October 30

2 Kings 12 Over the years I have frequently heard the complaint against churches for the amount of money spent upon buildings by churches. On the one hand they have some valid complaints. How is it that we can spend billions on buildings while people’s needs go unmet? How can we spend billions on buildings while one third of the world has never even heard the name of Jesus, much less been given an opportunity to repent and believe in Him. On the other hand there has to be a place for the church to congregate for worship and to perform various ministries to meet people’s needs. On the one hand the Catholic church spent great riches in the middle ages building gorgeous cathedrals while peasants wasted in poverty. On the other hand, the cathedral was the one place of manmade beauty which the peasants could enter and enjoy. There they could look up and consider the majesty of God. Should the building which houses the worship of the Almighty be a shoddy thing? How should it reflect His glory? Jehoash had a passion for the glory of God. Yahweh only had one temple. Jehoash’s grandmother had desecrated it. It needed repair. Is it not odd that Jehoash’s zeal for the upkeep of the temple seemed to exceed the zeal of the priests? But then as king and not priest, perhaps his focus was more upon the material realm as opposed to the priests being focused upon the spiritual realm. A friend of mine is an architect. He reports that the balance between building a building of beauty and a building that is cost effective for its purpose is a problem for architects who design church buildings. But there was only one temple in Jehoash’s day, so it seems to me that a little lavishness upon that building to bring glory to God was excusable. That one building served millions of people. Jehoash was doing what was right to demand that the temple of the Lord reflect the Lord’s glory. Even today there is only one temple that serves the people of God. Both Ephesians 2:21 and 1 Peter 2:4,5 tell us that today the temple of the Lord is not the physical buildings which we build, but it is the spiritual build of which we are the building blocks. Is the Lord most glorified in the physical building or the spiritual building? Obviously the answer is in the spiritual building. Let us have the zeal of Jehoash in building that spiritual temple! Yes there is a need for physical buildings of some sort, but let us never let the beauty of the physical temple eclipse the beauty of the spiritual temple. Let us never let the focus on the physical building drive the growth of the spiritual temple. Yes both should reflect the glory of God, but when all is said and done the physical will be destroyed. Only the building of the spiritual temple will result in true glory for our Lord. Let us pursue that! Indeed we serve a glorious King. Speak His glory to someone today! --Pastor john