When Jesus Comes

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ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:25:21.540-00:25:28.220, 00:26:46.180-00:27:01.020, 00:27:13.980-00:27:17.100, 00:28:05.500-00:28:09.480, 00:28:11.680-00:28:17.160, 00:29:12.600-00:29:22.060, 00:30:20.300-00:30:33.620, 00:31:22.960-00:31:48.880, 00:49:23.020-00:52:55.140 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I pointed out last week that one of the reasons the Lord Jesus saves us is not just to make our lives better and help us one day to go to glory. Those are great and wonderful promises and gifts that God has for us, but his purposes are much more grand than that. His purpose we saw last week is that he wants us to be living stones built together into a holy temple. Peter, the apostle, in his first letter, chapter 2, verse 4 and 5, puts it this way. He says, "As you come to him, the living stone rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." And the apostle Paul, in the text that we looked at together last week, echoes that same thought when he says, "You are no longer foreigners and aliens. This is addressed to the Ephesians who are Gentiles but have now come to faith. You're no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." As we saw last week, as we come into relationship with God and as we come into relationship with each other, we are built into a spiritual temple and the purpose of that spiritual temple is to contain and to manifest the amazing power and presence of the living God. And I believe that we can argue biblically that the more we grow in intimacy with God and the more we grow in intimacy with each other as we are cemented together as living stones into that holy temple, the more we will know and experience the presence and the power of God. And I say that because here is the promise that Jesus gives to his disciples in John chapter 14 verse 23. He says, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him." We will come to him and we will make our home with him. Because as he says in 2 Corinthians chapter 6, we are the temple of the living God as God has said, "I will live with them and walk among them and I will be their God and they will be my people." So here's the question that we want to try to address this morning. What happens as this temple is being built up? What happens as we deepen in our relationship with God and we submit ourselves to the discipline of his chipping away at us so that relationally we get built together into a deeper and greater intimacy? In other words, what happens when God shows up in his temple? We've already looked at it in the Old Testament. When God comes to his temple, his glory fills the temple. His presence is overpowering. What does that look like in New Testament terms? Well this being Palm Sunday, I thought one of the best ways to understand what that looks like is to look at what happens when Jesus comes to the temple. Because as we said earlier, that's a critical component of the Palm Sunday story. He comes into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, but once he gets to Jerusalem, the first thing that he does is he goes to the temple and he spends the next couple of days in the temple. So what happens when Jesus comes to his temple? Well I submit to you in the time that we have, we'll see how many of these we can cover, but there are four things that happen according to this Palm Sunday story that happen when Jesus visits the temple. The first is this, he cleans house, he purifies the temple, we read Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, he said to them, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you're making it a den of robbers. Now to appreciate what's going on here, you have to remember that under Old Testament sacrificial law, all the Israelite males were to travel to the temple in Jerusalem three times a year at the Passover, which is what this season is, when Palm Sunday happens, for the feast of Pentecost, 50 days later, and then for the feast of Tabernacles, a number of months later. And the command of the Lord to Israel was, you don't come to the temple without making a sacrifice, so they had to bring sacrificial animals, also they were obligated in the course of a year to pay the half shekel temple tax. Now appreciate the fact that people were coming from all over the Roman Empire, because Jewish believers and proselytes were scattered to the far reaches of the empire. That's how on the day of Pentecost, you had so many people together earlier when the Holy Spirit was poured out. And so to facilitate sacrifices, they had developed a cottage industry that said, we will make animals available to you, and we will provide opportunity for you to change your local currency into the shekel to facilitate your worship. And some very enterprising priests had seen an opportunity here to serve the worshipers, and they ended up bringing this whole auction market, if you will, into the court of the temple. Let me show you a picture of what the temple looked like, and you will appreciate just exactly why they did that. This is the temple of Herod, who spent many, many years rebuilding the second temple that was built after the exile, because he wanted to please the Israelites or the Jews, because he was a very cruel man, but he was a great builder. And so here you see the temple proper. You see all the buildings around the temple, but then here is the temple courtyard. This is the beautiful gate where the layman sat. But the significance of this is that there was plenty of room here. And so the priests brought the traders into this whole area and this area to facilitate preparation for worship. And let me say again that the reason wasn't all bad. It was really to serve the worshipers from all over the Roman Empire. However, there were two problems with opening up the courtyard for this purpose. The first is that it provided opportunity for human greed, because pretty soon the priests saw this as a great opportunity for making money, and so it really became a money-making business that took over the religious flavor. And secondly, and you've heard me talk about this before, it kept the Gentiles away from seeking the Lord, because the court is the only place where the Gentiles were allowed to come. And so in the interest of their pursuit of gain, they were presenting an obstacle so that Gentiles, non-Jewish people, could not even get close to the presence of God in the temple. So all of this is what Jesus addresses now when he quotes from two Old Testament prophets and said, "It is written, 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you're making it a den of robbers." The den of robbers is a quotation from Jeremiah. The house of prayer is a quotation from Isaiah 56 verse 7, and if you read that verse in its entirety, then you will notice that Matthew is leaving off the last part, but it's picked up by both Mark and Luke. It will be a house of prayer for what? All nations. It is a house of prayer for all nations. Now here already in the ministry of Jesus, you see this emphasis on the fact that from God's perspective, the purpose of the gospel is not just to reach the Jews. He wants to bridge the gap that also includes Gentiles. But in their religious blindness and in their selfishness, the religious priests are raising an obstacle to keep this from happening. And so Jesus as the Son of God, who according to the Old Testament Psalms quoted in John's gospel has a zeal for the house of the Lord, he is livid when he sees this happening. And so what does he do? He just takes matters into his own hands and he chases everybody out there. He turns the tables upside down and he is furious with anger. Very significant that this is really the only recorded violent incident of Jesus in all his ministry, which shows you his concern for the house of God. So back to where we find ourselves, what happens when God shows up in his temple? What happens when you become a Christian, first of all individually, and the Holy Spirit comes and he dwells within you? What happens when collectively we are built up in Christ to become a holy temple in the Lord? Guess what? He cleans house. He puts his finger on all of those things that are at odds with the Holy God. And he wants us to put that away because this Holy God cannot live in the midst of sinful people. That's been the whole history of God's problem in dwelling with the human race. And so God's holiness isn't going to change. So our sinfulness needs to change judgment, says Peter, will always begin at the house of God. Peter puts it this way. He says it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God. And if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? But if it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner? Sobering words. We stand at the beginning of Holy Week. And Lent and Holy Week is traditionally a time for self-examination and the question for you and for me, then, as we look forward not only to his death and to his resurrection, is to examine our own hearts and lives and say, "When Jesus lives in me, what are the things that are at odds with his holy presence? Where am I living idolatrously? Where am I holding on to sin that offends the heart of God? Where am I raising barriers to the coming of his kingdom, not only in my own life, but in the lives of other people?" I love the way Matthew Henry, famed Bible commentary writer, puts it. Here's a quotation. He says, "If Christ came now into many parts of his visible church, how many secret evils he would discover and cleanse, and how many things daily practiced under the cloak of religion would he show to be more suitable to a den of thieves than to a house of prayer?" What an indictment. And what a call for you and me to get down on our knees and say, "Lord, search my heart. Know it. I want to be clean. I want to be holy. I want you to be able to live in your temple, and I want you and me to be able to have fellowship together because of Jesus and the way that he has enabled our lives to be changed." So the first thing that happens is that he cleans house, but there's more. The second thing that happens when Jesus comes, and there is good news to all of this just for the record, is that he heals and restores broken people. Matthew's gospel is the only gospel that records the blind and the lame came to him at the temple and he healed them. And there's a lot more to that story that meets the eye. Because generally speaking, the lame and the blind were not especially welcome at the temple, and they were not allowed to bring offerings to the Lord. The closest they could get to the Lord was the beautiful gate I showed you where that was located a few moments ago. That's where you find the cripple in the book of Acts. Beyond that, they could not get any closer to God. And there were two reasons for that. The first is Old Testament holiness laws. Listen to this verse from Leviticus chapter 21, or two verses, "And God through Moses says, 'Say to Aaron, for the generations to come, none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near. No man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed.'" That's pretty clear and pretty categorical. There is no room in the presence of God under Old Testament dispensation for people who are physically not perfect, because again, the emphasis is on the holiness of God. You can read that whole chapter, Leviticus 21. You see all the other conditions that were attached to being a priest of God. But there's a second reason, and I have to tell you this morning, I never knew about that until I stumbled across it this past week. And that has to do with an episode that happened in 2 Samuel chapter 5 after David has come into his kingdom and he sets his sights on capturing the Jebusite city that eventually would become Jerusalem or Zion or the city of David. It's recorded for us in 2 Samuel chapter 5, the verses 6, 7 and 8, and listen to how this story goes. It's fascinating. "The king and his men marched to Jerusalem to attack the Jebusites who lived there. The Jebusites said to David, 'You will not get in here.'" Notice the phrase. "Even the blind and the lame can ward you off." They thought David cannot get in there. Now let's stop there for just a moment, because if I show you a picture of what Zion or the Jebusite city looked like, you will understand immediately why this was such an issue. It's not a very large area, by the way, maybe 100 meters wide and 250 meters long, but you'll notice that the Jebusite city, this is Mount Zion, but this was on a highly elevated hill. So there was a valley on three sides and solid ground up here. Furthermore, there was a spring in the brook Kidron here that through underwater tunnels fed the city. And so these Jebusites were so confident in their security that they said to David, "We don't need to have our regular soldiers up on the wall. Even the lame and the blind can defend against you. Good luck. You'll never get in this stronghold." Because by now all the rest of Israel had been conquered, but the Jebusites were living happily and merrily in their particularly well-defined or defended city. So listen to the story as it goes on. Nevertheless, I like that, David captured the fortress of Zion, the city of David. On that day, David said, "Anyone who conquers the Jebusites will have to use the water shaft to reach those lame and blind who are David's enemies." And so what happens if you read on with the story is that Joab, who later on becomes the commander of his army, takes a troop of men. They find where this water shaft is. They climb up in the water shaft, and they capture the stronghold, and this has a parallel, by the way, later on in the days of Hezekiah, who also digs a passage of water there. And if you're a tourist in Israel today, you can actually slosh through the water of Hezekiah's tunnel. It's an amazing piece of work because they carved out solid rock in order to facilitate this. Notice again then the emphasis on the lame and the blind, and now listen to how this passage ends. That is why they say the blind and lame will not enter the palace. The word there in Hebrew is house, and it can be the palace, but it can also be the temple. So in Israel, there is this saying based on this story, "The blind and the lame will not enter into the house." It was bad enough that the blind and the lame couldn't draw near to God to present sacrifices, and now you have a culture that reinforces on the basis of the story of David that the blind and the lame are really secondary citizens who will not enter the house of the Lord. So long comes Jesus, and guess what happens? He restores the blind and the lame, and in so doing, He not only removes the barrier between the blind and the lame so that they can come into the presence of God, He removes that whole Old Testament sacrificial system. There are even commentators who think He is pointing out that as the son of David, He far exceeds in generosity beyond David, who is said to have hated the blind and the lame. So here is Jesus, and He restores people to the redemptive purposes of God, and there you have an amazing picture of what happens when Jesus comes to His temple, and I for one am of the conviction that as God's people grow in their relationship with God, as they grow in their relationship with each other, as they are built up into a holy temple in the Lord, and God dwells among them in glory and in power, you will see the lame walking, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, and the poor having good news proclaimed. And I'm not just talking about physical healing, important as that is, but also spiritual healing and emotional healing. I believe there is a desire on the part of God when His kingdom comes to push sin and sickness and death back so that God can release the joy of the coming of His kingdom. And just to show you what that looks like a little bit in terms of practical everyday living. I want to show you a short video clip highlighting the story of a girl by the name of Jennifer Berrick. Just last March her mother published this account of her story where Jennifer was a 15-year-old girl truly devoted to the Lord when the family on their way back from church on a Sunday night got involved in a horrific car accident that left her severely brain damaged and in a coma. And the story of their struggle in coming to grips with this and the story of how God has progressively been healing her over these last six years and the story of how God has been using her despite the fact that she continues to have some very obvious physical disabilities is a story that I think just really shows the heart of God. So please take a look at this. You will never be able to convince the Berrick family that God doesn't perform miracles. The night of November 5, 2006 started out on a high note. Jen and her family spent the evening at church close to the higher power that would help get them through what was about to happen next. When I got out of the car I saw an engine actually sitting in the middle of the road. Just one mile from their home a drunk driver hit the family head on going 80 miles per hour. First responder Christy Vann. No one in my opinion should have ever lived through that accident. Jen and her parents Linda and Andy were critically injured. Her brother Josh was also hurt. All four were taken to separate hospitals but Jen whose head took the impact of the crash was barely clinging to life. Suffering from a traumatic brain injury and multiple fractures Jen was in a coma for five weeks followed by several months of therapy away from her Lynchburg home at Cooley Children's Rehabilitation Center and her parents couldn't always be by her side. They were battling their injuries from wheelchairs. Seeing the extent of Jen's injuries it appeared as if this once vibrant athletic girl who freely shared her faith in her savior would be forever changed. My name is Jen Barrick. I am a freshman at Liberty Christian Academy. About a month ago at a youth retreat God spoke to my heart and I completely surrendered my life to him. I know God has amazing plans for my life and I want to use all my talents and abilities to serve him. In everything I do I want to give God all the glory. My prayer is that God would use me to make a difference for eternity. Thank you. And it was true Jen was changed as God made himself even more real to her. She prayed for hours but she didn't ask for one thing and it was the power of the Holy Spirit praying through her and all she did was praise him. Thank you for everything you are doing in my life. I just want to praise you for all the people I have been able to influence. The power of the Holy Spirit was so alive in Jen it was like nothing I had ever seen before. She didn't know her middle name. She didn't know she had a brother. She didn't know two plus two was four. She didn't know she was even hurt. She didn't even know she was in a hospital but she knew every word to every praise song. She knew every verse she had ever hidden in her heart. It was unbelievable. I just have to constantly be reminding myself that his plan is perfect and that he can and that I believe he will heal me in the right timing. I mean it might not be for another year or it might even be longer or it could happen today. That's right. My faith is in the Lord. I forgot how to do everything. I had to relearn how to walk, how to talk, how to read, how to write, how to get dressed, how to do everything that we take for granted. As a mom I want her to be normal, you know, and yet God's telling me why do you want to live in the normal when I've set her apart to be extraordinary and I'm going to do the miraculous through her. One thing that I do is every morning I roll out of bed and I land immediately on my knees because I don't want to take one step without the Lord's help and I just love to surrender my day to the Lord and ask him to give me his spiritual eyes and his love and just to see situations through his sight and just it helps me learn how to tap into the spiritual power that he has in store for me and it has completely changed my life. I wanted to say that God wants to use each and every one in this room and wants to use your story for God's glory and he wants to use you in ways that you never imagined were possible. So tonight we're just giving God the glory. Jennifer reminds me all the time, she'll say, "Mom, the victory is greater than the suffering and we have to have an expectation of what God is going to do." You know, Jennifer came home from the hospital three months after our wreck and I'll never forget because she wasn't eating, she had a feeding tube and she didn't know she was hurt, she had so many problems and yet she would march around my kitchen and she would say, "I'm going to proclaim Christ to a lost and dying world, I'm going to have a ministry to the world." And I would look at her and say, "Jen, you're crazy, you can't even find your bedroom, how are you going to have a ministry to the world?" And you know it's just been amazing because in March the book "Miracle for Jen" came out and already over 40,000 copies have sold and sent all different countries and we're getting hundreds and thousands of emails of lives that have been changed and I just remember Jen saying that and Jen was saying out loud the hope of what was going to happen in the future. I know a lot of you are probably hurting for different reasons. You maybe haven't been hit by a drunk driver but you've been hit by something, you've been shattered by something and you know life is hard and maybe you're in a broken family or maybe something else has happened that has shattered you and I just want to tell you tonight that regardless of what it is, maybe you have cancer, even if you're not cured of the illness, you can be healed in your soul tonight. You can be healed with the peace of God that passes all understanding. Quite a story. And one of the things that's very remarkable about the story is usually when people are brain damaged, most of the healing happens within the first year and beyond that it plateaus. What's very interesting about Jennifer's situation is that she continues to get better even now which is six years or more after the accident. And certainly one of the reasons for that is that God has his hand on her life and God has raised up much prayer around the world for this girl and for the ministry that God is giving her. And I show you this this morning because the heart of God is a restoration. And while the subject of healing is always very difficult and we struggle with ALS cancer and Ben's diagnosis and that of others in the congregation, the fact remains that God will either give us grace to overcome those obstacles so that we can accomplish his purposes or he will restore us so that we can accomplish his purposes. And of course healing is more than just physical healing in the here and now. God's glory shines through sometimes in the most remarkable ways, not simply by snapping his fingers and restoring us, but by giving us grace to walk through some very difficult valleys and to demonstrate God's character in the midst of that. And what's been particularly interesting in their story is not only the work they had to do to forgive the drunk driver who remains in a comatose condition to this day in the hospital, paid for out of the public purse, interestingly enough, whereas the barracks had to take their insurance company to court to get even a minimal amount of support. That's part of how life works. But they had to particularly forgive the policeman because, you see, this drunk driver had been pulled over by the police because of his erratic driving, but the policeman, after interviewing him, allowed him to get back in his truck. And he turned on the ignition and started the truck, and he took off like a bat out of hell, and that's how come he was going 80 miles an hour when he hit them head on. And so to put that all in perspective and to work through all of that took a tremendous amount of spiritual grace. And to see them shine the way they do, and, of course, there's a lot more to the story. The heartache and the difficulty of all these years of therapy is just phenomenal, and yet sometimes God's power is made perfect in weakness. So what happens when Jesus comes to his temple? The first thing that he does is he cleans house. The second thing that he does is he demonstrates his healing virtue and his compassion. But there's a third thing that he does, and that is that he exposes religious hypocrisy. You would think, would you not, that when the lame and the blind are healed in the temple court and all the hoopla that surrounds that, that the religious leaders of his day would be thrilled to see the results of what was happening. Sadly, that is not the case because we read in scripture when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple area, "Hosanna to the son of David," they were indignant. Why? I can offhand think of three reasons. This was happening on their turf. The temple was their domain. Nobody asked them for permission. They just did it. Number two, Jesus was getting an awful lot of attention. It was bad enough when he was north in Galilee and they would occasionally go and visit him and criticize him, but now he had come into Jerusalem and the masses of the people were flocking to him saying that he was somebody great. The Bible makes it very plain that at the end of the day the religious leaders surrendered him over to Pilate because they were envious of his popularity and his influence over the people. And then thirdly, they felt, of course, that he was a threat to their religious system. They had become so focused on the Old Testament ritual that they didn't at all realize that the Old Testament ritual was a shadow of that which was to come. The reality would be fulfilled in the person of the Messiah. And when they saw the Messiah not taking seriously, they thought, Old Testament regulations, they immediately concluded that he couldn't possibly be who he claimed to be and they took the initiative to put him to death. As I said earlier, both Mark and Luke's gospel indicate to us that it was these incidents in the temple that finally motivated them to put their unhappiness with Jesus into practice and they began to officially arrange, if you will, the campaign to put him to death. So what happens when Jesus comes? Well, he cleans the temple. He makes the lame to walk and the blind to see. The children begin to shout "Hosanna!" because there is life and joy when God accomplishes purposes in his kingdom. But there are always those who are hung up on the letter of the law, who have their own ideas of what holiness should look like, who are bent out of shape because they have no control over the coming of the kingdom and they are indignant. They are indignant because they don't know the heart of God, they don't know the heart of Jesus, they don't know the heart of the kingdom of God. I love what Adam Clarke, a 19th century leading Methodist theologian, had to say about the church, he put it this way, it's extreme and crass perhaps, but really makes a point. He says, "The church or the chapel in which the blind and the lame are not healed has no Christ in it and is not worthy of attendance." When Jesus is present, things ought to be happening and lives ought to be changing. And I for one believe that the closer we draw in relationship with God, the closer we draw in relationship with each other, the more our faith will be tested but the deeper our faith will become and the more God will want to do in our hearts and in our lives whatever is necessary to remove whatever obstacles there are so that we can serve God, honor him, and do his will. Well, very quickly one more thing that Jesus does when he comes to his temple and that is he begins looking for fruit. The story goes on in the next chapter, early in the morning as he was on his way to the city he was hungry, seeing a fig tree by the road he went up to it, but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again," immediately the tree withered. I've talked about this many times in the past, I can be brief about it today. The fig tree represents the nation of Israel and the nation of Israel's spiritual center is the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus who's been doing most of his ministry in the north in Galilee comes to the temple in Jerusalem as the son of God looking for fruit on the tree. This as I said is Israel's religious center. This is the place where the passion for God ought to run the deepest. This is the place where people ought to be most passionately committed and in love with each other and carrying on the purposes of God. This is the place where the heart of God for the Gentile world should be crying out for God to save the nations of the world. This is the place where God ought to be worshiped in spirit and in truth, isn't that true? What does he find? He finds a corrupted priesthood more interested in making money than seeing the lost saved. He finds a corrupted priesthood more in love with the letter of the law than the spirit of the law. He finds a priesthood that is totally oblivious to the pain of the lame and the blind. Don't care a hoot about the things that God cares for. He finds a religious system that doesn't even recognize him as the son of God who is the fulfillment of everything the Bible has ever promised because he doesn't fit their agenda. And instead of people who are bending the knee bowing before God saying, "God, thank you that your kingdom is coming. How can we get on board with you?" They begin their plan to put him to death as he said earlier, "I have to go to Jerusalem because it's impossible for a prophet to perish away from Jerusalem." And so he looks for fruit. What does he find? There is no fruit on the tree. What happens when God comes to his people looking for fruit and he finds no fruit on the tree? Well, he'll put fertilizer and manure around it as he tells in one of the earlier parables. He'll do it for three years. But if after that it's still not bearing any fruit, it's not because the tree is undernourished. It's not because the tree doesn't have the potential. It's because the tree is simply bad. And no amount of more manure is going to make the tree bear fruit. So what does a farmer do? He says, "Why should it take up valuable land?" And he cuts it down. So what does Jesus do? He pronounces judgment. He curses the fig tree. And then he tells a series of parables over the next number of chapters whereby he talks about the offer of the kingdom coming and people turning away from it. And so he tells the parable of the two sons, one not the parable of the prodigal son, but two sons, one of whom says, "I'm going to do your will," but he doesn't. The other one says, "I'm not going to do your will," but he does. And he says, "Which one is better?" And then he tells the parable of the tenants, the people who own the vineyard, who are supposed to give fruit to the master, but who instead put the son to death. And then on and on it goes, the parable of the foolish versions and the wise ones. And he generates an opposition among the Jewish people because they know that he's speaking to them, and he is saying, "You don't share the heart of God, and you have been weighed, and you have been found wanting." And so what happens then is that Jesus sums it up this way in Matthew 21 verse 43, "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce fruit." And that literally gets to be fulfilled as history goes on, A.D. 70. The Romans under Titus invade Israel. They absolutely destroy the city of Jerusalem. They kill hundreds of thousands of people. Josephus said, "Blood was spattering up all the way to the rains and the bridles of the horses. It was a bloodbath like you'd never saw before, like you've never seen before." And the temple was destroyed, and Israel's religious system of sacrifices was totally shut down and remains shut down to this day. And there are, of course, many believers, both Christian and Jewish, who are looking forward to a third temple and the resumption of sacrifices made in the temple. And from this point on, the gospel goes to the Gentiles, and you and I are here today because our Jewish brethren, the Jewish folk, rejected as a nation the coming of God's kingdom, and the gospel has gone to the Gentiles. And the Bible says that Jerusalem will be trodden underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. And we don't have time to deal with it, but if you read what Paul has to say about that in Romans 9, 10, and 11, then you will discover that God is blessing the Gentiles today to make the Jewish people jealous so that one day they, too, will come to repentance. And he says in Romans chapter 11, "So all Israel will be saved." And then he breaks out into this doxology of praise to God in Romans chapter 11, talking about the wisdom of God and the power of God. So what happens when Jesus comes to his temple? Well, he cleans up. He restores the broken, the lame, and the blind. He exposes religious hypocrisy, people who go through outward motions but whose heart is far away from God. And he comes looking for fruit. And we stand this morning at the beginning of Holy Week, and as I said earlier, Holy Week traditionally is a time of repentance. It's a time that prepares us for the incredible sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary's cross for your sins and my sins. What an appropriate time for some honest self-examination. What do we harbor in the temple that doesn't belong there? What places are broken that only Jesus can heal? Where do we get hung up on externals and use that to reject the importance of the internal? [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:49:23.020; remove through 00:53:00.000] And what kind of fruit do our lives bear that show that the sacrifice [CUT] of Jesus was not in a wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died? My riches gain, I count but loss, and poor content on all my pride. Forbidden, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God. All the vain things that charm me most I sacrifice them to his blood. Deep from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down, Seated in such love and sorrow mingled with thorns composed, So rich a crown, but the whole realm of nature mine. That bird at all brings far too small, The soul amazes in so divine, Love demands my soul, demands my soul, Love demands my soul, my life my own. [Music] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:53:00.000; resume after this marked segment]