Passionate Pushback

“Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there.” Matthew 12:12a NIV

There is a beautiful place of worship and prayer called the temple.

If we say we belong to the Lord then we are the Lord’s temple and we belong to him.

We should be as displeased as He is when our worship, our prayers, and our plans have become more about our desires than his.

Jesus money changer tirade was a demonstration of the passion with which we should use to push back the presence of religious corruption in our lives in every place that belongs to the pure things of the kingdom of heaven.

What might that look like?

  1. Taking in any way from others anything that belongs to the Lord for our own personal advancement.

  2. Becoming consumed with the current cultural industry of platform and promotion to the expense of the purity of the gospel.

  3. When the cost for worship from others adds value to us instead of remaining as a pure and holy sacrifice to the Lord.

  4. When the leaders of the organizational system we belong to are kept in a position of power at the expense of those who need the message our organization brings.

  5. Any time we build “me” to the detriment of “we.”

  6. When prayer requests are covert vehicles for busybody behavior.

  7. If our confidence comes from a behavioral kingdom checklist.

  8. When hypocrisy is a disease caught by everyone but you.

  9. When our gifts in service to the church come with conditions.

  10. If the sincere acknowledgment of wrongness with no parenthetical qualifiers is an unfamiliar practice.

Whatever drastic measures are required - we need to recapture the pure practice of laying our hearts open before the Lord and asking Him to reveal the hardness of our hearts.

Then we need to change. Permanently.

We must be brave enough to become unknown for our influence in this world and unpopular for our convictions - so our accolades come only from heaven.

#jameswheeler #writingconnecting