1 Corinthians 3:16-17 “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.”

When elderly Christians become weary of the struggle through life, it is not surprising that they long to go home to live with God. What is surprising is that the God who already lives in heaven not only make his home with us. He makes his home in us. But that is what it means that we are his temple. It may seem redundant to say that God lives in a certain place when we know that he is present everywhere at all times. He is present with us right now, though not in the same sense that you are present and occupy a certain amount of space in a room or on a chair. He fills all things. He permeates the walls and the furniture and the people. He is this vast being, and we exist inside of him, so to speak.

            And yet, since the creation of the world, God has always made himself present and available to his people in special ways. He takes up special residence in places where people can find and experience his grace and love. At the time of Moses, he did this in the tabernacle, the mobile worship structure the Israelites moved with them through the desert to the Promised Land. From the time of Solomon on that place became the temple. There God made his home on earth with the people of Israel in a unique way.

            Since Jesus has come, God doesn’t use buildings or structures in the same way. Now he emphasizes the fact that he has taken up residence in each one of us by faith. We are his temple, his special home on earth. We are places where people can come to find God’s grace and love.

            This is why Paul warns, “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him.” When members of a church behave in a cliquish or mean-spirited way, they are ruining hearts for the gospel. This is a serious sin. The weak in faith may become disgusted and be driven away. Lack of love among church members convinces them the Christian faith is all a sham. These temples of God are destroyed.

Those outside a congregation won’t be able to see past the bickering and infighting to embrace God’s grace and salvation. Their hearts are wrecked before he gets a chance to set up shop in them. Without repentance, a prideful party spirit and self-promotion destroy the heart of the person who thinks and acts this way. It drives God’s Spirit out. Those who make it impossible for God’s Spirit to live in the hearts of others make it impossible for God’s Spirit to live in their own. There is only one fate left: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him.”

            But Paul was convinced that the Corinthians had not yet fallen so far: “…for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.” These words were more than a warning. They were the solution to the root problem. God had still chosen to make these Christians in Corinth his home. They had this in common. It made them truly important. A sinful human being can receive no higher honor than to have the Almighty God cleanse him of his sins and make him holy, and then live in that heart himself. There is no more prestigious position than “God’s own temple,” no promotion, no “up” from there.

            We share this honor. It puts how we treat each other in a whole new light. The people sitting around me, the people who take the opposite side of an issue at a church meeting, the people who always seem to rub me the wrong way, are the Holy of Holies where God himself is living by his Spirit.

It puts how we value ourselves in a whole new light. God’s house is not just a place I go on Sundays. It’s who I am. God lives in me, and that makes almost everything else I am tempted to use to feel good about myself insignificant in comparison. We are God’s temple, his home, together with all our brothers and sisters in the faith.

Colossians 3:3-4 “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.”

Who am I? What sort of person am I? How we answer those questions depends upon where we are looking. Biblical Christians know that each believer is simul iustus et peccator, at the same time a justified saint and a wicked sinner. When we look at our visible life, when we look within ourselves, we see sin and rebellion. This is true even for the believer. Evangelical author Michael Horton once wrote: “Our surrender is halfhearted and partial; our victories seem always to be sullied by pride. Even if we could live the ‘higher life,’ could God not smell our smugness? Wouldn’t our best works be sabotaged by our own depravity?”

But that is only half the story. Christ is also our life as our substitute. We have a life which we cannot see in ourselves because it is hidden in him. When we are justified, God hides us in Christ. Therefore, in God’s eyes, we look like Jesus. When we are looking at Jesus’ life, then we are seeing ourselves as God sees us. God looks at us with “Jesus-colored glasses” so to speak. This new identity is based on the teaching the theologians call the “Active Obedience” of Christ.

You may remember an old Warner Brothers cartoon in which Sylvester the cat painted a picture of Tweety Bird on Granny’s glasses while she was sleeping. That way, when Granny awoke, put on her glasses, and looked at the bird cage, it would appear as if the bird were still in the cage.

In making Christ our substitute, the Lord has painted Christ, both his life and his death, in front of his eyes so that he no longer sees us. Everywhere he looks, he sees Jesus. This is the robe of righteousness in which he has promised to dress us (Isaiah 61:10, Galatians 3:27, Revelation 6:11).

This comfort and confidence is the birthright of every child of God by faith. The better we know Jesus’ life, and the better we understand that Jesus’ obedience to God under the law was performed in our place, the better we will realize and appreciate our blessed new identity in Christ. Our life, with all its flaws, looks as beautiful, perfect, and loving as the life of Jesus Christ himself in God’s eyes.

But those who are unaware of it will have gaps in their understanding of justification and its comfort. Preach the Gospel, a book on preaching, says it this way:

“It is possible to neglect the active obedience so that people are left with a truncated view of how God reconciled the world to himself in Christ. That view may rob them of the certainty of salvation God intends them to have. It frequently causes a person to look to something within himself rather than outside himself to God’s promises for assurance of right standing with God. Analogically speaking, they end up using a stethoscope instead of a telescope in search of the certainty of salvation” (Balge and Gerlach, p. 10).

This misunderstanding in our faith will spill over into our life of sanctification, too. It will detract from the joy and freedom with which we live and serve. Remember, Christ’s life, the whole thing, is our life by faith. We may not be able to see it now, but God’s promise makes it so. Look at him to know how God sees you. To his eyes, I am Jesus. So are you.

Ezekiel 34:26 “I will send showers in season.”

            Getting rain at the right time was very important for ancient Israel. When they lived in Egypt, agriculture was all based on the Nile River. In the spring time it flooded, and the rest of the year they used the river to irrigate, and this provided a kind of consistency to their farming.

            Farming in the Promised Land didn’t work that way. Everything depended on the rains coming at the right time. There were spring rains, and there were fall rains, and without them God’s people weren’t going to have much to eat. That actually had happened from time to time. You remember that God kept the rains from falling for three years at the time of Elijah because he needed to teach his disobedient children a lesson.

            In Ezekiel, these showers have more to do with God’s blessings for our souls than with blessings for our bodies. With those showers, too, the Lord has a sense of “seasons:” proper and necessary times for his various blessings to drop into our lives. It was that way when he sent Jesus to save us. Christmas had its own season. “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” Good Friday and Easter had their own season. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” God has a sense of timing for these things he used to save our souls.

            His blessings have dropped into our lives in much the same way. “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,” David writes in the Psalms. We can walk back through our life stories and know that every milestone, every highlight, every blessing has dropped into our lives in God’s appointed season, at just the right time. Some of these blessings have been easy to see: birth, baptism, school, confirmation, marriage, children, etc. Others require a closer look. Pain and tragedy don’t look like “blessing” until we see the way in which the Lord uses them to train us, correct us, and deepen our faith.

            The careful timing of our blessings is a comforting thought as we look ahead. The coming seasons of our lives are still laid out by our Lord, and each blessed experience will be timed to provide the maximum blessing. We can approach tomorrow with no worries, because blessings are always in season with the Lord, and the God who keeps track of every hair on our heads has a plan for every day he gives us.

            Associating rain showers and blessings may feel like irony at first. We usually associate good and happy events with sunshine. We use the clouds, the storms, and the rain as pictures of gloomy times and sad chapters in our lives. But God promises to rain down blessings on his people. Expect nothing but torrential downpours in your future.

Ezekiel 34:26“I will bless them and the places surrounding my hill. I will send down showers in season. There will be showers of blessing.”

We are missing Ezekiel’s point if we think he is writing about getting enough rain. It’s not water he is concerned about. He repeats here: showers and blessings. At the end he puts them together: showers of blessings. Ezekiel is writing about God’s promise to bless his people.

If not water, then what? What are God’s “blessing-drops” made of? These blessings are bigger, and more inclusive than we might realize at first. The biblical languages each have two families of words that we associate with blessing. One of them stresses the happiness that comes along with being blessed. You remember that the name of one of the twelve sons of Jacob, one of the twelve tribes of Israel, was “Asher.” His name means happy or blessed. The same is true of the first word of each of Jesus’ beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. There is happiness in the things that Jesus promises us there.

Ezekiel uses a different word for “bless” and “blessing” here. That does not mean that happiness is excluded. It just means that happiness is not emphasized. God’s blessing is not limited to the kinds of things that make us happy, at least on the outside. Blessing comes with all the many promises our Lord makes to us, even things that don’t seem very pleasant at first. Even when people around us are hostile, inconsiderate, or lazy, God is blessing us. He uses the foolishness in their sinful natures to work on the impatience in our own. He is teaching you and me to be more like him–someone who keeps loving the unlovable.

I don’t want to give the impression that his blessings look mostly like burdens, though. I just want to point out that it is raining blessings all the time. There has never really been a drought, and that becomes more clear when we see what his blessing-drops are made of. They include everything our loving Savior and Good Shepherd does to serve our souls. If we stop looking at the word “blessing” with a telephoto lens for a moment, if take a wide-angle shot of the blessings Ezekiel mentions by name in the context, the picture is clearer.

In the surrounding verses God promises, “I will save my flock.” That is exactly what he did when he sent Jesus to be our Good Shepherd and to lay down his life on the cross. “I the Lord will be their God.” Out of all the billions of people in the world, we are not living in the darkness, terrorized by scary gods and evil spirits, hoping we have done enough to convince them to let us live another day. He placed us in Christian homes, or sent someone to introduce us to Jesus along the way. We were led to know the Lord, and by faith he has been our gracious God ever since. “I will make a covenant of peace with them.” Jesus’ death promises us forgiveness. Jesus’ resurrection promises heaven. In these blessings we have a peace most of our world can’t even imagine. “They will live in safety.” Body and soul, day in and day out, we are never out of our Savior’s sight, and no matter what we have experienced in the body, he has brought our souls safely to this day.

For the Christian, the forecast always calls for blessing showers today. They rain down on us until they overwhelm us with a flood of his grace and love. Soak it in.