The temple of old was a place where everything that displeased God was kept out. It was a special place. The world and its trade were not to be taken into the temple of God. Remember how Christ both at the beginning of his ministry and at the end of his ministry cleared out the temple and all the signs of worldly commerce. So it is with the church. We are here to keep our activities sacred for the Lord and not to bring the world in; we cast out all that belonged to the old life and the world. It is a sad thing that some churches do not, and the way they worship and the things they do are completely worldly.
In the building, everything counts. All the parts must cooperate together. Each part is designed for its particular position. This building does not depend on any other building. It has beauty and function. We are a holy temple in the Lord. We are to view this with great awe. If we gossip, we work against his plans. We don’t start by saying, ‘What is in it for me?’ Remember how Paul warned the elders at Ephesus: ‘Don’t think it is your church, or just “a” church. It is God’s will that we should be a holy temple. If Christ has loved us, of course we must love one another. Does Christ approve of the members of his church, and yet we do not? Do we tell Christ he should not love that particular individual? Love is to produce in the church something of beauty, and something that can be seen by the world around. What a great impact the local church has!
We are his dwelling place. Do we drive him away or is he content to live among us? Gossip hurts the Lord. How can we be a place for the Spirit if we grieve him away? Do we realise the corporate nature of all our activity? When we go to praise God, do we do so as just so many individuals? If that was all public worship amounted to, we could worship God in our homes without coming together. No, we are to worship as a family, our voices raised together, the same words of praise on our lips.
Among charismatic people, there are very many who love the Lord, but the presence of the Spirit is sought in terms of excitement, and breathless prayer, and a worked-up atmosphere so often. It is not the Holy Spirit; it is a manufactured atmosphere and excess. Then among the more traditional churches and the Reformed churches, sometimes the Holy Spirit is utterly neglected and things lean in the direction of formalism and coldness. We are always to be sensitive to the work of the Holy Spirit and honour him and be reliant on him and be open to him. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to stamp upon our hearts a foretaste of all the blessings which await us, and to put within us a bond with fellow Christians. He makes us sensitive to his feelings in how we live as we listen to the voice of conscience, so that we separate from the world, we take opportunity to witness to the gospel, we keep up our reading of the word, our worship, our prayer. We are to seek the filling of the Spirit to strengthen us for service, and to seek the guidance of the Lord.
What does this illustration apply to? The building in mind is a temple, and yet this illustration is applied to the local church. Sometimes people say based on these texts: ‘We see how a denomination should look.’ That is a great mistake. In the 1960s a certain group of churches rewrote their constitution. They wanted a council and they wanted to be a bit more like a denomination. They did not go all the way to a hierarchical government, but part way. And they went to this passage to support what they were doing. They said, ‘Churches have pastors and so they should also have councils.’ They said ‘You independents are a nuisance; you are schismatics’, and they point to 1 Corinthians 12 – ‘there should be no schism in the body.’ But they misapplied their texts. You can’t commit that sin in a denomination, only in a local church, because that is the only organisation God has glued together.