Scripture: 1 Corinthians
1:18-25 , John 2:13-22
In our first two Sundays of Lent, we considered the
power of God that works in each and every life who is surrendered to the name
of Jesus. By faith in Christ, we receive
His salvation, and through His grace, we become “friends” of God (John 15: 13-15). Today,
the 3rd Sunday of Lent, we
take a look at another gift that comes to us through the love of God in Christ
Jesus – and that is forgiveness and the rebuilding of the life we had so
neglected in the years before we came to Jesus in faith (Romans 15: 18-21).
We have to remember, though, that God’s “rebuilding”
is never to our specifications or desires, but always through the way and truth
that He has been presenting to us throughout this life. In the verses preceding our opening passage
today, Paul offers the Church in Corinth a glimpse of the drastic change that had come to
his life when Jesus met him on that historic road to Damascus. He had turned from being completely rooted in
the Law of Moses, to being firmly founded in the way and love of Christ. Before, he would never have seen the Gentiles
as a people who deserved God’s love and presence just as much as the Jews did. And now, ministry to these scorned people had
become his greatest joy!
The apostle Paul is, very possibly, the greatest
example of a life that was “rebuilt” through faith in Jesus Christ. Once, he had hated everything about the way
of God in Christ. He was arrogant and
self-aggrandizing to the point that, in his own mind, no one knew any better
than he did – to the point that those who did not live up to his way of
thinking, deserved nothing less than punishment, up to, and including,
death. And the change that came into his
life brought him to the very faith that he had been persecuting, and he
suddenly realized that the way of Jesus was, in truth, the very way that he had
been striving for all of his life!
But what about the rebuilding of our lives?
Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
The question that immediately
jumps into our minds at the beginning of this passage is no less than the
incredible difference between God’s wisdom and the human version. This just may be the primary reason that our
lives need rebuilding, too! The truth is
that the way of God doesn’t make a lot of sense when compared to what we have
always known through our personal wisdom, and I believe that it hangs on
those three strange words that describe God – omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent.
Omnipotence means that God is
infinitely powerful, that there is absolutely nothing that can stand against
Him. The power of God is indescribable, immeasurable,
and beyond anything that humanity, in our own frail form of wisdom, will ever be able
to fully understand.
Omniscience means that God’s
wisdom and understanding is infinite, while ours is so limited that if we
understand a mere fraction of all that there is, we would be blessed! There is nothing that God doesn’t know
or understand, and just in case someone believes that they have been able to
hide parts of their sinful life from Him, you had better guess again! Because He already knows!
Omnipresence means that God
is existing and involved at all times and in all places, simultaneously and without
exception,. To fully appreciate what
this involves requires that we appreciate the fact that God is timeless, and
that God can, and does, defy the physics of creation all the time! After all, He is perfect and infinite and
eternal, and nothing could never defeat His eternal perfection, or block His
presence among us.
The Lord has no limitation or
restriction, and we need to appreciate that fact. We, in our rebuilding, discover how to accept
our created imperfection, and how faith in Jesus Christ overcomes that
fault. We also grow in the knowledge of how
to patiently wait with God when He chooses to wait. This is one reason why Paul writes that “the
message of the cross is foolishness for those who are perishing”. All who have yet to come to Christ for new
life, haven’t learned three important lessons – (1) that they are imperfect while
God isn’t, (2) that they have to learn how to wait patiently and expectantly
for the Lord to complete His work, and 3) that our acceptance of Jesus will
never be achieved until we immerge from our worldly brand of “foolishness!
The world has no way to feel
the power of grace, so the mystery of the cross, the necessary death of the Son
of God and Son of Man, and that death for Him was overpowered by grace through
the resurrection of both the Divine and the Man.
It can hardly be explained in any reasonable way, so for “the ones who
are perishing”, it must be nothing less than “foolishness”. But God’s “foolish” mercy, if that, indeed,
is all that it is, is the only hope that anyone will ever have for eternity.
When we begin to surrender
ourselves to the way of God in Christ Jesus, our appreciation for who Jesus
actually is also begins to grow, and our understanding of who God in Jesus
truly is, also starts to change into a whole new perspective – that maybe His
way isn’t so foolish. This is
what God's sanctifying grace can do for us.
Read John 2:13-17
Perhaps this, too, is foolishness to the world’s way
of thinking. After all, weren’t these
merchants simply helping the faithful obtain sacrificial animals to offer up to
Jehovah God, and to help those who only had foreign currency to be able to use
Hebrew coinage to give in offering to the temple? The problem that Jesus had with these
transactions wasn’t that the sales were being made, but that they were abusive
and riddled with theft and lies. Jesus wasn’t
about to simply address the evil itself, He went after the entire corrupt process
that was being carried out within the temple courts, the House of Worship for
Israel as well as for any God fearing gentiles who had yet to convert to
Judaism. And so, the Lord did His own
“house cleaning” to free Israel’s worship from the world’s foolish
idolatry.
In Psalm 69:7-12,
a Psalm attributed to King David, he laments the fact that the very ones who
should be faithful were denying and debasing his Jehovah God’s name and house. In that passage, we read “7 For I endure scorn for your sake, and
shame covers my face. 8 I am a foreigner to my own family, a stranger
to my own mother’s children; 9 for zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who insult
you fall on me.” David
is confessing that he no longer feels like he belongs to the family of Jacob –
he feels like a religious outcast. His
faith and passion, the “zeal” that he feels for his God, consumes his
life, and he sees little evidence that anyone else feels that same way.
As members of the “family of United Methodism”, do
we feel as King David did? That the
“insults of those who insult (Christ) also fall upon us”? In Luke 17:24-26,
Jesus cries out that He, too, “must suffer many things and be
rejected by this generation”.
And in our previous discussions of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:10-12), we remember that Jesus told us that we,
too, would suffer from the hatred of the world, simply because we love and
honor Him?
Just who are the “foolish” ones? Who are the ones who need to be “rebuilt” in
faith?
Read John 2:18-22
So where is your authority to do this to the
merchants? Just who do you think you are
to carry out this despicable act? Apparently,
none of them actually knew who the Lord Jesus was! And when Jesus responded with the thought
that if the temple was torn down, He would rebuild it in three days – that
infuriated them even more! They were
still taking the words of Jesus literally, instead of seeing that they
contained prophetic thought regarding Himself!
Jesus was offering these intellectuals of Israel the
opportunity to be “rebuilt” with and through Him. Their entire approach to religion had been
through their own understanding and interpretation, and they had forgotten what
the prophets had told them many years before, especially in Isaiah 9:6-7. Actually the first 7 verses of that
chapter proclaimed the coming of Jesus Messiah, and while I have no doubt that
those learned men knew that passage well, they had their own ideas of what it
meant for the nation, and those words just didn’t fit with what they were
seeing in Jesus.
These men, and the nation’s priesthood, and the
royal leadership of Israel, and the entire nation itself, needed the
“rebuilding” that Jesus came to win for them, and very, very few ever saw the
hope of God in that Man. While Jesus was
talking to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:4-42),
she could see that He was wise and Godly, but didn’t quite see Him as God. So the Lord told her that the time was coming
when true worship would be in an entirely new place and way, separate from
where they worshipped and different from where the Jews believed God was, implying
that He would soon be the “Temple” where the faithful would come to show their
reverence and love to the Father. And when
their conversation was ended, the woman would go and begin testifying to every
person in the community, that this Man was unlike any she had ever known. And many would come to seek Him.
Jesus is ready, willing, able and anxious to rebuild
anyone who comes to Him – gentile or Jew – anyone throughout the world - but we
have to ask Him to help us. Matthew 11:28 - “Come to me, all you who are
weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” God doesn’t force His way upon anyone, but
neither does He turn anyone away who comes to Him repentant and seeking the new
way in Him.
A new and rebuilt life can be anyone’s through faith
in Jesus Christ. A new mind and heart
can be ours when we open ourselves to the exceptional and extravagant love of God
in Jesus. A complete and renewed
relationship with Almighty God can be ours, when we ask Jesus to cleanse us of
the ways of earth and to fill us with Him.
Jesus’ sole purpose in coming to earth in human form, to teach and do
all that He did, was to give us the chance to become new and right once again.
Will you give Him the opportunity today?
