passion week: tuesday

In Daily Walk, Chip Ingram mentions how King Solomon began so well, but ended foolishly. He started by asking God for wisdom (then getting it), but ended with a life separated from God through indulgence and compromise.

Surrounded by idol-worshiping foreign wives, Solomon went from being tolerant to accepting to finally worshiping the very idols God despised and specifically forbid.

We talked on Sunday during seminar about Jesus cleansing the Temple and we reflected how the merchants and money-changers probably came right back the next day and set up their tables again inspite of what had happened the previous day.

So why did Jesus bother with demonstrating such anger that probably did little in the way of reforming the populace?

It really is a warning, isn't it?

It starts from being tolerant to the wrong we see around us.

Then at some point, perhaps not immediately, but in subtle and small ways, we begin to accept them as reality.

Then it is almost inevitable that we will begin to worship it. We not only simply "let sleeping dogs lie," but we espouse the wrong deed.

The Jews who came to the Temple three times a year for sacrifices in obedience to God's command must have felt a sense that something was not entirely right about the way the Lord's House was becoming a marketplace. Some must have felt - at least in the beginning - that something was not entirely godly.

Is there something in your life which started as something seemingly insignificant, though you know it to be something that God is not pleased with? Could be a thought or a habit or an attitude toward something or someone.

Beware of coming to a place where you will begin to not only tolerate it, but accept it as some un-fixable, irreparable fact of your character.

Because soon, you will worship it and woe be to anyone or anything that challenges the way you think or act, because you will see it as a direct attak on your very character.