Built with Holy Hands

This next Wednesday we will have our monthly Men’s Meeting and again I hope each man takes the time to join us.  We will be meeting in Woodinville again because we are strategically praying that the LORD will open up to us opportunities to find a home for our church there one day soon.

Wednesday night we will have some updates on our search and be looking to put together a couple of short-term teams to do some leg work for us.  But we will also turn our attention to matters of personal holiness as I will be teaching on and teaching from the book “Fidelity – What it Means to be a One Woman Man.”

And there are two things I want to say about that now as we gather to worship.  First is this:  the more we consider the importance of having a church building, the more we will have to fight the temptation to not care about being the church ourselves.  Any time we begin to think of the church in terms of an inanimate place there will always be a corresponding temptation to forget that we, brothers and sisters in Christ, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit – and we always will be regardless of whether or not we own the deed to a particular address on a particular street.

Secondly, the marching orders we have to be Christians in this world is to display in every area of our lives the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and for men, one of the first applications of this is in the area of putting to death the passions of our flesh and doing so with the corresponding calling to give ourselves away in service to others.  Sometimes, men can get real excited about brick and mortar projects – and they should. We are called to take dominion of this world and we are built to build things.  But the LORD will not bless this work unless it is built with holy hands and pure devotion to Him.    And so now, on the LORD’s Day, let us make sure that wherever we are, we are offering up our bodies as living sacrifices to the One Who has come to set us free from our slavery to sin and death.  That will be the foundation upon which we will build a place to declare such freedom to the world around us.