Home of the Holy Spirit | Matthew 3:1-4:1

Sin is a lot like hoarding—something ugly and destructive that people gradually become comfortable living with. The story of that South City building makes the point painfully clear. From the outside it looked promising, but once inside, the reality was revolting: rooms packed with filth, rot, insects, waste, and decay—so bad it took months of cleansing and dumpsters of trash to make it livable. And that visceral disgust most people feel when they see something like that is used as a metaphor for something deeper: the holiness of God and His revulsion toward sin. Leviticus helps people grasp holiness through the language of cleanliness. Humans can understand, at least in part, the difference between clean and unclean, orderly and defiled—and God uses that to teach what it means that He is holy. God is not casual about sin. The sins people tolerate, excuse, or even secretly enjoy are not “small” to Him; they are spiritually filthy and unlivable. A holy God finds sin disgusting—lying, cruelty, sexual immorality, drunkenness, and every hidden corruption people stash away in the heart. That raises the terrifying question: how can sinners ever approach a holy God and not be consumed? The Old Testament answers that question with types and shadows. God taught Israel through sacrifices that the wages of sin is death, and that sinful people cannot draw near without atonement. The warning is severe: when Aaron’s sons offered “strange fire” in Leviticus 10—worship God did not command—fire came out and consumed them. Status did not protect them. God was teaching that He is not to be treated lightly. The New Testament confirms the same truth: in Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira lie to the Holy Spirit and God strikes them dead, showing that God’s holiness is not an Old Testament relic. He is loving, yes—but also fearfully holy. And this leads to the central question of the sermon: how can messed-up sinners become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit? Because that is exactly what the New Testament claims—God does not dwell in temples made with hands, but in a holy people. That privilege should produce awe and trembling, because the Holy Spirit is not an entertainer. He does not exist to give thrills and emotional experiences. He comes to make a people holy. The answer is Christ. Jesus fulfilled all righteousness. The incarnation begins in the womb—God taking on flesh—living a sinless life, tempted yet without sin, accomplishing what no one else ever could. Then He died the death sinners deserved, bearing sin in His body and giving His people His righteousness. Because Christ has fulfilled all righteousness and paid the penalty of sin, God can now make the unclean clean. The hoarders of sin can be washed, declared righteous, and truly become the home of the Holy Spirit. Matthew 3 then is framed as John’s urgent preparation: a sinful people must be made ready to meet a holy Jesus. Read the full blog post here: https://cotwstl.org/home-of-the-holy-spirit-matthew-31-41/ Do you want to support Church of The Word? https://cotwstl.org/give/ Check out our church here! https://cotwstl.org/ #biblestudy #faith