We Are Tabernacles! So What!! - 1/20/2010

Today's Mental Image:

Sukkot - The Feast Of Tabernacles

Do you not know that you are the temple (tabernacle) of God and that

the Spirit of God dwells in you?

We Are Tabernacles (Temples)! So What!!

1 Peter 1:1-16

If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple are you?

1 Corinthians 3:16-17 NKJV

"Because the Spirit is holy and dwells in us, our bodies are holy sanctuaries from God's vantage point.  Too often we disdain our bodies as the source of sin and our fallenness; yet they are precisely where God the Spirit chooses to dwell!"

FORGOTEN GOD, Francis Chan, pg. 71 

So do laws about the temple (the tabernacle) apply to us?

Often, when we think of being God's temple, we run smack dab into the problem of sexuality! Doesn't God know that we can't control our sexual hormones?  How gross to think that sex outside of marraige, or indulging our lust in our bodies and in our mind, means we are doing these actions in the Temple of God!  How blasphemous that we are in the Temple with God and he is so not there to us that we worship sexuality not him.

How much does God care about this "problem" we have?  These hormones we indulge in ways the Bible calls sin?

Paul, in his writing, reminds us that the words of scripture were written down as a warning to those of us who live in the final age!  So what warning does the example of Eli's sons give us - those of us who practice illicit sex and those of us who do not speak up about it?  Eli died because of it!  Eli's sons were destroyed because of it!  The name and glory of God were defiled by their indulging their lust - both in the moment and even after their death!

If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him.

[this is God speaking to believers in the New Testament not

just Israel in the Old Scriptures.]

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Having the Spirit of God, thus God himself, living inside of us!

What an awesome thought that is.  I am tabernacling God!

God is WITH us!  God is IN us!

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Yes!  We should respond in reverential fear!  But even more so -

We should be filled with joy.  The Children of Israel had

to go to the temple to be where God was

tabernacled - and when they did

they were filled with great

joy!

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WHAT SHALL WE PREFER -

LUST or JOY!

THE SEASON OF OUR JOY

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