The Prophet's Song and I how spent the entire talk on one thing - that we are the Temple

For Advent we are participating again this year in Advent Conspiracy with churches from around the Globe.

Our particular focus this year for Give More  is Kenya Matters and their well project, which will supply clean water not only to the orphanage, but also to the surrounding area.

For advent we are also participating with Churches around the world in the lighting of Advent Candles which give a particular focus to each week of Advent.  The first candle is the Prophecy Candle. This candle reminds us that the Old Testament is full of poetry and songs that point to Jesus the coming Messiah.
The readings for were from Isaiah 40 and Luke 1. I titled the talk The Prophet’s Song.

I started by pointing out how this season is a season of songs – Christmas songs are everywhere.  Just this morning I heard one of the songs I reference Santa Baby.  This is a fairly recent song, but there are ancient songs that go back millennia. One of the most ancient songs is found in Isaiah 40 which pointed to the Messiah’s forerunner, John the Baptist.

I discovered that I came into this talk a little overloaded with things to say. I had three things that I felt like the Spirit wanted to highlight from Luke 1 and Zechariah’s encounter with the angel. I somehow managed to really only get to one of them, and that was this. The ancient Jews believed that the temple was the place where Heaven and Earth met. The temple was the place where they believed God dwelt. Three primary things happened at the temple that we see in Luke 1: Sacrifice; worship and prayer.

The New Testament points to us as the Temple of the Holy Spirit. People who call on and follow Jesus are now the place where Heaven and Earth meet. I think that this means that our lives like the ancient temple are to be characterized by: Sacrifice; Worship; and prayer.

I really spent a bunch of time on Sacrifice and Worship and short-changed the prayer part, because it seemed important to spend time in worship at the end.

Regarding sacrifice there is an undeniable thread in the New Testament that refers to us taking up our cross, losing our lives, presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice. God it would seem is after our entirety of our lives. A shorthand way of representing this is to talk about our time; talent and treasure. I believe each of these areas will reveal what we value.

Regarding worship, I tried an experiment (about a quarter of the way into it I thought this is taking way to long – which it was), in which I read a fictional description of a Martian observing the “worship” practices of modern society. The excerpt is from the book Desiring the Kingdom by James K. A. Smith. Though it took way too long and that probably wasn’t the setting to read for an extended period of time, I thought the passage was brilliant in its description of the Mall as a place of worship. The point of the exercise was to help us recognize that our hearts are shaped by what we admire – by what we ascribe worth to (ascribing worth is the most basic definition of worship).

The point brothers and sisters is that there are many other things which compete for our allegiance and admiration, or as Rich Mullins beautifully said in song, “The stuff of Earth competes for the allegiance, I owe only to the Giver of all good things.”

In the end I briefly referenced prayer and the exercise of thoughtfully praying through the prayer Jesus gave us as way of training our souls.

Then we closed in singing of the worth of our Great God.

My prayer is that we would be a community of Jesus followers who are characterize by our self-sacrificial love, extravagant worship and lives of prayer.