Desecrating The Temple

So this morning I'm reading from that old devotional book and it quotes a verse in Jeremiah 51 talking about desecrating sacred things. To give a little background, at the time, Babylon has sacked Israel and left it in ruins. The section is talking about how people would no longer treat God's temple as it should be, how Babylonians would just walk through it without care for Who's it was. They would enter the Holy of Holies, the room of the temple where God resided, thinking nothing of it. This really saddens me and hits me hard, for some reason it always has, to think that we take something Holy that belongs to God and desecrate it because of our ignorance, laziness or just the fact we don't care.

Then the writer goes on to say the church is like that today. Now, this is a book from England and his example was the church. Again, so you understand, the Church of England is the national church and is run by the government. That means the government can choose what goes on there and who teaches / preaches there (many nationalized churches in Europe are like this). So, that means you could go to a church where the pastor is not even a Christian, he's just someone who is a friend of a friend of someone in the political circle. Kind of sad yet true.

And then later on today it hits me. We do this all the time! Reason? Because we are now God's temple. I Corinthians 6:19-20 says, "Or don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body." (NLT). Every time we take who we are for granted, when we act in a selfish way, when we do something to our soul that God does not intend for us to do, we are desecrating the temple all over again just as the Babylonians did 2700 years ago. So we need to realize who we are as a temple of the Holy Living God and start living the way we should.

Kinda deep and depressing, but now you know how my day has been :)

I Peter 2:5 - "And now God is building you, as living stones, into his spiritual temple. What's more, you are God's holy priests, who offer the spiritual sacrifices that please him because of Jesus Christ." (NLT)

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