Zeal For Your House

Transcript

I want us to begin our time in the Word with a little bit of a thought experiment, okay? So imagine with me for a moment that you are not here in this room, that you’re not here in this city. Imagine that it is not the year 2023, and imagine with me that you’ve been able to go back into time to the year 31 AD. You are in Alexandria, the major metropolis of ancient Egypt. You’ve recently been converted to the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob through a Jewish missionary named Omari. And through Omari’s discipleship, you are learning what it means to follow God. You’re memorizing scripture. You’re sitting under Omari’s teaching. You’re praying. You’re going to the synagogue every chance you get. And as you’re being trained up in this faith of Yahweh, you’ve heard about what the faithful Jews do. They go up to the Jerusalem temple to celebrate the high holy days.

One of the major holy days that you’ve heard about is called the Passover. You’re learning that the Passover is a time where God’s people remember the story of their salvation from slavery in Egypt. And you can still remember Omari telling you the story of how God brought judgment against Pharaoh by killing the firstborn sons in all the land. And how the mercy of Yahweh would fall on any house that covered its doorposts in the blood of the Lamb. The wrath of God would literally pass over the homes of those who trust in the blood. As you heard this story for the first time, you came to understand a concept called grace. You were so moved by this concept of grace that you decided in your heart that you would have to take the pilgrimage up to Jerusalem to observe this holy Passover at the temple

of God with all the rest of God’s people. And the journey is a long one from where you are in Alexandria. It’s about 600 miles. Omari tells you, don’t worry about bringing a sacrificial lamb with you as you go up to the temple. You’ll be able to purchase one in Jerusalem. So you set out towards the holy city. After eight days of travel, you finally make it to Jerusalem. You are road-weary and exhausted. You try to find a room where you can rest when you get there, perhaps somewhere on the outskirts of the city, but there’s no vacancy anywhere to be found. The city is swollen with travelers. You’re from Alexandria, but even you have never seen so many people in one place at one time. You overhear someone saying as you’re walking down the road that there are perhaps 400,000 people in the city of Jerusalem during this Passover weekend.

After a while of looking for a room, you finally give up and you join thousands of other travelers by finding a nice soft place in the grass to rest your head before the big day tomorrow. When you wake up in the morning, you have two items on your agenda, two items on your to-do list before you go to the temple. Number one, you need to purchase your sacrificial lamb. Number two, you need to find somewhere to exchange your Egyptian coinage for the silver coinage that you need to give for your offering at the temple. By mid-morning, you have failed at both. According to some of the locals, sacrificial animals used to be sold all throughout the city and in the Kidron Valley. But these days, all the animal vendors do their business right there in the temple courts. The same thing is true of the money changers.

They’re also set up right there in the temple courts to make it easier for the worshipers to pay their temple tax. So finally, after having failed at both of your tasks, you set your face to the temple mount. And you can see the temple off in the distance as you make your way through the city. It’s on a high point. So as you walk, you try to focus. You begin to pray. You meditate on all the things that your older brother Omari taught you about the temple and why it’s so important. You remember Omari teaching you that the temple is where God’s holy presence dwells with his people. And apparently, from what you’ve learned, it hasn’t always been this way. Omari told you how long ago, in the beginning, God dwelled with his people in a garden. Must have been a big garden. Later, God dwelled with his people in a tabernacle, and then one day, God allowed a temple to

be built in the heart of Israel. And God was kind enough to fill his temple with the presence of his glory, which was God’s way of saying, I love you. I desire a relationship with you. I’ve made a way to be present with you, even though you do not deserve it in any way because of your sin. But the thing that you remember most, the thing that Omari told you that sticks out most in your mind that you can’t shake, is that the temple is only special because that’s where God is. So as you walk towards the temple, you can’t help but tear up at the idea that you’re walking towards the very presence of God himself. And you begin to pray a prayer of thanksgiving. Thank you, God, for this grace. I get to come into the presence of the God who made me and knows me and loves me.

And as you pray, you can faintly begin to hear the sound of singing off in the distance. Omari told you about this. He said there would be lots of singing as the saints traveled up to the temple. The Psalms of Ascent is what they’re called. He told you that the Bible has a songbook in it and that God’s people love to sing from it. And so they do. And so you begin to sing. And as the fullness of the temple comes into your sight, you meditate on the history of the temple. Omari was faithful to tell you about God’s presence through all of salvation history. The temple built by Solomon, destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt by Zerubbabel, and now renovated by the pagan Roman king, Herod. And as you enter into the outer edge of the temple, for a moment you pause, you’re stunned. You’re stunned by what you see and what you hear and what you smell.

It’s not at all what you were expecting because what you were expecting as you walk into God’s house was something glorious. But instead what you find is something more like a chaotic Middle Eastern bazaar, a marketplace. There are hundreds of oxen and sheep and pigeons. There are vendors calling out and bargaining and bartering and the outer court of the temple has the overpowering stench of animal musk and dung and sweat. When you imagined what the temple would be like, you dreamt of a sweet, serene, reverent, awesome ambiance. But what you have found here is loud and jarring and vulgar. And as you confusedly make your way over to purchase your sacrificial lamb, you find something odd. The price of the sheep in the temple court is double what it would have been in Alexandria. Or even what it would normally be in Jerusalem at any other time of year.

You didn’t bring enough money with you to buy a lamb at this price, so you’re forced to buy a pigeon, the offering for the poor. Next you make your way to the money changers and as you make your way to the money changers you find that the exchange rate is higher than what you were told it was going to be. And so now what was supposed to be this time of joyful worship is turning into a time of suspicion and confusion and anxiety. And you begin to wonder to yourself, is this what God had in mind when he said in his word, my house will be called the house of prayer? As you make your way to the offering site, one of the men there in the temple catches your eye. You see that he has something in his hand. You move closer. You see now what he’s holding, it’s a whip.

There’s nothing obviously distinguishing about this man and you would likely not have noticed him in passing if you hadn’t seen his face and the look of fierce indignation on it. You’ve seen this look before, this look on this man’s face is the look of righteous anger. And so you turn to observe this man more carefully. And now you are in his direct line of sight and you can see his face clearly and what you see is a face set like flint, eyes like daggers, storm clouds gathering in his cheeks. His neck is tense and fibrous. His shoulders are set. His posture is rigid. His nostrils are flared. His jaws are clenched. And as you watch this man, you feel anxious. And surprisingly, you also feel safe. And so you ask yourself, who is this man? And before you can blink, the man begins to crack his whip.

He’s driving the ox and the sheep out of the temple court. And this man is calculated, he is precise, he is fierce in his movements, yet he is calm. And above the sound of the crack of the whip and the noise of the commotion, you begin to hear a voice crying out in the temple courts. And you can’t quite make out what that voice is saying, but all of the animal vendors are scrambling to grab their supplies and their money and their animals. And so as you stand there trying to make sense of what’s happening, you hear the sound of coins, thousands, tens of thousands of coins crashing to the temple floor. You look up and you see this man flipping over the tables, one after another, without thinking you move closer. Because something in you says, I have to hear the voice of this man.

And he’s saying something about his father’s house. And you can only barely make out a few phrases. Something about a house of prayer for the nation. Something about a den of thieves. After a few more minutes of chaos, the dust begins to settle. The outer court of the temple is almost empty now except for you and this man, in which you now perceive to be a group of his disciples who begin to surround him as he makes his way out of the temple court. And there you stand, heart pounding, sweat dripping, pigeon still in hand, not really sure what to do next. You’re talking to yourself. You ask yourself, who was that man? Why was he so angry? Will he be arrested by the temple guard? And as you try to make sense of what you just experienced, you just can’t help but shake the feeling that what just took place in this place was a good thing.

The Cleansing Begins

A necessary thing. You have this gut feeling that the man that you just encountered was more than a man and that his words were more than merely human words. And you think you can recall one of the disciples calling him by name. Joshua, Jesus. You see his faint silhouette off in the distance and before you realize what you’re doing, you find yourself moving towards him in faith. You don’t know why. You can’t explain it. But everything in you feels compelled to follow this man. You feel like in his voice, you can hear the voice of God. And wherever God is, is exactly where you want to be. Our text for this morning is in John chapter 2, the cleansing of the temple. I will read aloud from John 2, verses 13 through 17, and you can follow along with me. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting there, and making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, take these things away. Do not make my father’s house a house of trade. His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your father’s house will consume me. This is God’s holy, inspired, inerrant, and infallible word. It is completely sufficient for all things needed for life and godliness. Amen. This morning’s text is all about Jesus cleansing the temple, which leads us to ask the question, why was that necessary? Why did Jesus feel like he had to kick these animal vendors and money changers out of the

Four Points of Corruption

temple courts? And then we have to ask ourselves, well, okay, once we get the answer to that, what does it mean for our lives? So I have four points for you this morning. Note takers, here they are in advance, and then I’ll give them to you again as we go throughout the sermon. Point number one, convenience. Point number two, greed. Point number three, irreverence. And point number four, zeal. Point number one, convenience. The animal vendors and money changers that Jesus confronts in this morning’s text were at one time set up in the surrounding areas of Jerusalem, but with the passing of time, like a long time, they would move in closer and closer and closer to the temple until they finally ended up in the temple itself. They set up shop right there in the outer court, which was known as the court of the

Gentiles, and the reason why they did this was for the sake of convenience. Like most bad ideas, selling animals at the temple was probably thought of by some well-meaning people who were just trying to be helpful. No ill intent at all, it just sort of organically happened. If you’re trying to sell sacrificial animals, why not make it as convenient for the worshipers as possible? Amen? That’s a good idea. I live in a city of 55,000 people in North Alabama, it’s called Decatur, Alabama. Decatur, where you at? There you go. Our city is about 60 square miles, and it exists along two lines, Sixth Avenue and the Belt Line. Those are the two main roads, and what that means is that in our pretty small city, we have two of everything, right? So we have two Walmarts, two Chick-fil-A’s, amen, praise God. Do you guys have Chick-fil-A here?

Is that allowed? Okay. Is that a weird question? Okay. We have locally sourced chicken, obviously, at the Chick-fil-A here. We have two Burger Kings, two AutoZones, we even have two of the things that nobody wants, we have like two Arby’s. We also have like 17 car washes. Just every time you turn around, there’s a new car wash, but my point is that we live in a land of convenience, even in Decatur, Alabama. We have a consumer mentality about everything, a consumer mentality about the food we eat and the places we shop, and where we worship, and how we worship. This is a problem. Because of how we have been trained to see all of life through the lens of convenience, we then, whether we intend to or not, we begin to mistakenly assume that God values convenience in worship as much as we do. We think that God would never want to inconvenience us as He calls us to worship Him.

But friends, a simple reading of the Bible will reveal to us that nothing could be further from the truth. As we read the story of redemption, it seems like God is not really concerned at all with our convenience, and to the contrary, it seems like He’s constantly making our service to Him inconvenient. So let me just give you a couple examples. You think about Abraham, formerly Abram, called to leave everything that he had ever known and everyone that he had ever loved in order to follow the word of promise. Speaking of convenience, the whole sacrifice your son on the mountain thing, right? Pretty inconvenient. David, even after he was prophesied over to become the king of Israel, spent an inordinate amount of time hiding in caves before his coronation ceremony. Just consider a brief survey of the prophets and the kind of lives that they were called

to in the service of their God. Remember that guy who had to lay on one side for like years at a time, right? Jesus, to put it lightly, was inconvenienced in his earthly ministry. The apostle Paul knew basically nothing but difficulty and tribulation in his service of God. From like the first day when he was blinded by Jesus, Jesus is like, you’re going to serve me. Zap. Right? From that day all the way through the end, I mean, just read in 2 Corinthians, Paul’s anxieties, his afflictions, his suffering, his peril, just the daily anxiety of the churches, the pressure of ministering. Romans 12 tells us that our entire lives are called to be living sacrifices, and we just throw that phrase around so much, living sacrifice, living sacrifice. But you know what the problem is? None of us have to make sacrifices, right? But like if I brought a goat up here on stage and slid its throat in front of you, you’d

understand that a sacrifice is a bloody, messy, costly, inconvenient affair. And so is carrying a cross on your back. God is not overly concerned with your convenience. He tells us plainly that to follow him in this world will cost us. It will be inconvenient. Luke 14, 33, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. Time, talent, treasure, preferences, comfort, you have to give it all up. You get to give it all up. By the time Jesus shows up to the temple, we see the unintended consequences of thinking that God appreciates convenience as much as we do. Things have gotten so bad that a cleansing needs to take place. Friends, is this not a good lesson for the body of Christ today, particularly in our American convenience-oriented context? This mentality is so dangerous. Pastors, in particular, you must be careful.

We cannot train our people to worship at the altar of convenience. When we do that, parents, when you train your children to worship at the altar of convenience, it’s like, yeah, we would go to church, but we do have a soccer game, right? We would go to church, but we did get in late last night. We would go to church, but there’s a little tiff between us and a fellow church member. We don’t want to be uncomfortable when we see him in the hallway. When we train our people to think like that, we’re training them to think that if there is any impediment at all to our worship, that we are therefore relieved of the joyful responsibility to engage in worship, right? We train our people to assume that it is our job as a church to make their worship efforts cost-free. And I just don’t know that’s Jesus’ plan for your life.

The Idol of Money

That’s Joel Osteen’s plan for your life. But one will lead you to hell, and the other will lead you to heaven. Friends, think about what happens if we begin to evangelize with this impulse. Remember, what you win them with is what you win them to, right? So if we make coming to Jesus as convenient as possible for people, what are we going to do when Jesus makes it as inconvenient as possible for them to follow him? Sean, what are you saying? You don’t want people to come follow Jesus? You’re trying to put up roadblocks? You’re trying to.. Do you guys remember when Jesus said to his disciples, you have to sit down and count the cost before you follow me? And they did. They did the math on that, and a lot of them turned away. A lot of them turned away. And if we evangelize people by just trying to remove every possible roadblock to them,

what’s going to happen is they’re going to come into the church, and they’re going to find that God is not interested in convenience, and then they’re going to go back to the world because at least it seems like they are interested in that. In our culture of ease and affluence and convenience, maybe the church should risk overdoing it a little bit in the opposite direction. Maybe we should train our people to live with a little, if not a lot, of inconvenience. Think about it in the context of this local church. Guys, I have to tell you, I love all the kids in this church. Praise God. I was talking to Sam last night, and I was like, you know, Portland, people love dogs more than children, right? Is it hard in your church to convince people that children are a blessing and they should have a lot of them?

And he was like, no, we’re too fruitful. We should slow down the multiplication, right? But I love that you have them here in this room with you. Is it inconvenience? Yeah. I was trying to get on a roll earlier. Somebody’s kid was off the chain, right? I was like, hey, am I talking or are you talking, bud? It’s the same way in my church. It would be very convenient for you to just shuttle your children away into a different room so that, you know, we could all listen with complete, hmm, yeah, perfect concentration. But is that really the most edifying thing for everyone, the body of Christ in the long run? No, of course not. The inconvenience that Jesus builds into our lives and into our corporate worship, it actually serves a purpose, right? We’re not just trying to like make things hard because we’re Navy SEALs, right?

That when Jesus inconveniences us, it serves a purpose. It sanctifies us. It shows us that Jesus is worthy. Even when we overcome inconveniences to follow Jesus, we’re even showing ourselves like, oh wow, I do love Jesus more than I love other things, right? Now take a moment and think about your brothers and sisters in other contexts outside of our convenient context. Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, we could keep going. Consider the inconvenience, to put it mildly, that they experience in order to gather with the saints and offer true worship to God. Fear of arrests and imprisonment, lack of food and water, see the church that has one communal Bible that they have to pass around in their studies, having to meet at 2 a.m. to avoid the authorities when they obey God by singing hymns, they have to do so in basically

a whisper so that their neighbors might not hear them. What do you think our brothers and sisters would say to us if they could see the way that we worship at the altar of convenience? King David was once given the opportunity to worship at his own convenience, and here’s how he responded, I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God, that cost me nothing. Point number two, greed. So at my church we have two different foyers, in one foyer we have books that we give away for free, little booklets we help people take and read, and then in the other foyer we have a book stall, books there that we sell. So I guess my question for you would be, are we wrong for selling those books at the gathering in our church? If Jesus showed up at our Sunday morning service, would he rip the book stall off the

wall and flip over the sign that has our Venmo address, right? Would he cleanse that gathering? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. When you look at the temple cleansing here in John’s gospel, you have to understand that the issue here is not merely the fact that money is being exchanged in a holy place. You have to remember that the temple tax was actually instituted by the Lord God in the book of Exodus, right? Whether we’re in modern-day Portland or ancient Israel, the fact is it costs money to carry out faithful gospel ministry. I hope you’re supporting this faithful gospel ministry with your consistent giving. Thomas didn’t ask me to ask you that. But maybe the issue here is that these vendors are making a profit. Maybe the exchange of money isn’t the big deal, but making a profit is. Okay, I think we’re getting a little closer to the heart of the issue.

I think that could be valid. And we’re going to come back and we’re going to talk about that a little bit more later in the sermon. And I do think we should try to be suspicious. We should be suspicious of any time that profit margins and worship try to coexist. But I think the real heart of the issue is seen in Matthew’s account of the second temple cleansing. Listen to what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 21. He said to them, it is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of thieves. You make it a den of thieves. So what you see here is that whatever business these people were conducting at the temple, it was not a legitimate business. They were, according to Jesus, stealing from God’s people. What’s happening here is that these vendors and these money changers are price gouging.

They’re setting their prices and their exchange rates artificially high because they know they’re the only game in town. They know that the people of God have been commanded to carry out true worship at the temple, right? This is God’s law we’re talking about. And so their business arrangement takes advantage of that. Now in case you haven’t done like a PhD in ethics or like Christian ethics, price gouging is bad, okay? Price gouging is bad. It’s like right up there with like 30% payday loans, right? 30% interest loans, like it’s bad. But price gouging God’s people in the temple of God, in the name of God, as people are trying to worship God, is as bad as it gets. So what leads these people to do such a wicked thing? Well, the answer is greed. And friends, the heart of greed is dark and it is complex.

And greed causes us to love money more than we love God and to serve money rather than serving God, which is why Jesus talks about greed. He condemns greed in such strong language. Listen to what he says. He says, you cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve money and God. You might be thinking, well, Sean, that’s a condemnation of money. No, no, no. That’s a condemnation of the sin that lives in your heart that causes you to worship money. The Bible has a word for that, it’s greed, right? And so greed turns money into an idol and an idol is just whatever we ascribe deity to, whatever we put our trust in, whatever we put our hope in. And money is one of the greatest idols that the human heart has ever invented. And I want you to see the irony here, friends. The temple of God, where he is supposed to be worshiped, has been converted into an idol

temple where money is being worshiped. When Jesus shows up, he says, this has to go. These vendors and money changers would probably have claimed to be there at the temple to help God’s people, to grease the grooves of worship, to facilitate worship. We’re making it easier for people to worship. And friends, that’s what greed does to us, doesn’t it? It’s so easy to rationalize our sin. When lust takes a hold of us, the kind of math we can do to give ourselves permission to indulge in the flesh, when our greed takes a hold of our heart, the ways that we can square the circle in order to make it seem like our carnal desire for money and things is actually in the service of God, and we can say it out loud with a completely clear conscience and be like, man, my logic is airtight.

And you know, the crazy thing is that a lot of people who are around us, who know us, who love us, they may actually agree with us. We might be slick talkers. We might be logicians, if that’s a word, right? But then Jesus shows up, and he sees right through that. And he exposes that. And he exposes us. Our modern religious landscape is full of animal vendors and money changers, full of people who would try to use the church of Jesus Christ as a means for personal gain. Friends, hear me well. There is no shortage of men and women who are what the Apostle Paul calls peddlers of God’s Word. Peddlers. Those who want to use the gospel for a means of personal gain. So I want to exhort you this morning to be wary, to be careful of any pastor, of any Christian author, of any theologian, of any Christian institution that seems to be using

their platform as a pretext for greed. I’m going to embarrass Thomas. He doesn’t know I’m doing this. I haven’t planned this with him. But one of the things I do when I make new friends in new places is I ask to hear their story and I ask like 10,000 questions, and I ask really personal questions. Questions like, how much money are you paid by the church? One of the things that really encouraged me about Thomas was when he stepped in to begin shepherding this church, he stepped away from a very lucrative career to make not a lot of money by serving the church, right? Hey, praise God for your pastors, right? They’re not peddlers of God’s Word. They are not greedy for gain, or as the King James says, for filthy lucre. I wish we could have kept that one, right? Get rid of a lot of the KJV stuff, but filthy lucre?

Come on, man. Right? Praise God that your pastors are not like that. But there are pastors like that. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul says, I never came with words of flattery, nor with a pretext for greed. He had to say that because the church is full of people who do come with a pretext for greed. But here’s the thing that’s really tricky, and here’s, if you want to be wise in this fallen world, here’s what you need to know. The Joel Osteens, the Joyce Myers with their gold-plated toilets, the Creflo Dollars with their private jets, these are the guys who are quite obviously the peddlers of God’s Word. They are obviously greedy. They’re so obvious, it’s laughable. Sometimes I just stop and I’m like, dang, how do their followers not see this? It’s so obvious that if I were Satan, I probably wouldn’t invest much of my ammo in their ministries,

right? I wouldn’t be, right? I would be trying to work in more subversive ways. I would be trying to use people in ministries that are greedy in less obvious ways, who don’t wear the $10,000 suits, who don’t live in the big houses, who don’t fly the private jets, those who have basically good doctrine, those who seem to be helping the poor. Now listen, I’m not trying to, in this point of application, create within you a spirit of suspicion. But I do want you to be discerning. So let me just give you one tool that I think will help you discern greed in the church. In 2 Corinthians, Paul contrasts men of greed with men of sincerity. Listen to 2 Corinthians 2, verse 17. Paul says, we are not like so many peddlers of God’s Word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ.

Do you see the contrast? In our church, we often say contrast creates clarity. And Paul here says that there’s a kind of sincerity in the gospel that cannot coexist with greed. So as you’re thinking about which missionaries to support, whether or not you can trust your church with your giving, which by the way, if you can’t trust your church with your giving, you should just be at a different church, right? If you’re thinking about which institutions are worthy of your financial support, ask yourself this question. Are they characterized by sincerity, openness, accountability? Where you find these things, you will probably not find greed. Point number three, irreverence, irreverence. I do think there is a sense in which even if there was no price gouging, none whatsoever at the temple, there would still be a kind of desecration taking place here. Imagine walking into, when I was in D.C., I went to go visit the Holocaust Museum.

I mean, it was amazing. If you’re ever there, you should go. Imagine walking into the Holocaust Museum and finding a group of teenagers there laughing and joking and taking selfies next to one of the exhibits, right? Or what if you came to my great state, maybe the best state in the union, Alabama, right? And you went down to Montgomery and you went to go on a tour of the lynching museum, and while you were there, you saw someone sloppily eating Chinese food, or maybe watching cat videos on YouTube, right? Right there in the middle of the museum. How would you feel about that? Well, you say, well, Sean, you know, there’s nothing wrong with eating Chinese food, amen. And there’s nothing wrong with watching cat videos, I agree. It may be the only worthwhile thing on the internet, that and John Piper sermons, right? None of the things are laughing and joking and having a good time.

These are not unholy activities. But there is something profane about doing these things in that place. It’s irreverent. That’s the word, if you’re a note taker, that you should probably put in big, bold capital letters. It’s irreverent. It’s a lack of acknowledgement of the holy. And that seems to be, I think, at the heart of Jesus’s anger in this morning’s text. The temple is a holy place. It’s been made holy by God’s holy presence, and holy things are happening there. God’s people are remembering his wrath and his grace in his deliverance, right? Worship is taking place. God’s name is being exalted. His attributes are being praised. His deeds are being celebrated. His love is being experienced. The people of God should be in communion with God in this place. It’s the holy experience, which means that it is not an appropriate venue for business. Even if everything is on the up and up and no one’s being taken advantage of, the temple

of God is not a Walmart. I know this seems silly, but in my church, when we first installed the bookstall, I thought about having someone man the bookstall. You know, stand out there after service, they would be the deacon of the bookstall, right? Full of the spirit to check people out, right? So I thought, but then I thought, first of all, we sell our books at a, we take a loss on it. It’s basically our way of just trying to get good books into people’s hands, but you got to have a little skin in the game. So this $15 book on Amazon, we sell it to you for $7, right? But we don’t, we decided not to have anything set up there that might look like a checkout counter, right? We just don’t want anything to look like what we’re doing in this holy place is transactional.

Zeal for God’s Glory

It just feels out of place with the holy nature of our gathering. I don’t know what that means for your church, but I want to encourage you, praise God, I have not felt anything like that on either of the occasions that I’ve been here. Point number four, zeal. When I was a kid, I don’t know if you’re allowed to do this anymore, but when I was a kid, we would always make fun of each other’s mamas. Is that still a thing? Your mama’s so fat, right? Blood type, Rocky Road. It was always in good fun, right? And it still is when I’m with the boys, right? But if you wanted to fight, there was really no faster way to do it than to, in serious, like insult someone’s mom, right? Why? Why? Why do men get so angry about you insulting their mothers? Well, it’s because they know that their mothers are worthy.

They’re holy, they’re beautiful, they’re glorious. We intuitively understand that our mothers are supposed to be honored, and that any attempt to rob them of their glory is a capital offense. Friends, this is how Jesus feels about his father, but to the nth degree. Because you’re sinful and your mom is sinful, the passion that you feel to protect her and her glory is diminished by that sin. But Jesus is not sinful and his father is not sinful, and so the zeal that he has for his father’s glory is unlike anything that we have ever experienced before. And so, the reason why Jesus is so upset about what’s happening in this temple is because of how much he loved his father and how he perceived this whole setup to be a detraction from the glory that rightly belonged to his father. Just look back in verse 17.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your father’s house will consume me, consume me. This is John quoting the psalmist, and the psalmist endured significant opposition for his zeal, his passion for God’s house, the temple. And if the psalmist cared that much about the house of God, how much more will Jesus, the true son of God, care about the glory of his father’s house? Now you might be thinking, or maybe you’re even a new Christian and you don’t understand how the glory of God connects to the house of God, right? You said that he was passionate for the glory of his father, not his father’s house. Well friends, in the Old Testament, under the Old Covenant, that is where God’s glory was to be found. That’s where we interacted with and beheld the glory of God in the temple, right? The temple of God was a visible representation of the glory of God in the midst of the people

of God. So let’s just be clear, right? Jesus is not concerned with protecting a building, right? You guys know the story. In the Old Testament, God, as a form of judgment, allowed the first temple to be destroyed, right? And he would allow the temple to be destroyed. Okay, so then he’s not concerned with the stones and the wood and the metal or the hay, right? These things are not holy in and of themselves. They are only holy when God’s dwelling makes them holy. And Jesus is so upset here because he perceives that glory is being stolen. Where is the reverence? Where is the awe? Where is the acknowledgment of the holy God of the universe? This is one of the reasons why I cannot stand pastors who make their preaching just like the funny joke laugh time hour.

Listen, if anybody doesn’t like sarcasm, it’s my love language. Sometimes it’s too much. It’s like the only language I speak, you know, I got to reel it in. But like, we are in the presence of, do you understand that we’re in the presence of God right now? God’s Holy Spirit is among us. This is a serious time. If you came here to be entertained, you should go find another church. But actually, you probably shouldn’t do that. You should probably repent of that and like, ask God to help you want to be in the presence of something greater than mere entertainment. Jokes, jokes, jokes, what do jokes compare? How do jokes compare to the true joy of basking in the glory of the presence of God by his spirit through his word with the saints? And we can laugh and we can rejoice, but that’s a serious laughter and it’s a serious joy.

You guys remember back in Exodus, the whole situation with Moses and God’s wrath towards Israel. He was getting ready to destroy Israel. The Lord was angry at their disobedience and Moses, he told Moses, ‘I’m going to kill them, but you’re good to go.’ But you’re good to go. You can go up to the promised land. I got you. And this is how Moses responded. He said, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. For how will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? See, friends, Moses was not zealous for the things that God could offer him. He was zealous for God. I don’t want to go to the promised land if God’s not there, because what’s the promise

for milk and honey without God’s glory being present? That’s nothing to be excited about. Now, here’s the thing. We go from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Where does God’s glory dwell now? Where does his presence dwell now? In us. Christ is the head. We are the body. The spirit of Christ dwells in us as we are being built up into a holy temple for God, a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, says Paul in Ephesians. God’s spirit doesn’t dwell in this building. We could transplant it. We could go out to the park like we did for the barbecue last time I was here. We could just all just file out and go to the park and do the same thing we’re doing now and God’s presence would be with us there. Friends, Jesus was zealous for his Father. And now, because of Jesus, God is our Father too, which means that we should be zealous

for the glory and presence of God. We should be zealous to protect the church from greed and an idolatry of convenience and every other thing that tries to corrupt this holy gathering and these holy people. We should be so zealous for the presence and glory of God that we are willing to weed out anything that would rob us of that. It’s one of the main reasons why we practice church discipline. I’m tired of these unhealthy churches, Sean. Yeah, I know. God kind of gave us a mechanism to help fight that. It’s called church discipline. If your church doesn’t practice that, you want something that you’re just not taking advantage of the grace that God has given you to accomplish it. Let me offer you a quick warning here, particularly if you’re like young and you like to read a bunch of dead reform guys, this warning is particularly for you.

There’s a kind of zeal that you may be thinking of in your mind here that is not at all the zeal that I’m talking about when I’m talking about Jesus’ zeal here in the temple. You are almost certainly inclined to, in your youth and with your heart puffed up with knowledge, you might be inclined to a zeal without love, a zeal without wisdom, a zeal without any of the fruits of the Spirit. There is a kind of zeal that comes more from this world than from Jesus, and it can make its way into our presence ostensibly in the form of somebody who wants to reform the church. But oftentimes what I find is these guys who want to cleanse the church and reform the church, they often do so in such a way that makes it seem like they don’t care if they destroy the church in the process.

That is not the kind of zeal that we see on display from Jesus here. You say, well, Sean, Jesus did it. I can do it. Yeah, that’s true, kind of. But Jesus was perfect. You’re not. He was sinless. You’re a sinner. He was righteous. You’re pretty unrighteous. If you don’t think so, talk to Thomas or one of your pastors after the service, right? His discernment was, the acuity was 100%. Your discernment is substantially lower. So be careful. Jesus could flip tables and crack whips because he was God in the flesh, and unless you’re God in the flesh, you should probably be pretty slow to bring about your reformer’s zeal, at least in this church. I’ve been preaching for a long time, so let me wrap it up here. This is like the city of justice, right? Everywhere I go, I mean, I saw a big sign the other day, health care justice, and immigrant

justice, and sexuality justice, and racial justice, and justice. I don’t know what all that is, but I saw it. A whole lot of justice, and listen, praise God, I hate the fact that in kind of a lot of the circles that I move in, justice is a word that we’re afraid of now because it feels like it’s been co-opted by liberals and progressives in the worst sense of the word. I don’t know, friends. Jesus, Jesus is just, and he brings his justice to the earth. His ministry is a ministry of justice. It does not belong to any political party. It belongs to the gospel. Now here’s the thing, when we see Jesus going into the temple to cleanse it of all unrighteousness and all filth and all unholiness, and we see him bringing justice to that corrupt system, we go, yeah, oh, amen, Jesus, praise God, tear down these unjust structures.

But what if the same Jesus who hates injustice in the temple of God is, what if he hates injustice in you? What if the same Jesus who flips over tables in the temple wants to flip over the tables in your heart? Well, friends, that is the kind of God that he is. He is holy. And the presence of God will not dwell in unholiness. He will not make his home with you if you are corrupt. That’s bad news because we are all corrupt. I hope and pray that you rejoice and celebrate the justice of Jesus when he begins to cleanse your heart so that he can make his presence with you. Because friends, it’s scary and it’s painful, just like it must have been to be there on that day. Now this is a gathering of people who have had their hearts cleansed by the justice of

God. Praise God and amen. But I pray that you are still going out there calling others into that same justice. I hope that as you’re talking to people, you’re not just trying to win them with kindness and lofty arguments. I pray that you’re telling them, hey friend, God loves you and he wants to be with you and he wants to have a relationship with you, but your heart is sinful and he can’t dwell with you if your heart is sinful. And so I hope you’re giving them this bad news that Jesus is going to cause a disturbance in their life. But I also hope you don’t stop there. I hope you go on to promise them what the Bible promises us, what Jesus promises us, is that if we allow him to come in and tear up our heart and to cleanse us and to purify

us, that he will make his home with us. And that all the pain that we go through when he cleanses us of our old dead heart, it’ll all be worth it in the end because we will know joy forever and ever. I pray that we love this Jesus, that we serve him, and that we proclaim his name. Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, we love you. We thank you that you have saved us, that you have cleansed us, and that you’re continuing to cleanse us. It hurts, God, and sometimes we wish we didn’t have to go through the fires of sanctification, but we rejoice that your Holy Spirit has made his home in our hearts and that one day we will make our home with you in heaven forever. Help us to long for that day, to look forward to it with great joy and expectation. We pray all these things in the mighty, glorious, beautiful, holy name of Jesus.

Amen.