King in the Temple of our Hearts

Over the past year I’ve been on a journey with our youth group through the life of Jesus, this past sunday night was another step in that journey.  We looked at two different encounters with Jesus and tried to figure out how they might apply to our lives today. In the first encounter we found Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem, up through the desert road from Jericho, a climatic 3,000 ft climb up the mountain to where men, women, and children celebrated his coming, celebrating as if he were king, they threw down their cloaks, waved palm branches and sang Hosannah. We learned that throwing down your cloak wasn’t something you did unless you were showing loyalty to them like a king. Even then very few would have considered throwing their cloak down on a dusty dirt road but in that moment those people saw Jesus as their king. They sang Hosannah which means “God will save us, right now!” They were soon to find out that Jesus wasn’t going to be the earthly king that they had planned on, he wasn’t going to overthrow the Romans, he was going to be a greater king than that. He came to be King in man’s hearts, King in our hearts.

From there we find Jesus comes to the Temple the next day. The Temple would have been an exciting place, crowded with people, a buzz of business as people prepared for the passover sacrifices. People packing in to buy their unblemished lamb or dove. Jews from all over came. The priest would have been busy from sun up to sundown offering sacrifices for the people. There would have been a constant line of those waiting their turn for their sins to be forgiven by the blood of a lamb or calf or dove. But that was all interrupted when Jesus came in and started flipping over the tables and driving out the sheep and cattle. He let the birds from their cages and disrupted the flow of exchange and sacrifices. He was angry at what he saw and burned with a jealous passion for his fathers house. 

Jesus had a right to be angry in that moment, the venders had taken up nearly all of the court of the Gentiles and the court of Women which were places meant for prayer not for selling of animals. They had turned that area of the temple court into a den of robbers and not into a place of worship. Somewhere over the years the religious leaders had stopped carrying about the court of the Gentiles and Women. They thought it was more important that people have easy access to animals for sacrifices then it was for people to be allowed to worship God in those places. We know Jesus cared for all people, and he cared about everyone’s relationship with the Father. He would die so that we might be in relationship with him so it’s no wonder that we would fight for the Gentiles and Women to have a place to worship. Jesus had to clear that space and stop everything for that to happen. 

That brings it back to us. There are times in our lives where we need Jesus to be jealously angry for us, for our time, and we need him to flips some tables over in the temple of our hearts. We need him to remind us it’s not about going to church or doing the right things or sacrifices its about a relationship with Him and his Father. Sometimes we need him to clear room so that HE can be King of our hearts again. When he is King of our hearts and our lives it’s much easier for us to throw down our cloaks and worship him with everything we got.

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 11 “A Year Of Thoughts”: That’s When We Were The Young

That’s When We Were The Youth

Over a sunset that set to soon

The green grows like the hills

For which we climbed then,

That’s when it was our youth

 

Those days we wondered in timeless masses out to play

 

To play was the name of it

That thing we did to pass the day

It was slow much slower then,

That’s when we were the youth

 

Feathers in our hair and speaking in our native tongue

 

To take to dreaming riding west

The horses flew across the yard

Always chasing the smallest one

That’s when milk made giant youth

 

Our mothers told us to grow strong so by and by we did

 

To this we write now as past

Though on we grow like children

For we still climb, play, chase the day

That’s when we find time for it

 

The time we never had as youth has found us, bound us, caught us somehow.

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

A little reflection of growing old and moving past our childhood in poem form. Sometimes I think as youth we had a much better grasp on how fun life really is but as we grow older that fun gets sucked out of us by the ever faster moving time. The picture is of a piece of art that I painted and painted over again and this is actually of the middle stage of the piece. The original piece was a sunset, then I over laid that with two different greens and finally placed a feather on top of that. The final result of the piece is a curved canvas that allows for the feather to stand out off the canvas while being held on by a smearing of blue paint. As a child my imagination would run like crazy and there was always a story everyday to fill the time. Now my mind and imagination still run but i have to find the time for it. Find the time to stop and imagine, create, and remember.  That’s when we were the youth.

P.s. The milk reference is true, my mother would say drink milk it will make you strong however, I was allergic to dairy as a kid and when i out grew that I became lactose intolerant because i couldn’t drink it as a kid, somehow even without that much milk I still grew, I wouldn’t say strong but I grew.