THE NEED FOR CLEANSING
And He entered the temple and began to cast out those who were selling, saying to them, "It is written, 'And My House shall be a house of prayer,' but you have made it a robbers' den." (Luke 19:45, 46)
Pastor Ron Ritchie describes a visit to the Gothic cathedral Notre Dame de Paris in the following way, “We were hoping to find a place to pray, but as we approached the great doors of the church we quickly became aware of another reality: commercialism. The plaza was filled with people from around the world who were hoping to get inside the church, but before any of us could reach those doors we had to press past booksellers, portable T-shirt stands, tour guides, their groups and buses, street musicians, a blind beggar, and street artists. Commercialism had taken over the plaza.”
Pastor Ron’s experience reminds us of what Jesus, the Prince of Peace, may have seen when he walked into the court of the Gentiles within the temple area after his triumphal entrance on that first Palm Sunday. After his rejection by the Jewish leaders, he saw the need to cleanse the temple because of the corruption in worship that blinded the people from seeing their Messiah. Jesus had cleansed the temple at the beginning of his ministry (see John 2:13-16), and here he was cleansing it again at the end of his ministry.
Many of us see the need for our Lord to come and cleanse our "temples." There is so much clutter in our lives that we can't find the time or a place to pray.
We need to cleanse our lifestyle, our minds, and our hearts.
In the New Testament, the human hearts of the Christian community replaced the building of stone as the temple, or God's dwelling place, on the Day of Pentecost. Paul told the Corinthians and the Ephesians, "You are...God's building" (1 Corinthians 3:9). "...you [are] built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:20-22; see also 1 Corinthians 3:16). "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
The bedlam and activity that was going on at the temple that day was the symbol of Israel's heart, and our Lord knew that the problem was their corruption in worship. This lack of true devotion to God was what kept his triumphal entry from being triumphal in a permanent sense (Luke 19:35-40). So the King returned to the temple and began to cleanse it for the second time. Jesus looked around the court of the Gentiles and cried out using the encouraging words of his heavenly Father quoted by Isaiah, in which the Lord declared to all the people that his temple was an outward symbol of his loving heart and that all peoples--Jews, Gentiles, eunuchs, and foreigners--could gather in the same place and worship him
"...those I will bring to My holy mountain,
And make them joyful in My house of prayer.
The burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be acceptable on My altar;
For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples." (Isaiah 56:7)
God has designed the collective invisible body of Christ and our individual physical bodies to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, the place where he dwells. This temple is where he wants to communicate with us and wants us to communicate with him and worship him. He wants our lives to be so in tune with him that when others see us they think of God. We need to come to Jesus and ask him to cleanse us of those activities in our lifestyles that hinder us and others from communicating with the Father. Our only hope for spiritual health in a very sick society is to pray that the Lord will come into our temple and cleanse our lifestyles so that we can once again become people of prayer,