Simply Fellowship — Episode 7: Not in Temples Made with Hands

Welcome

​Welcome to Above All Love. This is Simply Fellowship — the Good News, quietly told.

​This is a gentle space. No pressure, no performance. You don't need to have answers about buildings or belonging, or about where God is or isn't. You don't need to have a church to come back to, or feel the loss of one that has gone.

​You're welcome exactly as you are, wherever you are reading this — in a home, in a garden, on a phone in a waiting room, or anywhere else entirely.

​If you need to read slowly, or stop and come back — that's completely fine. There's no right way to be here. Just be here.

​Hymn

​We begin with a hymn verse. Read it slowly. You might want to sit with each line before moving on.

​O thou not made with hands,

Not throned above the skies,

Nor walled with shining walls,

Nor framed with stones of price,

More bright than gold or gem,

God's own Jerusalem.

— F. T. Palgrave

​Prayer

​Living God,

​Thank you that you are not confined to any building we have made for you. Thank you that no steeple contains you, no locked door shuts you out, no sale sign diminishes you.

​Meet us today wherever we are — in our homes and our routines, our advocacy and our wandering, our walks through the woods and our late nights on screens. Remind us that we carry something we did not build and cannot lose. Remind us that the Presence is not somewhere we have to travel to.

​And if we have grieved the loss of a place that felt holy to us — let us grieve it honestly, and then find you here, still, in this body, in this breath, in this moment.

​Amen.

​Old Testament Anchor

​Before we reach the New Testament's radical rethinking of the temple, we need to hear the older voice that already knew this truth.

​"Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things My hand has made, and all those things exist," says the Lord. "But on this one will I look: on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word."

— Isaiah 66:1–2 (NKJV)

​This is the word underneath the early church's astonishing shift. Long before Stephen stood before the Sanhedrin, long before Paul preached in Athens, Isaiah had heard God say it plainly: the house you could build me is not the house I want. What I look for is not architecture. It is a heart.

​Scripture

​Our reading today is drawn from Acts 7:48–50 and Acts 17:24 (Easy English Bible).

​"But the Most High God does not live in buildings that people make. As the prophet wrote: The Lord says, 'Heaven is my throne. The earth is a place to rest my feet. What kind of house would you build for me? Where would I rest? I myself have made all these things.'"

​"God made the world and everything in it. He is Lord of heaven and earth. He does not live in buildings that people make."

​Devotion

​In Scotland, it is becoming a common sight to see a For Sale sign outside a kirk.

​Many of these buildings — some centuries old, some the anchor of a community for generations — are being converted into flats, bars, community centres. On a cultural level, it can feel like loss. It is a visible sign of a shifting landscape. But we must be careful what we mourn.

​Because the buildings are just that. Bricks and mortar. The work of human hands, offered to God, yes — but not the dwelling place of God.

​Stephen knew this, and it cost him something to say it. Standing before the Sanhedrin, accused of speaking against the temple, he turned the accusation back into a question: has God ever actually lived there? He quoted Isaiah and then said it plainly: the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands.

​The whole arc of the Old Testament had been bending toward this truth: God cannot be housed. The temple was always a meeting place, not a cage. Paul understood this too. Standing in Athens — a city of extraordinary temples — he told the philosophers something their architecture had never quite managed to say: He is the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

​In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul turns to the believers and says: do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you?

​The architecture God has chosen is human flesh.

​There is something clarifying about the absence of a building. It asks you the question directly: where, then, do you think God is? Where do you expect to meet him?

​The answer, it turns out, is: here. Wherever here is.

​In the home where the morning prayer is said. In the advocacy meeting where someone is fighting for a person who cannot fight for themselves. In the woods where the trees do not ask you to perform. In this screen, in this moment, between these words and whoever is reading them.

​Wondering Questions

• ​I wonder which spaces have felt most holy to me — and what it was that made them feel that way?
• ​I wonder whether I have sometimes looked for God in a location, when he has been present in a person all along?
• ​I wonder what the church could become if it truly believed it was not a building to maintain but a people to be inhabited?

​An Invitation

​If you have felt, lately, that the church is shrinking — that the visible signs of faith are fading from the landscape — you are not wrong to notice it. But the church was never the building.

​If you want to respond today, you might simply say:

I don't know where you are, but I am willing to be a place where you dwell. Come and make your home in me.

​Going Out

​Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

May you carry today the quiet knowledge that you are not empty —

That the Most High has taken up residence in the ordinary building of your life.

May the sacred travel with you into every unsacred-looking place.

And may you know yourself to be what no bricks and mortar ever quite managed to be —

A living temple, a dwelling place, a home for the Holy.

​Above all, love.

Amen.