A Heart for His Building
He walked across the dusty, stony ground, kicked a rock and bent and drew in the dirt. He looked around at the desolate land scape and down at the city below and wondered if his dream would ever be a reality. Would it really happen, someday would the people of God worship on this ground? Would songs of praise fill the air? Would the word of God be read aloud? Would prayers be uttered and heard?
He had a dream. A dream of a building called a house of God. A dream of a building where his people could worship. A dream of a permanent home for their services. And now as he stood on the empty lot he wondered just how long it would be until the doodling he made in the dirt would actually become a building.
It was later. The dream had taken on a substance and as he stood and watched the men and women exercise their talents and gifts, his dream was becoming a reality in front of his very eyes. There were those who had doubted, and those who had scoffed, but now they could see what before only he could see, and the doubters had been silenced.
So much had been done, but so much more still had to be finished. He hadn’t realized that the transition from dream to reality would take so much time, sacrifice, and so much talent. There were times that he knew that whatever it cost, it was worth it, while other times he wondered if it would be worth what it cost.
His days were consumed with building and during the night he tossed and turned with a thousand questions racing through his head. His life revolved around the construction, and he began to bore his friends with his obsessive talking of the progress. He stepped through the rubble of construction and listened to the saws and hammers and his mind drifted back to how much simpler this had been as simply a dream.
It was later. Much later, it seemed like a thousand years later, but it couldn’t have been that long and he stood and looked at what had once been a dream. He could hardly take it all in. The size and the splendour of it. Just like he had dreamed. It had come true and was now a reality. He wished his father could be with him to see this accomplishment.
No more would his people worship without a permanent spiritual home; no more would they feel like nomads. God had given him a vision for what could be done and had given him the strength to do it and it was finished. As a matter of fact, we are told in 2 Chronicles 7:11 So Solomon finished the Temple of the Lord, as well as the royal palace. He completed everything he had planned to do in the construction of the Temple and the palace.
It is March at Cornerstone, and that means that it’s Money Month.
Here is a little insight for those of you who have become a part of our church family in the past year.
It was 23 years ago that we decided to take a different approach to dealing with finances at Cornerstone.
We decided that instead of dealing with the crisis of finances. That is harping at you every time things got tight financially in the church; that instead, we would teach stewardship once a year.
Because our church year ends in April, we decided March would be a good month, so here we are.
And so, if you can handle a few messages on stewardship each spring, then you get a free pass on the preaching team harping at you about money for the rest of the year.
As part of that process, we adopted what we call “Step-up Cornerstone.” Each year, at the end of March, we ask those who make Cornerstone their church home to step out in faith and fill out an “estimate of giving” card. We collect those cards at the end of that service, and we use that figure to plan our budget for the new church year.
And there are benefits to that, both for the church and for you as individuals. For the church, it gives us a responsible way to plan our budget for the upcoming year.
For you, it allows you in a very practical way to determine what type of church you want to have in the upcoming year. A church in its own building with full time staff will always cost more than a church meeting in a community centre with part-time staff.
For the first twenty years of my ministry, the churches that I led did what most churches do. Each year the leadership would pull a budget out of the air. It may have been based on the previous year’s budget with a slight increase for additional expenses, or perhaps department heads had submitted their wish list for the new year.
Often it was done by a committee, but realistically, it wasn’t based on any knowledge of what the church income would be.
Sometimes the church would talk about how they were stepping out in faith. But the end result was that the preacher would end up talking about money all the time, challenging people to step up and pay a budget that was not rooted in reality.
Twenty-three years ago, in 2002, the leadership at Cornerstone decided to take a different approach. I would speak on the biblical role of stewardship for a month each year. And it’s an important topic, and it’s an important part of our spiritual lives.
And at the end of the month, we allow the folks who call Cornerstone their church home to respond and provide an estimate of what they believe they will be able to give in the upcoming year.
Our theme this year is A Heart for his House, and we are going back to the story of the building of Solomon’s temple, which is told in the book of 2 Chronicles, the 14th book of the bible.
This morning, we are going to look at some thoughts on temple building.
We are three thousand years apart and several hundred million dollars different in cost.
And yet, even with all the differences between the temple of Solomon and our two buildings, there must be some common ground. A common thread or two which weaves its way through the tapestry of God’s house.
1 Chronicles 22:7 “My son, I wanted to build a Temple to honour the name of the Lord my God,” David told him.
1) They both began with a Dream David started off with a dream, he could see the temple in his minds eye. He wanted to build a building to be called God’s house. It probably started off innocently enough, a word, or a thought, maybe it wasn’t even David’s original idea or thought, maybe somebody said something in conversation that stuck in David’s mind.
And there the thought began to germinate and grow until it became a passion with David to build a house fitting to be called God’s house. And so David began to plan and think and doodle.
Maybe he used to sit at whatever his version of Tim Horton’s was and doodle on the paper place mats. While he was drinking coffee. Maybe he called in an architect and draftsman and began looking at drawings.
We don’t know everything that David did, but we know that this became an all-consuming vision of what could be done. Because we are told that he called in the head prophet in 2 Samuel 7:2 . . . the king summoned Nathan the prophet. “Look,” David said, “I am living in a beautiful cedar palace, but the Ark of God is out there in a tent!”
And that thought gripped him that he was living in a better home than he worshipped in.
20 years ago, that was the reality at Cornerstone. Most if not all of us lived in better homes, then the place where we worshiped God. Which was the Lion’s Den, at the Lebrun Centre in Bedford.
And David began to dream and imagine and envision. He began to build temples in the air because he had learnt the secret, that if you don’t build castles in the air, you won’t build anything on the ground.
And he found a site that looked promising, and he paced out the plot of dirt and dreamt and envisioned what would go where.
Our building started with a dream. Almost from day one we talked and dreamed about what it would be like to have a place of our own.
Those who were here in our first 9 years will remember that I mentioned having our own building approximately 5,753,248 times, approximately. Sometimes it was on a front burner and sometimes it was on a back burner, but the dream was always there.
1 Chronicles 22:8 “But the Lord said to me, ‘You have killed many men in the battles you have fought. And since you have shed so much blood in my sight, you will not be the one to build a Temple to honour my name.
2) They Both Involved a Wait.
What a blow that must have been to David, I’m sure that he felt like saying, “Hey God, correct me if I’m wrong but you were the one who wanted me to shed the blood and fight the wars. Am I right?”
All the work, all the dreams right down the drain. I mean, if God hadn’t wanted David to build, then where did the vision come from in the first place?
There were a few times over the first nine years that a particular piece of property became available, and we thought that perhaps the time was right. But it never seemed to happen.
Now I don’t think that our group was a particularly violent people, not the type of people that God would tell us “And since you have shed so much blood before me, you will not be the one to build a Temple to honour my name.”
And yet we too were put on hold and told to wait on the Lord. And just as we find it difficult to comprehend God’s motives for David, sometimes we questioned why Cornerstone Wesleyan Church was still in the Lion’s Den?
The answer of course is that God is God, and we needed to trust in the fact that he knew what he is doing.
God didn’t tell David that the temple wouldn’t be built. He just didn’t want David to build it. And David accepted that. And when everything was said and done, it may have been Solomon’s temple, but it was David’s dream. He was the one who first saw what could be done, and he encouraged Solomon and prodded him along and supported him.
God didn’t tell us that Cornerstone Wesleyan Church wouldn’t have a new building he just put it on hold for a while. And when the time came it was in a perfect location and was more than we could imagine.
Sometimes God tells us to wait. And when those times happen, we would be wise to heed the words of the prophet Isaiah who wrote in Isaiah 40:31 But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.
Let’s continue with the story, 2 Chronicles 2:4 I am about to build a Temple to honour the name of the Lord my God . . .
3) They Both Belonged to God
Why was the temple built? I mean, did they build it to glorify David or Solomon?
More than hundred pyramids stretch for four hundred miles along the west bank of the Nile in mute tribute to the kings of Egypt. Was that the reason behind the temple, to glorify David or his son? After all it is often referred to as “Solomon’s temple”
Was it to glorify, Israel, which was in its peak at this time? No, it was built to glorify God. Solomon said, “I am about to build a Temple to honour the name of the Lord my God”
We have to always keep in mind that our church home is not just a building.
We did not just construct a hall or a meeting place.
We have to realize that our buildings might not be temples, but they are worship centres for Cornerstone Wesleyan Church. For us, they are a house of God.
And I know the church isn’t a building. But it makes a difference when you are worshipping in a place dedicated to God.
In those first nine years we met at the Lion’s Den, the Empire Theatre and again at the Lion’s Den.
We worshipped from time to time at Fish Hatchery Park, the Board Room at Sunnyside Mall and the Bedford Lawn Bowling Centre. And those served the purpose, but they weren’t a church.
You don’t mop up spilt beer in a church and we had to do that on occasion. You don’t open the doors of the house of God to get rid of the stale cigarette smoke, and we had to do that.
Both of uur buildings, have been dedicated for holy use. And they might be used for other things, but their primary function is a Holy one. Providing a space for God’s people to worship God.
We did not step out to build a monument to Denn. We didn’t set out to glorify Cornerstone, and we didn’t do it, so people will say what a great bunch of people the Wesleyans are.
The reason we stepped out in faith to have a building of our own, a place to worship our God, is so he could use us, and use our building to work through and to make an impact on our community. And to help depopulate hell.
In one the meetings leading up to the capital campaign for our building a young lady challenged the board, asking “Why do we only have $1000.00 budgeted for outreach, but a million dollars planned for a church building.” To which one of my building committee members responded, “No, we have $1,001,000.00 budgeted for outreach.
The last Sunday we worshipped at the Lion’s Den we had 36 people out, the next Sunday when we opened the doors at Gatehouse, we had 105 people out.
The reason we sacrificed for the capital campaign and the reason we will give our time and energy and our talents and our money is to see people come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and saviour and if the sacrifice means that one more person will be in the kingdom of God then it has been worth it.
But let’s continue to make sure that we know that this building is not Denn’s, it’s not yours and it’s not Cornerstone’s. It is God’s. And it is for his purposes.
1 Chronicles 22:5 David said, “My son Solomon is still young and inexperienced. And since the Temple to be built for the Lord must be a magnificent structure, famous and glorious throughout the world, I will begin making preparations for it now.” So David collected vast amounts of building materials before his death.
4) They Both Required Planning
Even though it wasn’t going to be David who built the temple, it was David who laid the groundwork. It was David who dreamed the dreams and David who made all the preparation for the work that needed to be done. Solomon got the credit, but David made the things that Solomon did possible.
There were times when I looked at property and buildings and commercial sites and churches and met with the building committee and talked to leaders in the church that I felt like we were spinning our wheels. But then God would remind me that time spent planning is never wasted time.
The reality of it is that the members of the building committee poured countless hours of work into the preparation and planning before the first tree was ever cut on our property.
1 Chronicles 29:3 And now because of my devotion to the Temple of my God, I am giving all of my own private treasures of gold and silver to help in the construction. This is in addition to the building materials I have already collected for his holy Temple.
5) They Both Entailed a Cost This was the beginning of David’s speech when he tells all those gathered how much he was prepared to give to see the temple become a reality.
Houses of God have never come cheap, and the temple was no exception, and neither are our buildings.
The people of Israel had to make sacrifices to make the temple a reality. They had to make financial sacrifices and they had to make sacrifices of time and talents.
Anything worth having is worth paying for.
Our buildings were the result of those who called Cornerstone their church home making sacrifices.
People gave sacrificially of their time and their money. The sacrifices that folks made were in the hundreds of dollars for single moms and teens right up to gifts of tens of thousands of dollars.
Our theme for the capital campaign was, “Not equal ggiving, but equal sacrifice.” And that is still true today.
And I wish I could say that everyone contributed and sacrificed, but that wasn’t a reality.
As in most areas of God’s work, there were those who made a sacrifice and gave and others who stood back and watched.
You know what I’ve said before, when it comes to giving some people will stop at nothing, some sign in blood and some sign in pencil.
And the cost didn’t end when the Temple was complete. There was also to on going cost and maintenance. And that was provided for by the sacrificial gifts of God’s people, through their tithes and through their offerings.
Through December and January close to $11,000.00 came in for the care campaign, and that will be used this Spring for interior and exterior painting at our Gatehouse Campus. After all, it has been twenty years.
But it doesn’t stop there. This year not only are we asking for you to fill out an estimate of giving card for next year’s budget, but we will be asking what you would be able and willing to give over the next 12 months to put a new roof on our Gatehouse building.
The cost? We have estimates range from around $70,000.00 for asphalt shingles, right up to $170, 000.00 for an interlocking aluminium roof.
How will we decide what option we go with?
You will decide with your response. It’s not an emergency, but it will need to be replaced soon, and so we would challenge each of you to ask God what you can sacrificially commit to between now and March 2026.
And when we receive what we need, we will go ahead with the project.