see this made manifest in our world.

It's. It's this love that creates an irresistible community of people that sees the lonely set in families, that moves to meet needs and is a voice for the downtrodden and the brokenhearted. The same love that moved God to do that. It's the incredible holiness of God. We've got power. We've got holiness. If God. Peter in his letter, he repeats the call of Leviticus.

He says, Be holy as I am holy. That's God. Be holy as I am holy God comes and he says, I'm holy. I'm completely other. I'm completely distinct. I'm perfect, I'm full of lights, I'm glorious, I am full of splendor come and be like me Come and be like me. And we often think of holiness as being this oppressive rule in which we've got to make sure we have this moralistic behavior that we do the right thing.

And we're contrite when we're wrong and all of that stuff is right. But that's not what holiness is. Holiness is an invitation to life and life in all of its fullness. You have the angels up in heaven. Holy, holy, holy. It's all they can say. He's like, I want you to be holy like me. I want you to be glorious and perfect.

I want you to bear my image. It's an invitation to life. It's costly, cost you everything. Be holy is I am holy. Paul goes on in first Corinthians six, The verse that we looked at before, and Paul says this in the context of us talking about sexual morality and food being offered to idols. What he's actually saying there's there's a cost to being the temple of God because can't just do whatever we want with our bodies.

It actually impacts the holiness and the suitability of our bodies to be a place where our holy God can dwell. I want the Holy Spirit to be pleased that He's taken up residence in me. I am not fully there yet. I was praying in preparing for this message. And as you as you prepare something like this, you're constantly asking, God, search me, know me, see if there's any offensive way in me.

And I thank the Lord that He's not taking the Holy Spirit from me. It's promised it to me. But being the kinds of people that God wants us to be, it's something that we do day to day, moment by moment. It's a lifestyle that is utterly radical indifference to what the rest of the world comes and offers. It's a it's a choice to be a people among whom God is pleased.

Well, it's about worship because our lives, they need to revolve around him. Paul says to the Corinthians, into the Colossians to do everything. Is it for the Lord to the Romans? He reminds them to offer their bodies their whole lives as a living sacrifice. And that is true and proper spiritual worship and its presence. We talked about presence where we, through our proximity to God, can become transformed into his likeness, that where we go advancing the kingdom, we can do so in confidence and security, not that we'll be successful as the world sees it, but that we are together with a living God.

I'm just going to invite the worship team to come back up when we commit to following Jesus, when we come and ask Him to be Lord. In that moment He comes and by the Holy Spirit He lives in us. I don't get it. But it's incredible. It's breathtaking that we have the privilege of being the place where God chooses to intersect with the world.

And for me it just prompts a response that I just need to I just need to surrender every arena of my life, every pattern of thought, every relationship, every every hope and dream, just at the foot of the cross. The aim of the game is not to conform to a bunch of rules, but rather that we become more like Jesus.

And as our hearts and faces begin to radiate like God, that we can come and we can take up our true vocation as image bearers. And so as we worship Jesus now, I'd just like to ask you just to come before the Lord and just ask the Spirit to reveal if there's if there's any area in your life, anything at all, which makes it unsuitable place for the Holy Spirit as well.

It's a it's a tough prayer. Trust me. I've been praying a lot recently, but the enemy will do everything that he can to lead us into patterns of death and destruction. And a life of holiness is an invitation to life and life in its fullness. Just allow the spirit to speak to you, to reveal that which needs to be sorted.

Maybe there's some stuff that needs to be left aside. Said that needs to be confessed. I don't know what it is, Father. We come before you. We say what a what a privilege it is to know you. And as we as we look at the the narrative of Scripture and look at how you have chosen to come and make your living with us, we just want to say thank you.

Thank you, Lord. Here we are out. Outrageous love when we when we think about what you have done, when we think about how you have brought us into your life and your kingdom, our hearts are just full of gratitude. And we come and we we just ask in this moment that you would you would reveal to us by your spirit that which needs pruning, that which needs uprooting, so that we can be not just suitable but thriving places.

You as well, that you would come and be pleased to live amongst us and Father, that we would see that replicated amongst our community of people here. That as we draw closer to you, as we live together with your presence, that there would be a a great radiance that just comes from this body of people. It would be a light and a beacon to all that see to everyone that we encounter, that they would see that to be something totally, radically different about us.

It's all about you, Jesus. It's all about you. So we pray in the name of Jesus. I mean.