Location Location Locashun

Raise your hand if you're excited about Freshmen Group on Monday at 7p in Hoover 2055. Yeah, me too! Actually my fond memories of this room are sitting in the very top right corner with Kris-with-a-K, head spinning as Professor Sturges blew through 51statics example problems in 50 minutes. Also today in our 6am (yikes) Acts Bible study, we talked about this passage where Stephen references Isaiah 66, which says

--This is what the LORD says: "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?--


So will Hoover 2055 be His resting place? Can we just put up a reservation with Iowa State and assume that it simultaneously made a reservation in the heavenly realms with the Most High that he will show up?


This summer I was in India, where most of the people are Hindu. We were mostly in the big city, but one time we got to go to this tiny town called Basi, where my friend Amit lived. He took us around and showed us basically the whole town in one afternoon. The primary school, the secondary school, his dad's mustard oil factory. And we also saw several temples. They say India has 330 million gods. Probably a pretty accurate statement. We went to this one temple of the hero of Basi, I don't even remember the god's name, but some thousand years ago he had done something and the people of Basi were really grateful so they would sometimes ring the bell at 3:00 and bow and then eat crackers.

Anyway, the point is that they believed the god was actually, like, there. More than anywhere else. This is the essence of a temple, it's a place people can go into the prescence of a god.

Yahweh, the Most High God of the Bible used to operate in a similar fashion. There was first a portable tabernacle, and then a glorious temple built in Jerusalem. Okay, we know that God is omnipresent, that's part of who he is. But there are places that are more.... full.... of God. Like when the temple was still here. Both Exodus and 1 Kings talk about when the tabernacle/temple opened for the first time, and the Glory of God descended in a cloud and filled the place so that no one could even get in. If you could name the MOST HOLY spot in all of the physical world, it was that patch of ground in the Middle East.

But what about today? The temple was torn down in 70 AD. Are we left with any holy ground? I think, no, I KNOW that Hoover 2055 can be a very holy place. This is how:

"Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?"
1 Corinthians 3:16

What Paul's saying here is that the special place where the fullness of Yahweh's Holy Prescence rests is in His people. If you are looking for the place more full of God than any other place in all the material world, look no farther than the gathering of His people. That's where God himself rests in a unique way.

So come on over to Hoover 2055 on Monday night. Let's approach the Most Holy Place with confidence. He wants His Fullness to rest on each of us.