Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the merchants and their customers. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the stalls of those selling doves. He said, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a place of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!” The blind and the lame came to him, and he healed them there in the Temple (Matt.21:12-14).
A church should be a place of worship. Over centuries of time, churches have been built specifically as places of worship to God. Today, there are many churches, many religions and human beings have many different ways of worshiping God. However, true worship is not possible without talking to God – and that’s what prayer is all about. Even though there are many different religions, and ways of worshiping God, they mostly have one common fact – talking to God (prayer).
Now, as we can mostly appreciate, a church building is a physical building like any other secular building. What makes a church building sacred are the people who come there to worship God. A church building without true worshippers is no different to any other building.
Jesus told us that when we pray, we should go into our inner room – that area that I like to call ‘the secret place’. (Matt 6:6).
Where is the closet that Jesus says that we should go to in order to worship Him? Well, we’ve shared before that our secret place could be a physical building, but it’s also a place within us. In the beginning, God breathed His breath into mankind and mankind became a living being. In essence, when God breathed His breath into Adam, the secret place was created within mankind and passed down by procreation – giving us our individual places to communicate with God – and for God to communicate with us. (Gen 2:7).
When Jesus entered the Temple he recognized that it was being used for the purposes of the world – buying, selling and all other businesses – everything except worshipping God. I can only imagine how Jesus must have felt because the Temple was His house of prayer and there He saw the pure heart of mankind reveling in its deceitfulness. We’ve also shared before how God feels about the nature of mankind – He said in the book of Geneses that every intention of mankind’s nature is only ever evil – continually! Through the prophet Jeremiah He said that the heart of mankind is deceitful and desperately sick – who can understand it? (Gen 6:5) (Jer 17:9). So to have witnessed that behavior taking place in the temple, Jesus would have been extremely grieved.
If we went into a church building and found people profaning God, we would certainly have something to say about it. We would more than likely react in a very angry way. I remember a time when I was visiting a remote rural church in Zimbabwe only to discover that the day before my visit, a troop of Baboons had trashed the building. They had broken and torn down pieces of the roof as well as urinated and defecated all over the inside – almost as if it was a deliberate attack. I was absolutely horrified and couldn’t believe what I saw…. there was so much anger in my heart towards those baboons. However, this was really animals doing what they do – according their nature. They behaved like that automatically as with the people in the Temple of Jesus’ time – they were doing what comes naturally to mankind.
We react strongly to people behaving badly in a church building, but what about when the ‘House of Prayer’ within us has been turned into a ‘den of thieves’? How often are our secret places full of unwholesome thoughts? Jesus came into our secret place (His temple) and knocked over the unwholesome tables within us so that our houses of prayer may be used for the purposes of worshipping and talking to God, untainted by the things of the world.
The scripture in Matthew 21 goes on to say that the blind and the lame came to Jesus in that Temple and He healed them. Let’s allow the Lord to search our secret places by the power of His Spirit and knock over the tables of the things that don’t please Him and we will begin to see amazing healing (physically and spiritually) taking place, not only in our own lives, but the lives of those around us.
May the master continue to enlighten the eyes of our hearts and draw us closer to Him daily – Bless you all.