1 Corinthians 3:16

1 Corinthians 3:16

I. Every Christian is a dwelling-place of God. This is not a metaphor. It was the outward temple that was the metaphor. The reality is that which you and I, if we are God's children in Jesus Christ, experience. That God should dwell in my heart is possible only from the fact that He dwelt in all His fulness in Christ, through whom I touch Him. That Temple consecrates all heart-shrines; and all worshippers that keep near to Him partake with Him of the Father that dwelt in Him.

II. As temples all Christians are to be manifesters of God. The meaning of the Temple of all temples is that there the indwelling Deity shall reveal Himself, and if it be true that we Christian men and women are, in deep and blessed reality, the abiding-places and habitations of God, then it follows that we shall stand in the world as the great means by which God is manifested and made known, and that in a twofold way to ourselves and to other people.

III. As temples all Christian lives should be places of sacrifice. The difference between all other and lesser nobilities of life and the supreme beauty of a true Christian life is that the sacrifice of the Christian is properly a sacrifice that is, an offering to God, done for the sake of the great Love wherewith He hath loved us. As Christ is the one true Temple and we become so by partaking of Him, so He is the one Sacrifice for sins for ever, and we become sacrificers only through Him.

IV. This great truth of the text enforces the solemn lesson of the necessary sanctity of the Christian life. The first plain idea of the temple is a place set apart and consecrated to God. Christianity is intolerant. There is to be one image in the shrine. One of the old Roman Stoic emperors had a pantheon in his palace, with Jesus Christ upon one pedestal and Plato on the one beside Him; and some of us are trying the same kind of thing Christ there, and somebody else here. Remember, Christ must be everything or nothing. Stars may be sown by millions, but for the earth there is but one sun. And you and I are to shrine one dear Guest, and one only, in the inmost recesses of our hearts.

A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth, May 6th, 1886.

Christians the Temple of God.

I. A temple is a place in which Deity is supposed specially to dwell, and in which He may be approached in worship. It supposes the existence of God and His willingness to hold intercourse with His creatures, and these are truths which have been universally admitted. The true dwelling-place of spirit is spirit; the true temple of Jehovah is the human soul. Christ appears not to abolish sacredness, but to extend it; not to defile holy ground, but to make all the earth holy; not to demolish temples, but to multiply them by making human souls more truly God's habitation than ever had been the sanctuary upon the sacred hill. And thus our Apostle Jew though he was drew attention from the outward and visible, saying, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?"

II. Glance at the past history of this temple. It is in ruins. The lamps have gone out, and the altar is overturned. No incense rises from the censer, no anthem swells from the choir. Majestic, it is still lovely even in decay; but the wind is wailing amid the colonnades, the filth defacing the chiselled relics, the screech owl nestling in the ivy, and the viper hissing among the rank weeds that grow round a few shattered columns that are still erect. Ah! how eloquently these things declare, "Know ye not that man was once the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God did dwell in him? If any man defile the temple of God, him will God destroy."

III. Consider the reconstruction of the temple. This was Christ's great work. He himself was a temple. This world has been consecrated by Jesus Christ, the High Priest of the universe. Not only so; He makes us individually temples. We were polluted polluted by sin; but He cleanses the temple from its pollution. We are led under the influence of the Spirit of God to deplore the desolation, to long for the reconstruction of the temple, and when this change in our heart is produced the temple is rebuilt. Christ is the builder of it; He is the chief corner stone. Because sin polluted, God forsook it; but because Christ has purified it, God has returned to it, dwells in it, makes it glorious with His presence; but lest we should again pollute it, and a worse thing happen, the solemn voice comes forth to us from the most holy place, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him will God destroy."

Newman Hall, Penny Pulpit, No. 3890.

References: 1 Corinthians 3:16 . Preacher's Monthly, vol. viii., p. 124; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. v., p. 327; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses in Marlborough College, p. 38; Hutchings, The Person and Work of the Holy Ghost, p. 118.