Renouncing

Yesterday, in the message I mentioned a few things that were my strongly convicted feelings about the way we treat God. I feel that many people, just like in the times of Acts want the church building and the sanctuary to be more sacred than need be. They are not old fashioned but Old Testament fashioned. They don't realize that God has left the church, there is no Holy of Holies located in today's churches. There is no High Priest that we must talk to and send to the Holy of Holies to go to bat for us. There is simply a Savior who was God's Son, who died on a cross to build forever a bridge to God for us. So that the Holy Spirit can be ever present in our lives on a daily basis.
In Acts, Stephen is faced with the daunting task of explaining all of this to the Sanhedrin. He is faced with making them see that God does not dwell in buildings made by man, but in hearts because of what His Son did for us on the cross. Why was it so hard? 2 reasons:
1. They had religion with no relationship. They had a complete understanding of the Old Testament, of religion and they had all the rituals down pat, they could quote scripture, put it in context and defend themselves at all times on matters pertaining to God's word and "the law". But they missed completely the fact that God's own Son had been right there in their presence, they had missed out on the greatest gift, a relationship with our Creator. They had religion and no relationship.
2. Secondly, and I feel this is the one that is prevalent today. They wanted the temple to be holy, and the place where GOd was because they didn't want GOd anywhere else. They did not want God to be in their presence on their daily journeys, they wanted to leave Him in the temple and not take Him out. We do the same thing don't we. We want God on Sunday, Wedensday night and whenever we meet at the church, but we sometimes want to leave Him there because we are ashamed of what we do with our lives the rest of the week.
2 Corinthians 4:2 says, Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.
This means that we live in a way on a daily basis that we are not shameful of what we have done either privately or publicly, we don't distort the Bible or it's teachings and we don't do anything that would not allow our conscience to be clean. A clean and clear conscience is important as we go through our day and especially as we walk into church, we need to have our hearts and minds clear so that we can communicate with God clearly without distractions.
The Sanhedrin and the leaders of Stephen's day could not do this. They could not worship God through the entire week, they simply left Him in the temple, they did not want to think about Him being there as they lived through out the week.
Can you do it? Can you honestly say that you welcome the idea of GOd being everywhere you go through out the week? I hope so, because He is and He will be.
Thanks for reading and ahve a great day!