Building God’s Temple with Care

Isaiah 53:1-3                 1 Corinthians 3:1–4:21                 Matthew 7:24-27

Building God’s Temple with Care

A building can look so sound in calm weather. A straight strong structure with a sound roof, solid doors, and sealed windows. But let hurricane force winds rise. Let the rain come down in torrents. Let the power of nature test its very foundations and challenge every joint and seam to the utmost and suddenly you discover what had not been quite obvious at first.

Paul is writing to a church that looks impressive on the surface. Of all the New Testament churches, Corinth appears to be the most gifted, active, and confident of them all…but as several ill winds blow through the house churches in the city, something troubling is revealed. The church may not be as impressive as it seems.

Arrogance. Pride. Jealousy. Division. Boasting. Competition. All these things had bubbled up to the surface, and Paul’s diagnosis is as sharp today as it was back then: “You,” Paul says to the church of God in Corinth, “you are still infants.”

Not because they lack knowledge or gifts but because their lives look no different from the world around them.

And so Paul does something deeply pastoral and deeply confronting. He takes them back to the original construction site. Because the question is no longer, “How impressive is your church?” But rather: “What are you building on – have you forgotten…have you forsaken the one and only true foundation? And how are you building on that one and only true foundation?” What materials are you using?

Paul begins with a tension we must not miss. While he calls them brothers and sisters in Christ, he speaks to them as if they were unspiritual.

And this is crucial.

While the abundance of spiritual gifts show that they have the Spirit of God as only the Spirit gives such gifts, their lives reveal that they are not living in step with him. So Paul does not deny their identity as Spirit-filled believers…no, he acknowledges that they are the church of God in Corinth…but while he does not deny their identity as believers, he does expose their glaring inconsistencies.

Their behaviour…rather than reflecting the likeness of Jesus…their behaviour was reflecting the lives of what he calls “people of the flesh”…not in the sense of an unconverted person, but in the sense of being a believer whose life is shaped by worldly values rather than heavenly values.

And what are those values? Well, pretty much the same as they have always been. Unhealthy relational assessments and evaluations and judgements based on perceived perfection, on social status, and an unhealthy alignment with personalities, cliques, groups, or factions.

“For when one says, “I follow…fill in the blank,” and another, “I follow…fill in the blank,” are you not being fleshly?”

These worldly values make the church looks less like the body of Jesus and more like a marketplace of competing brands.

And Paul’s response is devastating in its simplicity: “What then is Paul? What is Apollos?” Are they not simple servants? The Greek word, diakonoi, is functional but not flattering. These are not celebrities. They are not spiritual elites. They are waiters at God’s table…workers in God’s field. One plants…the other waters…but God gives the growth.

And this dismantles every form of worldliness in the church, because if God is the one who gives growth, well then no one gets to boast. And if both planter and waterer are “one” and on an equal footing as servants, then there is no hierarchy to fight over. Only shared service.

The church is God’s field. This is Old Testament language. Israel is often portrayed in the Old Testament as God’s vine or God’s fig tree. This agricultural metaphor implies cultivation, care, and fruitfulness. Like field and horticultural crops, believers are meant to grow. You are meant to produce something that reflects the one who planted you and the one who grants you growth because you are God’s field. 

At this point, Paul changes the metaphor from a field to a building, and his point becomes a little more precise. There is one foundation and only one: Jesus Christ. There are no alternatives, no upgrades, and no replacements.

And this is where Paul presses hardest: “Let each one take care how he builds.” Note that he doesn’t say when you build or whether you build, but how you build, because he is assuming that if you are a believer, you will be building on that one foundation with something whether that something is gold, silver, precious stones…or wood, hay, or straw.

And while the difference between these materials may not be always obvious and visible to us and others, it will be revealed in time, because there is a Day coming…a day of divine evaluation.

Now this Day is not meant to condemn the believer as the believer is saved by grace through faith in Jesus already…no, rather the Day is designed to reveal or expose the structure of the believer’s life in much the same way as a storm exposes the solidness of a building or as fire reveals the durability of substances. Some work will endure. Some will vanish, but the believer remains saved.

But here is the sobering truth: It is possible to be saved…it is possible to be a believer…it is possible to be part of a church…and yet still see your life’s work reduced to ashes.

But now Paul’s metaphors reach a climax. “Don’t you know,” he says, “that you yourselves are God’s temple?” This is not just any building. This is the place in which the holy, almighty, creator God has chosen to live.

What the tabernacle and the Temple symbolised…what the prophets promised…all is now fulfilled: God’s Spirit dwells in his people…which means this is no ordinary construction project.

You are sacred space. Each and every one of you. You are sacred space.

And therefore how you live as a member of God’s church…whether you live to build up your life and the lives of the other members of the body…to cultivate and nurture growth in both and them, always esteeming others better than yourselves, or whether you cause damage to the church of God by being selfish, self-centredness, self-absorbed of by being divisive or destructive or dismissive is not a small matter.

At this point, Paul turns to the root issue beneath everything:

The Corinthians think they are better than what they really are because they are using the wrong standards of measurement.

They are evaluating everything…status, success, spirituality…according to the wisdom of their age, and Paul says that that wisdom is foolishness. Not slightly misguided. Not partially helpful. No, foolish, stupid, because it operates without reference to God.

So Paul calls them to a radical reversal: “If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become ‘fools’ so that you may become wise.”

In other words: Lay down the metrics of the world. Stop measuring success by eloquence, influence, or status. Because all of it, Paul says, is already ours in Christ.

This is one of the most liberating truths in the passage: “All things are yours…you are Christ’s…and Christ is God’s.” In other words, there’s no need to compete when everything already belongs to you because you are in Jesus.

Then in chapter 4, Paul turns to address their views on leadership and again, he dismantles it. In the church, all leaders are nothing more than servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.

Servants and stewards. And what does Paul say is required of servants and stewards? Faithfulness. And here is where Paul relocates healthy evaluation. Healthy evaluation is not a matter of opinion, whether it is the opinion of others or whether it is your own opinion. No, healthy evaluation belongs to the Lord, because only he sees the hidden things. Only he sees the true motives. Only he sees the real intentions. 

And therefore, Paul says, it is best to reserve judgement – and we need to listen here to what Scripture says – it is best for us to reserve judgment or evaluation for that Day when every one of us will be correctly judged and evaluated by God…who is the only one who knows every single detail about every single one of his children. Our insight is so limited…it is so finite…we know so very little about the lives of others…so it is rather arrogantly hypocritical to think we can evaluate or judge other members of God’s church, don’t you think? 

“Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you did not?” Why do you think that you are better than other believers?

And so, Paul says, that if we want to know what believers ought to look like in the church, we should look not to status or success, but rather we should look to the “product” produced by suffering.

Using himself and the apostles as examples he says, “We are fools for Christ… we are weak…we are dishonoured…to this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are brutally treated, we are homeless.”

Now, in Paul’s case, this was not exaggeration. This was apostolic reality.

And as such it reflects something deeper…it reflects the pattern of Jesus himself. As Isaiah says, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; he was despised as one from whom men hide their faces, and we esteemed him not…he was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”

You see, life in the church ought to be shaped by the cross. Believers ought to mirror the humility, obedience, faithfulness, and self-sacrificial nature of the one they profess to follow. 

Now in this light, the question comes to us. What does your building look like? What does your field look like? What are you building with? 

Because you are building something. Something ought to be growing in your life and in the lives of your fellow believers.

But what are your standards? What materials are you using? Are they shaped by Scripture or by the spirit of our age? Are they durable or merely impressive? Are you building for the approval of others or for the evaluation of God? Or perhaps most importantly, are you truly open to the evaluation of God?

And perhaps more searching still: How are you treating others in God’s church? Because if you are God’s temple and they are God’s temple and together we are all God’s temple then your words and your deeds matter. Your attitudes matter. Your behaviour matters.

So, what does maturity look like in your life? I’m not asking how much you know. I’m not asking how neat your theology is packaged. 

I am asking how deeply your life reflects the life of Jesus.

When the storms of life pass over you, after the skies clear, what is left standing?

Have you been tried and tested and weighed in God’s balance and been found wanting?

But perhaps more importantly what we should all ask is what will be left standing in that Day when God will test every thought, every word, every life, every work, every foundation.

On that Day the question will not be how impressive did I appear to be, but rather did my life’s labour endure?

So, dearest beloved brethren, build carefully. Build faithfully. Build as Jesus built because in the end only what is built on him will stand.

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2026