I saw the other day that a major shoe company had converted an old historic church to a basketball gym and locker room. It turned out beautiful, but I was a little saddened. How many people had once called that building their church home? How many salvations and baptisms had occurred there? No matter what the facility, I always consider places of worship holy ground. So did Jesus. He told the money changers “Not in my house!”
Mark 11:15-17
And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
Crooked System
The religious elite had turned the temple into a money-making flea market. There were money exchangers who would exchange your pagan money for purified temple money, at a fee of course. Some people sold sacrifice approved animals. The temple leaders got a cut of all of these transactions making their pockets bulge.
Not In My House
Jesus wasn’t having any of it. He came in and started turning over the tables and sending the sellers and animals scurrying out of the temple court. The temple was holy ground, and it wasn’t going to be a place of profit. Imagine that scene.
A Holy Place
Jesus then quotes Isaiah 56:7 “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” God’s house is a place of prayer. It is where we go to be in his presence. When we make going to church anything else besides worshipping him, we shortchange ourselves. A lot of people will tell you the building isn’t the church, and there is some truth to that, but we still go to a place of worship to meet God.