Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
We are God’s Temple (Ephesians 2:21-22)
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Flannery O’Connor, in her short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost, tells of two convent-educated 14-year-old girls who delight in calling themselves Temple One and Temple Two. Their teacher Sister Perpetua had suggested the best way to confront a young man behaving “in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile” was to say, “Stop, sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” For them this was cause for endless amusement.
Later in the story they visit a circus and hear one of the sideshow “freaks” declare to the crowd, “God done this to me and I praise him…he could strike you thisaway….Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know?” The crowd responds, “Amen. Amen.”
As she often does in her fiction, O’Connor here depicts the perverse and trivial twist humans can put on profound truth. We dare not risk the same mistakes. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says:
"Our attitudes toward things like race or gender operate on two levels … our conscious attitudes … what we choose to believe” and our unconscious attitudes, “the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think.” The basic notion of the study is that we “make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us.” It speaks to the issue of snap judgments that we make without getting below the surface. The challenge: “our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values."
Because of a North American individualistic mindset, we too quickly interpret our being the temple of the Holy Spirit in primarily individualistic terms. The Bible teaches that we as individuals and as the church are temples of the Holy Spirit. In writing to the Corinthians, Paul said, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit..?” (1 Cor. 6:19), indicating that individually we are temples of the Holy Spirit. But more often than not, Paul is looking at the collective sense or our being the temple of God. “Don’t you know that that you yourselves are God’s temple…?” and goes on to say, “God’s Spirit dwells in your midst” (1 Cor.3:16) and “…you together are that temple.” (3:17).
Here as well, in Ephesians 2:21-22 Paul says that Gentile and Jew are being built together to become collectively a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. Unfortunately, in English the singular and plural form of “you” is identical. When we read “you” in the New Testament we usually think “me” where, in fact, in the majority of cases, certainly in Ephesians, we should understand “us”. When in doubt, intentionally read any “you” in Ephesians as “all of you” and you won’t go far wrong.
What implication does this have for mission? Namely this – the church wherever we find it is part of the dwelling of God. We dare not look for a perfect church; the church that we see is the church. There is no other. The church in which God dwells is not some ideal, universal, invisible group of people who behave as we think they should. No, the church is the visible local church with all its cranks and hypocrites, sinners and saints. We are being built, we are under construction, and we are becoming what God wants us to be by his grace. Whether the local assembly looks like ours “back home” or not, it is God’s temple and we are part of it.
It is a challenge to see our fellow believers this way. We can always see ways to make something better than it is. A godly friend of mine told me of his experience in leaving a church 20 years ago to establish a more Biblical and relevant body of believers. Now, sadly, 20 years later, that wonderful experiment is falling apart, and my friend noted that the cause of its failure is related directly to the qualities they intentionally built into their structures as an improvement on the old ones. Our challenge is to identify with God’s people wherever we find them, and seek with them to be the kind of dwelling in which God is pleased to live.
Holy God, and loving heavenly Father, grant that we your people will be a temple worthy of you, and may your Holy Spirit be so at home in us that the world will long to join us in being a people amongst whom you live and work and express your love.
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