CLEAR THE TEMPLE!

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE’S: “When they arrived back in Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out the merchants and their customers.” Mark 11:15 —– “He taught them, Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a place of prayer for all the nations, but you have turned it into a den of thieves.’ ” Mark 11:17

TODAY’S MESSAGE: When we accept Jesus into our lives, we accept great responsibility. God sends the Holy Spirit to come to reside within us. Our bodies become the temple of the living God. Our bodies are no different than the temple that Jesus visited in Jerusalem on that day with his disciples. It is to be a place of prayer and goodness and not of worldly ideas floating around in our heads. Our hearts are to be made clean, and our lives changed. Many years ago, when I accepted Jesus, I came into the relationship as a heavy smoker. The Holy Spirit began to convict me of that bad habit beginning on day one. I pondered the idea that my body was the temple of God and that my bad habit was doing nothing short of destroying his temple. However, the habit was hard to break. But as I went on and continued to develop my relationship with Jesus, the conviction of my smoking habit began to overwhelm me, and I took my cigarettes to the burn barrel and threw them away. Was that an easy thing to do? No, it was not! But my relationship with the Lord was stronger than my habit. My prayer time each day was filled with the guilt that I was not doing everything to make my life different. Each time I would take a smoke I would wonder whether those around me were seeing me as a good representative of Jesus or seeing me as a hypocrite. Smoking and Jesus just didn’t go together. I had begun to clear God’s temple of the rubbish in my life, but I had not yet thrown out that particular bad habit. We are all tempted in life. We all have things that try to drive us away from the Lord. But as we continue to grow in Christ, we become more sensitive to what he wants of us. He understands that our relationship with him takes time. But over time, we will begin reflecting his characteristics and not our own. There is always time each day to do a little cleaning in the temple. JESUS IS LORD! PRAISE THE LORD IN ALL SITUATIONS!