No. 84 - WELCOME TO MY HOUSE By: John J. Blanchard Wednesday, April 19, 2006 Last Day of Unleavened Bread Good morning, brethren, and welcome to the Last Day of Unleavened Bread. The title of this sermon is “Welcome To My House”. Many of us in our lives have uttered these words when we were going to have friends or relatives stay with us at our homes. Other times perhaps we have invited in some people that were in need of a place to stay. We invited them to stay at our house and made them feel at home. Often I have had people take me into their homes and have said while you are here, make yourself at home and be comfortable. Go in the fridge if you need anything from the fridge or whatever. If you want to take a nap, just go lie down. This is your bedroom. Just be comfortable here. They make you feel warm and invited. They make you feel like you are not a pain in the neck being there, but they actually want to help and be hospitable. This is a wonderful habit to be in. To be hospitable and let people feel comfortable in your home is wonderful. But it can become strained, and it can be difficult especially in an extended stay. I don’t know if any of you have had the opportunity to have someone in your house for a long time, perhaps months or a year or two. Sharing your own home with somebody over a lengthy period of time can get very difficult. I have had the privilege of meeting a couple who have done that to an extraordinary degree. When I heard their story as I talked to them, I was astounded by their love and by their hospitality. They are a couple who have modest means, but have opened their house to foster children. Over the years they have taken in over two hundred foster children. Many of them they have adopted, and they call them their children. They take care of them. They love them. This couple is so warm and inviting and give such a stable household to people over a long stretch of time that the State of Michigan has awarded the lady of the house the “Foster Mother of the Year” title several times! Often the State will have a particularly sad situation. For example, when a couple of children whose house has burned down, both parents have died and they are now orphaned, they will turn to this lady. I am using that as an example. They will turn to this lady and say we have a very difficult situation here. Or perhaps there is an abuse situation where the children need a lot of love. They turn to this couple and ask would you take these children in? They make their home available. Our home is your home. You are welcome. Make yourself comfortable. This is hospitality in its most true Christian form. It is the sort of hospitality that we need to have in God’s Church towards one another. But our hospitality has to include a spiritual element because our house (our heart and mind) after baptism and conversion becomes the house of God. Hospitality expresses love. So we need to express love toward our fellow Church members, to people in the world and to our families in order to learn how to be hospitable to Jesus Christ Himself. Let’s look at hospitality and how we let the mind of God into our mind when we let Him dwell with us. Turn to I Peter chapter 4. COVERING A MULTITUDE OF SINS Read I Peter 4:7-10. Here we are being shown that hospitality is a type of love and that we are supposed to be hospitable to one another. By demonstrating that kindness and that love to one another, we will cover a multitude of sins. Who of us is free from sin? None of us. There is not a day that goes by that we don’t make a mistake of some sort. But God says if you let Me dwell with you and you are doing it right, much can be overlooked. If you are learning how to be hospitable and loving the way I am hospitable and loving, there is much that can be overlooked. Many mistakes can be covered between us and our brethren. Read I Peter 4:1-2. It is the mind of Christ (and we have that same mind of Christ dwelling in us) that we need to understand that suffering and sacrifice is what Christ was willing to do for us because He loved us. It is the same chapter that talks about being hospitable and full of love to one another, for that will cover a multitude of sins. Back up to I Peter 3:8 and read verses 8-12. It is a matter of course, brethren, that we learn to be compassionate toward one another, tenderhearted, full of love and hospitality toward one another as we let the mind of Christ dwell in our mind (in our house, so to speak). This is big stuff! It takes a lot of effort, but it is well worth it. This will bring peace to our families, and it will bring the love of God into our lives, so that we can be an example to other people. THE HOUSE OF GOD The concept of “welcome to my house” takes on a lot of meaning here. We share our homes with one another. We share our lives with one another as part of the body of Christ. We are indeed the house of God. Turn, if you would, to Ephesians chapter 2. We often read these verses, but let’s go back and reread them. Read Ephesians 2:19-22. We are being built into a dwelling place for Jesus Christ (for the Spirit of Christ). We are a household of God. We are no longer strangers and foreigners. There is virtually not one of you here that I would know if it were not for the Church. We would have been strangers. Had I walked by you in the store or in a mall, I would not know who you are. But because we were called together and brought into the body of Christ, we are no longer strangers but fellow citizens in the household of God, being built into a house for God. In Hebrews chapter 3 there is another scripture we often read. It explains how we are a house for God as well. Hebrews 3, verse 1: “Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling…” All of us have partaken of that calling when we were baptized, committed ourselves to follow Jesus Christ’s way and let Him dwell in us. “…consider the apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus, who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was faithful in all His house. For this one has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as He who built the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God. And Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which would be spoken afterward, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end.” It is undeniable. If we believe the Bible, we understand that we are the house of God. We are where Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit dwells. That means “welcome to our house,” and having a clean house is an entirely different and much larger concept than our physical homes. We use our physical homes to demonstrate our love for people and to share with other people, but we are speaking of something spiritual here that goes far beyond just physical houses. Jesus Christ purchased us with His blood. We know that from baptism. Turn to Acts 20:28. “‘Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.’” We have been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. We belong to Him. It is as if He has bought a house to dwell in with His own blood, but we agreed to give our house to Him. We agreed at baptism to make it possible for Him to have a place to dwell in, to continue to do His work. We are bought with a price, and that price was His blood. I Corinthians 6:19-20 tells us that same thing. You do not need to turn there, but we have been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ. At baptism we made an agreement with Him that He could use our flesh and blood and make our flesh and blood part of His body. You need not turn there because we often turn there as well, but in Ephesians 5 it says we are flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones. We provide Him a body to dwell in to accomplish His great work right up until the end of the age, in order to save this entire world for a beautiful Millennium that is just around the corner! It is like a lease-purchase agreement. We can get out of this agreement if we want to, but when we joined hands with Him, we said no. We will walk this way for the rest of our lives, but He does not hold us there with chains. We have to do things voluntarily with Him. We have to continue to renew a covenant with Him. We do every year at Passover. We renew a covenant saying yes. It is almost like re-enlisting, although it is not exactly re-enlisting because we were never released. We are re-upping and saying yes, I will continue in Your service. I want to be cleansed at this Passover because I know there are mistakes I have made in this past year. I want them wiped out including mistakes I am not even aware of. There are sins that I am not aware of and people that I have offended that I do not know I have offended. I want that wiped away so I can start with You fresh and clean and go forward. At the beginning of the Days of Unleavened Bread that is what we did. We washed one another’s feet, we partook of Passover and we said yes, we are pleased to have You dwelling in our house. CLEANING OUR SPIRITUAL HOUSE We will continue to work to clean up this house. That is what the Days of Unleavened Bread portray. They portray putting sin out of our house and out of our lives. Jesus Christ is not comfortable around sin. When we invite people into our house, we go through a lot of work. When my wife and I are going to have company, we do a little extra house cleaning, and we make a nice bed for them. We get everything ready for the guests so they will feel comfortable. I know you all do the same thing. You go through a little extra effort. We are talking about Jesus Christ dwelling in our house as being our life, our heart and our mind. Are we going to bring Him into a filthy establishment? No! He says I know it is very hard for you to clean up your house so I will help you. I am providing the blood that can wipe away your sins. I will continue to wipe away your sins whenever you come before Me and ask for forgiveness, provided you are forgiving your brothers and sisters and providing you are forgiving the people in the world who offend you. I will continue to cleanse your house with you. We will work together on this! It is a wonderful feeling knowing that we have that kind of relationship with our guest. But we have to do something. We cannot make our house a wreck and say God will take care of that. So what if I offended that person! God will take care of that. We cannot have that kind of an attitude, because that is putting a burden on Jesus Christ that should not be that way. We have an agreement to examine our lives every year. Actually, we should be doing this constantly. We need to make sure that our lives are in accordance with God’s will, and where we see that we are not, to change it. That is called repentance. We want to have Jesus Christ work with us, and we want to bear fruit for Him. He says that is what I want to see. I want to see fruit thirty, sixty or hundred fold. I want to see you grow in the knowledge of Me (speaking of Jesus Christ). He says I want you to grow in My knowledge. I want you to grow in My love. I want you to be hospitable and kind. By this you will cover a multitude of sins, and you will make the house that I dwell in a beautiful place. We have the mind of Jesus Christ, and we examine ourselves. We can turn to I Corinthians chapter 11. These are scriptures that we read at the beginning of the Days of Unleavened Bread. Read I Corinthians 11:23-31. Christ says be hard on yourself when working on your home, and I will not have to be hard on you. We pray to God. We want healing when we are sick or when our relatives or friends are sick. But He says if you are not examining yourself, if you are not properly taking care of your house and helping Me clean it, why should I hear your prayers? Why should I act on your behalf? You are making a filthy dwelling for Me. Judge yourself so I will not have to judge you. Then I can properly hear your prayers. There is a big issue involved here. We need to be making a diligent effort to clean our house for Jesus Christ, so that we can indeed have Him hear our prayers and act upon them. We have this mind of Christ within us. We can read a couple more scriptures to that effect. Turn to I Corinthians chapter 1 verse 10. “Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” We are joined together by the mind of Jesus Christ. That is how we all came together. That is how we all came to know one another. We are not to be divided, yet we find the Church terribly divided today. We should have stuck to what we had learned years ago to speak the same thing, to not air our dirty laundry before one another and before the world and to be unified. We should have been hospitable and loving toward one another. If we had done these things, we would not find ourselves in the fix we are in. But that is just a sign that we did not examine ourselves well enough. We can fix that. We still have time. We can start examining ourselves and work on giving the mind of Christ a pleasant place to dwell. I Corinthians 2:10 says, “But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.” (speaking of revealing the truths of God) “For the spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” That is the spirit that dwells in us, brethren. Continuing in I Corinthians 2:12. “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit [which] is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” That dwelling of Jesus Christ’s mind within us leads us into the truth and teaches us. It draws us to know more and to overcome. Continuing in verse 14: “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For ‘who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” That is what the house of God is for. That is what the body of Christ is for. It is to give the mind of Jesus Christ a place to dwell and to tell our bodies (our physical selves) what to do. Let that mind run us so that we can grow in holy righteous character and not be the same person we were before baptism. We need to grow into a new man where our spirit dwells with the Holy Spirit, forming a more righteous being and giving the body that Christ needs so He can continue His work. This is a great mystery. You can read about that in Ephesians chapter 5. We will not turn there, but it is a great mystery. Jesus Christ says we are to put the leaven of malice and wickedness out of our lives to bear fruit for Him. Put the filth out! Grow in character. Make our houses clean, and we are to beware of the leaven that could make our houses dirty. LEAVEN OF FALSE DOCTRINE Turn to Matthew chapter 16. Leaven can take many forms, but Jesus Christ addresses a couple directly. Matthew 16, verse 5: “Now when His disciples had come to the other side, they had forgotten to take bread. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.’ And they reasoned among themselves, saying, ‘It is because we have taken no bread.’” They were still physically minded. They thought Christ was angry with them because they forgot to bring some bread with them. Verse 8: “But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, ‘O you of little faith, why do you reason among yourselves because you have brought no bread? Do you not yet understand, or remember the five loaves of the five thousand and how many baskets you took up?’” He said don’t you remember, I can make physical bread if I need to! Verse 10: “‘Nor the seven loaves of the four thousand and how many large baskets you took up? How is it you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning bread? But to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.’ Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” In other words false doctrine (a false portrayal of Jesus Christ), false things that were being spoken to teach others is a type of leaven. That leaven can destroy us! It is harming the body of Jesus Christ. Therefore, Christ was saying beware of false doctrines, because that false doctrine can be a leaven in the body of Christ that is very harmful. TOLERATING SIN Turn to I Corinthians chapter 5. Read verses 1-3. Paul is saying among the congregation here in Corinth you have a sin that you are not dealing with. It is out in the open. Continue reading verse 4. He says when you are together, the mind that is Me should be the same mind that is in you because it is the mind of Christ. In verse 5 Christ says this mind of Christ should “…deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” He says you cannot tolerate a sin like this in the body. We should all have the same mind and be working toward the same goal. If we leave a sin of this sort right out in the open, we are going to harm the entire body of Christ. It is a situation where, as an employer, I could give you this example, and it is a true story. Often in the construction industry you have smokers. A lot of people in the construction business are smokers, and we understand it is a hard habit to break. One time we had a gentleman who said I need to have a cigarette every now and then. It helps me to be more productive, and it makes it so I am not nervous. But he said I am very careful not to do it when my hands are both needed. I make sure it does not effect things. We said okay in moderation and be careful. We are outside and it is not hurting anything. Do not do it in anybody’s house. Later that year we hired two other men who turned out to be smokers. They noticed that gentleman “A” would smoke when it was not break time so they would start smoking. Unfortunately, when one smoker lights up, it helps the others get the idea that they need to light up. It is just a given. There were times when we would be handling trusses or heavy pieces of steel and you would have three or four guys with cigarettes in their hands trying to juggle tools and materials. Eventually we had to say it all has to stop. You see a little leaven leavened the whole lump. That is a minor thing compared to what we are dealing with here in I Corinthians. You should never have a situation like this in the Church. Deal with it as gently as you can at first. If it becomes a big issue where it is going to hurt other people, Paul said you know what we have to do. We have to turn this person over to Satan for a little while. Satan tends to thrash them and humiliate them. If they are serious about their calling, they will fix their problem. This has happened to the Church at large! We were not repenting and properly examining ourselves. We were not speaking the mind of Christ. We were hard on each other. When we did all these things, Jesus Christ allowed us to be thrashed by Satan. That is the evidence you see out there. The body of Christ is shredded into many pieces, because Christ had to allow it. Those of us who were serious about our calling are acting upon the situation. We are examining ourselves and turning the situation around in our life. By doing that we are cleaning up our corner of Christ’s home. All together we are the body of Christ (the home of Christ), but each individual is also a little home for Jesus Christ. It is a place for Him to dwell. We need to clean up our homes of the malice. This leaven is called malice. We need to speak the truth. We need to have a hospitable love, kindness and compassion for one another that will cover sins. That will get rid of sins. Then we will build a beautiful house for Jesus Christ. We do this by yielding our minds to His mind. MANY MANSIONS We need to have a beautiful and spotless house. Turn to John chapter 14. Jesus Christ says I will make this possible because you have My blood. You have My sacrifice. Read John 14:1-3. Christ says in My Father’s house there are many mansions. You can picture a large house with many small houses within it, which is basically what the body of Christ is at this time. But it is only a type of something that is going to come that is amazing. We need to say welcome to my house. Jesus Christ is saying if you let Me into your house and work on your House, in My Father’s house (in His huge house) there are many mansions. It is a household of houses. STEWARDS OF GOD’S HOUSEHOLD Do you remember how Ephesians 2:19 said we are being built up into a household of God? Matthew 24 also says this. Turn to Matthew 24 and read verses 45-51. None of us wants to be a hypocrite, but Christ has entrusted us with the goods of His household. Each of us has a certain measure of those goods. We are a steward of those goods, and we must take care of them and bear fruit. That means take care of one another. As servants, if we are beating one another, accusing one another and slandering one another, we are harming the entire household. This is God’s household. It is not a time for exposing dirty laundry to the world. It is not a time for slandering one another on the Internet, taking each other to court or whatever. There are so many crazy things going on in the Church. It is a time for love. It is a time for compassion. It is a time for hospitality, for those things will cover a multitude of sins. We must clean up our portion of God’s house. LOST COMMANDMENT Turn to Luke chapter 15 and read verses 8-10. In the household of God we have each been given at least ten coins, speaking of the ten commandments. When we lose sight of one of those commandments and we start breaking it (especially habitually and letting God down), we are making our house filthy. By sweeping our house and looking for how we misplaced that coin (for how we have started to break down in that area whatever it is) we clean our house up. This is important, because this is what God needs. He needs a clean house. The cleaner our house is the more work He can get done. If we are not careful, the habits grow worse. Matthew chapter 12, verse 43: “‘When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none.’” This is talking about demons. The entire world is bothered and plagued by demons and the temptations that Satan uses to attack people. He attacks the body of Jesus Christ the same way. A VACATION FROM OVERCOMING Verse 44: “‘Then he says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.’” He was saying of the people that He was talking with in that generation, I can cast out a demon from a person. But if they do not continue to work on whatever their problem is, that demon will wander around in dry places. He will say I had it pretty good back there in so-and-so. He will go back there, but he will take seven of his friends. Now that is a serious situation to find yourself in because it is harder to get rid of the problem the second time around. It was very interesting when I looked up the term “empty”. I was wondering what does this mean. If you sweep your house, there should be furniture in there, and there should be furnishings and the wherewithal for life. But it says “empty” so I was interested in what that term “empty” meant. It comes from the Greek word scholazo, which means to take a holiday, to be at leisure, figuratively to be vacant (of a house). It comes from the word schole which means loitering leisurely, as withholding one’s self from work, by implication as if on vacation from school or physical employment. Now that changes that meaning quite a bit. What Christ was saying (and this is applicable to us even more so than the Pharisees), when I come and clean up your house at baptism and put everything in order and get it all straightened out, if you take a vacation from work, you are a target for Satan. If you are not working on your problems anymore, if you are not dealing with the things you must be dealing with and if you are not going to school anymore learning from God’s word, you make an attractive target for Satan once again. But now that you are part of My house, he is going to bring seven of his friends! Think of the Church at large. When we were called originally, we gave up things like Sunday keeping, Christmas and Easter. We thought that was kind of tough. We got a little persecution from friends and relatives over it. But that is nothing compared to the problems the Church has today! The second time around is a lot harder. Now we have the problem of who is telling the truth and the body of Christ turning on the body of Christ. Those who I thought were my best friends are making life miserable for me. We are looking at our situation and finding that the body of Christ is in a far worse state. To get out of this fix is a lot harder than our original calling. We have to learn from these lessons. They are appropriate for us today as well. Turn to John chapter 8 and read verses 31-36. If we go back to the sins that enslaved us, we are no longer free. We are not talking about the occasional sin that we repent of. We are talking about going back to a life of habitual sin. That will make our situation far worse to get out of the second time around. We have to keep being diligent about cleaning our house for God. Keep after the problems. Do not take a vacation. This is not something we take a vacation from. It is not something we stop learning how to do. We have to be doing it all of the time. There is nothing like the spring holy days to remind us of these things. A lack of diligence not only harms us, but it can harm the entire household of God. Remember Hebrews 3 and Ephesians 2. We are the household of God. There are many parts to this household and many individuals in it. FORGIVENESS Turn now to I Corinthians chapter 3. Read verses 9-17. Those are potent and very serious words, brethren. When we are not diligent in our own lives, that sin can be a type of leaven that can go through the house of God and leaven the whole lump. False doctrine can travel through the whole Church harming people. False attitudes, false causes, retributions, vengeance, hatred, injustice and harsh judgment are leavening that can go through the whole Church and puff the whole thing up. We have to resist all of those things because if we destroy the temple of God, God will have to destroy us! This is serious. But on the other hand, brethren, we are not to get discouraged. Jesus Christ says if you come to Me and repent, I have the blood necessary to clean you. And it is by the blood that we overcome Satan (Revelation chapter 12). We overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb. We have all the help we need. We just need to have the will and the desire. We need the desire to improve and the desire to bear fruit for Jesus Christ. Turn back to Luke chapter 17. Christ equates offenses with harming the body of Christ. Read Luke 17:1-4. We need to learn to forgive, but we also need to learn not to cause offenses. It goes both ways. Woe to those who cause the offense, but also woe to those who cannot forgive when the brother or sister wants to repent and say they are sorry. In the Church today there is a lot of unforgiving. It is the opposite of forgiveness. There is a hard hearted attitude in which offenses are remembered year after year and not let go. That is not Christ-like. Christ says He wants to forgive all of the time. All we have to do is say we want to repent and change. He is willing to forgive. He is in the forgiving business. Turn to Matthew chapter 18. We often read Matthew 18 to learn how to deal with a difficult brother, but we should learn how to heal the body of Christ and how to make it a better place for Jesus Christ to dwell. Read Matthew 18:1-4. Once we are converted, we are to become humble. Verse 5: “‘Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me.’” Continue reading in Matthew 18:10. “‘Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones…’” Here let’s say converted ones, because we are to be like a little one when we are converted. “‘…for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven. For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost. What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep…’” Christ is talking here about His sheep. “‘…and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.’” God does not want to lose any of His converted sheep. Matthew 18 is more than about how to solve something with a difficult brother. It is about taking care of the least of the brethren, the sheep. Let us continue in Matthew 18. Read verses 15-17. Many brethren and many ministers have used this to beat up people when the purpose of it is really to win a brother back and keep the sheep in the fold. Read Matthew 18:18-20. If this is used properly, it is wonderful when it works. If it is used improperly, we can bind God in heaven from forgiving one another. If we do not forgive one another, God tells us in Luke 7 and Matthew 6 I will forgive you as you forgive others. So if we are very harsh in our attitude and beat each other up with these scriptures instead of trying to seek forgiveness and healing, we bind God’s hands, too. Therefore, the Church of God becomes a wreck. There is a lack of forgiveness, and it is a hard-hearted place. Drop down and read verses 21-22. This is the full life span of a man. Seventy years is considered the life span of a man. Seven is a perfect number, therefore he says seventy times seven. To do this right, you need to forgive your brother as long as he lives. Then you would be doing it perfectly, seventy times seven. There is no limit. He did not mean four hundred and ninety times and then kill the guy! There is no limit. Christ does not set a limit on forgiveness as long as we keep turning to Him. TURNED OVER TO SATAN Read Matthew 18:23-35. Who are these torturers? What is happening here? This is not some sort of purgatory or some sort of ever-burning hell. This is that concept we read earlier of turning the offending person over to Satan to be thrashed. Satan is a torturer. He loves to hurt people. He loves to make our lives miserable. But if we cannot forgive our fellow Church member and people in our families, at work and out in society at large, who else is like that? Satan never forgives. He never forgets anything he can accuse us of. He is the accuser of the brethren. He never lets anything go. So when he latches on to a person to thrash him, there is no relief until that person learns to forgive. Then Jesus Christ steps back into the picture and takes care of it. We want all of this to happen in our lives before Christ returns. So all of us from time to time have to get thrashed a little bit. We have to pray to get through it. We have to pray that we see what we need to learn and correct it. It is a good thing. Usually it can end almost as quickly as we learn our lesson. I am not saying that everything that goes wrong in life is because Satan is thrashing us. The whole world is Satan’s, so the whole society out there is designed to cause maximum suffering for humanity and maximum grief. We run into it all the time. That is why when things do go wrong, we learn to be patient with other people. We learn to be helpful to other people, because we know what it is like to get hurt ourselves. There are valuable lessons we learn just walking out in life. When we have a sin that we will not repent of (leaven that we will not put out of our life), then we can literally be turned over to Satan to be thrashed for a while. It is actually the love of God to allow that to happen. If we have unrepented sin and we are not working on something and Jesus Christ were to return, we could find ourselves in a more serious situation than just physical problems in this life. Forgiveness is a big deal to God because He is in the forgiving business. He wants His house cleaned up. When we show love, compassion and forgiveness to one another, we are helping the entire household of God become a better place. A CONTENTIOUS CHURCH We understand that we are part of the ten virgins. Jesus Christ calls His Church His bride. When we are unforgiving, slanderous and accusatory to one another, we become like a bunch of squabbling, hard-hearted women. I am not picking on women. I am just saying I am supposedly a woman too in God’s eyes. I am part of the body of Christ, I hope! So therefore as part of the bride, I must accept the same mantle. If we are all bickering with one another, it is like a bunch of women bickering over something. Turn, if you would, to Proverbs chapter 21. Imagine Christ dwelling in a household of bickering women. What would He say about that? We will look at a couple of selected scriptures. Think of Jesus Christ talking about His Church. Proverbs 21, verse 9: “Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.” He says I would rather dwell in the corner of the house than have the whole house and be arguing all of the time. Drop down to verse 19: “Better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and angry woman.” It is better to get out of the house entirely! There is only so much patience He can have. He runs out of patience. A household of contentious people is not a pleasant place to dwell. It is not a clean house. It is sad, isn’t it? BLEMISHED SACRIFICES Read John chapter 2:13-15. Now we like to think Christ was angry at those Pharisees. He drove them right out of His temple! But didn’t we just learn that we are the temple of God? Do you think we can learn something from this? We just saw in Proverbs that He would rather get out of a house than dwell with a bunch of contentious women. Read John 2:16-22. The apostles understood He was speaking of the temple of His body, and they understood in Acts that we became the temple of God. They preached it in the epistles. We are the temple of God. We read it in Ephesians and in Hebrews. In I Corinthians 3 we read we are His temple. We do not want to be whipped with a bunch of cords because we are abusing the sacrifices of God. Back then it was sheep, oxen and doves, but we are living sacrifices. And when we beat up one another as servants of God, beating one another, accusing one another and being unforgiving toward one another, we are giving God blemished sacrifices! If you were to read this account in the other gospels, He is saying get these blemished sacrifices out of My temple! You are making My house a den of thieves. Don’t do this to My home! You are making My house filthy! Sacrifices should be given willingly. We lay down our lives willingly for our brothers and sisters and for the world. We are to pick up our cross and follow Jesus Christ. We are not to ask for bribes. We are not to exact a pound of flesh from our brothers and sisters when they offend us. We are not to increase each other’s burdens by holding grudges and being difficult or clique-ish. We are to work diligently to clean our individual corner of God’s household (our individual house). We are to help each other keep our house clean by making it easy to be forgiven. It is not rocket science, but it is heart science! It is having the mind of Jesus Christ dwelling in us. If we learn how to do these things while we still have time and we properly use the lesson of the Days of Unleavened Bread, then when Jesus Christ returns we will be able to say with open arms and a smile on our face, “welcome to my house”!