Clean the Temple Breakthrough with God

In Great Britain and America today, the bane of the church is self-indulgence, self-preservation, and self-centeredness. The gospel message is all about us, served on a man-centered platter at a sumptuous banquet table laden with delicacies. Other generations knew the price of discipleship and the cost of following a crucified savior.

John the Baptist had a platter with his head upon it. Stephen was baptized with stones as he saw Jesus rise from his throne. Paul finished his ministry not with accolades and applause but with a falling axe.

The blood of the martyrs cries out against the self-absorbed church of this generation. Listen friends, revival will never come to your church or this land if there are hindrances blocking its path. God is looking for clean hands and pure hearts that yearn for his manifest presence to see the king of glory come in.

In 2 Chronicles 15.8 we read, And when Asa heard these words and the prophecy of Oded the prophet, he took courage and put away the abominable idols out of the land. And that's what we need to do today, both in our churches and in our country. Take some time now friends to study this next passage of scripture with me if you'll turn in your bibles to Psalm 24.

I want to read us the verses that are here following in verses 3 through 10. Here now is the word of God and may the spirit of the Lord attend the reading of his holy word. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully, he shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob Selah. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the king of glory shall come in. Who is the king of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates, even lift them up, ye everlasting doors, and the king of glory shall come in. Who is the king of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the king of glory, Selah.

The psalmist here speaks of clean hands and a pure heart. Clean hands represent our relationship towards man or our dealings with our fellow men, clean and honorable. This speaks of a horizontal emphasis.

A pure heart speaks of our relationship with our creator. Do we have any unconfessed or unrepentant sin in our lives which defiles us breaking fellowship with him? This is a vertical emphasis for the king of glory to come in revival. We must have friends, both horizontal and a vertical channel, open to receive the heavenly blessings as they refresh and revive the people of God.

And notice that when these two channels are clear of any sin blockage or hindrances to revival, the two, the vertical, the pure heart, and the horizontal, clean hands, they form a cross. For God to come to revival and dwell in his manifest presence among his people, we must look at how a mountain stream flows. Picture in your mind, friends, a clear mountain stream.

At the top of the stream, the source of water, the flow that channels down the mountain is clear. It's clean and forceful. Lower down the mountain, the stream may get clogged up with debris that slows the flow or contaminates it or both.

When the debris is cleaned out of the stream at the bottom, then the clean, clear water flows freely once more, providing a vital life source for the benefit of mankind. This is like true revival. When our hearts, our lives as believers are contaminated by sin and the debris of this world, we hinder the intimacy we could enjoy with Christ our Lord.

Cleaning out our stream, so to speak, is an integral fact to seeing God move in revival. When we enter a right relationship with God, we are setting ourselves to receive the revival winds when they begin to blow in the tops of the mulberry trees. A perfect example of revival and of this process is found in the life of King Hezekiah.

Notice how he found it necessary to first clean out the temple of the idols there and then bring them down to the brook Kidron where they were burned and destroyed once and for all. This is seen in the following passage detailing how the Levite priests obeyed temple reforms of King Hezekiah. Let me read you 2 Chronicles chapter 29 and verses 15 through 16 at this time.

And they gathered their brethren and sanctified themselves and came according to the commandment of the king by the words of the lord to cleanse the house of the lord and the priests went into the inner part of the house of the lord to cleanse it and brought out all the uncleanness that they found in the temple of the lord into the court of the house of the lord and the Levites took it to carry it abroad into the brook Kendron. Relating this passage, God is telling us that unless we are willing to clean the house of our hearts and reenter a right relationship with him through repentance, then there remains a hindrance or obstacles to revival. In 2 Chronicles 7 14, the text reads and turned from the wicked ways.

This is demonstrated by King Hezekiah in chapter 29 of 2 Chronicles when the priests acting on the orders of Hezekiah removed the obstacles, the abominations that were standing between them and God. Then God's blessing was made clear. Remember that clear mountain stream and it was made clear to flow in revival.

But notice that cleaning our house, our church, or our lives is a two-fold process. The title of my message this evening, friends, is Clean the Temple. And I want to look at these two aspects as related to our text.

Number one, clean the temple. Notice in this passage in 2 Chronicles 29 that the word it is emphasized. This is to draw attention to the idols which had profaned the temple.

These were the unclean things. If we truly desire to see revival in our land, it is high time that the people of God do likewise and clean the temples of our sanctuaries of any filth and abominations that greed God. We wanted to reach the world, so we let the world into the church.

What has that gotten us? It's only corrupted the house of God. What things are we trusting in? Are we trusting in our man-centered methodologies or are we trusting God and his spirit? Number two, we must clean the temple of our heart. Until we see God with a broken and contrite heart over our sins, both corporate and personal, then there will stand obstructions which block the path to revival blessings.

Do we have wet eyes when we pray or are our hearts cold towards the things that break the heart of God? Have we drifted away from an intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ? Have we left our first love? Our Lord's admonition to the church in Ephesus was, remember therefore from when thou art fallen and repent and do the first works or else I will come unto thee quickly and will remove that candlestick out of its place except thou repent. I have visited the ancient ruins of Ephesus, perhaps some of you have as well, and when you walk around there and look around, there's no visible church there today. Throughout the region of Asia, which is now Turkey, where these seven churches of the book of Revelation existed, now has little Christian witness to this day.

For when God removes something, he permanently removes it, friends. The ultimate failure of these New Testament churches was to repent and to realign their hearts Godward in a visible testimony, and that's what can happen to us if we do the same, if we fail to heed the same warnings. Listen, brother pastor, your church can either be a light which brightly demonstrates Christ in your community or it can be in danger of being snuffed out by him who has asked you to repent and do the first works before Ichabod is written over your door.

I've known many churches that God used to use in remarkable ways, but now Ichabod is written over their door. Wait carefully what the wise 25-year-old King Hezekiah ordered the priest to do. Basically, he said to do two things.

He said, number one, sanctify yourselves. Number two, sanctify the house of the Lord. If the church will do likewise, a true worship will be restored that glorifies God and not the present display of fresh flesh and entertainment that satisfies us.

Now notice the result of King Hezekiah's actions. Then the king rose early and gathered the rulers of the city and went up to the house of the Lord. Temple worship was restored in line with God's requirements.

When we, as the people of God, do these two things, sanctify ourselves and sanctify the house of the Lord, then we too will have a breakthrough with God. We will see his glory and worship him rightly, singing praises of Hosanna. Notice further what occurs as Hezekiah celebrates the Passover with the people and listen to his wise words and admonition as he addresses the people of God as found in chapter 30 and verses 7 through 9. And be not like ye, your fathers, and like your brethren, which trespassed against the Lord God of their fathers, who therefore gave them up to desolation, as ye see.

Now ye not be stiff-necked as your fathers were, but yield yourselves unto the Lord and enter into his sanctuary, which he has sanctified forever, and serve the Lord your God, that the fierceness of his wrath may turn away from you. For if ye turn again unto the Lord, your brethren and your children shall find compassion before them that lead them captive, so that they shall come again into this land. For the Lord your God is gracious and merciful and will not turn away his face from you if ye return unto him.

Now notice, friends, what transpires in Jerusalem as this return to God takes place and mark this as a pattern for revival in our day. So there was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the time of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, there was not the like in Jerusalem. Then the priests, the Levites, arose and blessed the people, and their voice was heard, and the prayer came up to his holy dwelling place, even unto heaven.

Listen, friends, when we, as the people of God, get serious with him and realign our hearts to him, then we too can stand on the promises of God that he will hear our prayers, and he will heal our land. When God comes in revival to a church or community, darkness is pushed back and evil decreases. For the dark kingdom of Satan cannot stand the light, and the devil is powerless against light.

Where darkness prevails, it's because the church has failed to push back the darkness by being more light, by being more Christ-like. How bad do we want it? How bad do we want revival to come to this sin-cursed country? Are we willing to pay the price? Are you, brother pastor, willing to clean your sanctuary and align yourself and your people all to his Holy Spirit? How about you, friend? Are you willing to part with your dear idols and come clean with God, and that's through repentance? If we want to experience a personal revival, we must take our darling sins to our own brokidron and burn them there. Nothing must stand between us and a holy God.

We need revival to come to this land. We need revival to come to the church. We must fall on our faces and go to God, and let's do that now, friends, as we seek him in this time of prayer.