Good Building
I don’t know much about building, but I do not that you need a good firm base to build on and that as you go along, you need to keep checking that everything is aligned correctly – otherwise the smallest wonky bit becomes amplified more and more as the building goes on. And if you watch enough dream-house building programmes on tv, you realise the folly of not having plans, proper plans, drawn up by an expert…
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23 (CEV)
Only One Foundation
10 God was kind and let me become an expert builder. I laid a foundation on which others have built. But we must each be careful how we build, 11 because Christ is the only foundation.
16 All of you surely know that you are God’s temple and that his Spirit lives in you. 17 Together you are God’s holy temple, and God will destroy anyone who destroys his temple.
18 Don’t fool yourselves! If any of you think you are wise in the things of this world, you will have to become foolish before you can be truly wise. 19 This is because God considers the wisdom of this world to be foolish. It is just as the Scriptures say, “God catches the wise when they try to outsmart him.” 20 The Scriptures also say, “The Lord knows that the plans made by wise people are useless.” 21-22 So stop bragging about what anyone has done. Paul and Apollos and Peter all belong to you. In fact, everything is yours, including the world, life, death, the present, and the future. Everything belongs to you, 23 and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
Building for God is done with people though, human lives in all their different shapes and sizes. Together we become his temple. But just as bricks resting only on each other would wobble, we need a mortar to hold it all together – which is God’s Spirit. That is what will hold us together in him, built on the foundation of Jesus and all he showed us of God.
Thinking we can manage without God is foolish (Paul’s words not mine!). We haven’t done anything, bricks do not build themselves, God is the one who builds. Our plans might make a very wobbly building, we need to keep checking them against God and what he wants.
And we need each other – one brick does not a temple make! Together we make a temple, a place for God to live. We can help and support one another in the building process, in our individual as well as corporate lives. For we must be careful how we build, follow the plans that have been laid, build on the firm foundation we have been given and check and check again that we are building right, straight and true.
Build me Lord,
into your temple,
what you want me to be,
with the people
you are building me with.
Let us not be wobbly,
but true,
held together in your promises
and your truth,
built on the foundation Jesus gives
and sticking to the plans you have drawn
Pam's Perambulation 