Temple

Here's the most famous place you've never heard of. It's St. Peter's Church Hall in Liverpool, England. It looks like a typical church gym except for the heavily-timbered cathedral ceiling and missing basketball hoops.

St. Peter's was having a church social with a local music group performing. During a break in the music, Paul, a 15-year-old guest, played songs on the guitar and piano impressing the teen band leader, John. A few weeks later, John Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join the Quarrymen, later known as The Beatles. That first meeting was July 6, 1957 - a historic place and moment in music but nobody knew it.

The Liverpool Museum reflected, "That meeting didn't just change the lives of John and Paul, it was the spark that lit the creative (fuse) on a cultural revolution that would reverberate around the world."

St. Peter's Church Hall is a temple where two music greats met. The stage from the hall is almost an "altar" since it was moved to a museum in Liverpool.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Altar; Worship - Christians also worship at an altar, but it is exclusive to New Testament believers (Heb. 13:10); 2) Temple - The New Testament names three places as the Temple of the living God on earth: 1) The physical body of Christ (Jn. 2:19; Matt. 26:61; Mark 14:58); 2) The church, the body of Christ (1 Cor. 3:16-17); 3) The body of the individual believer (1 Cor. 6:19).

Rabbis in Israel have spent many years searching for a qualified red heifer. Finally in September of 2022, a Texas man has delivered five red heifers to four Israeli rabbis so the young cows can be slaughtered and burned to produce the ash necessary for a ritual purification prescribed in Numbers 19:2–3.

Some Jews believe the ritual is a step toward the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Some Christians believe that “third temple” will set the stage for the Antichrist.

Editor’s Note: The red heifers must be monitored for defects by the rabbis until they are three-years-old. At that time, if unblemished, they would be suitable for use as sacrifices in the red heifer ritual. The Mishnah, which is a written embodiment of Jewish oral tradition, teaches that only nine red heifers were sacrificed from the time of Tabernacle worship until the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.

Orthodox Church officials in Russia discovered in 2008 that one of their church buildings had disappeared. Poof—gone! The 200-year-old building northeast of Moscow had gone unused for a decade, but the Orthodox Church, which was experiencing growth, was considering reopening the church building, and that's when they discovered their building wasn't there.

They had to get to the bottom of this. After investigating the matter, the church officials did not blame aliens from outer space for the missing structure. Rather, they said the perpetrators were villagers from a nearby town, whom they said had taken and sold bricks from the building to a businessman. For each brick, the thieves received one ruble (about 4 cents).

This two-story church facility did not go from being a building to not being a building in one bulldozing stroke. Rather, the bricks were apparently chiseled out one by one by lots of people. In the same way, some churches—built not of bricks but of "living stones," that is of Christians—are not reduced in one fatal stroke but rather by Christians one by one choosing not to be involved. Stay home and watch a TV preacher. Read the Bible and pray, but don't mess with the organized church. Do your own spiritual thing. Each decision means one less living stone. In the end, the church, intended by God to be the display of Christ's glory, is chiseled away. Conversely, each person who gets involved helps to build a holy temple in the Lord made up of living bricks, where Christ is glorified.