Jesus cleansed the temple in the beginning of His ministry and during the last week, the Passion Week. The same things as He drove out the first time had crept back into the temple again. Today we are the temple of God and I believe we can experience a parallel thing in our inner man, our inner life or also called our soul. At Salvation God dealt with the obvious sins in our lives but through time He goes to the very root of those sins, our inner life.

As a man thinks in his heart so is he declares Solomon in Proverbs, to have a real change in life our hearts need to change. Jesus gave man the diagnosis ‘heart-problem’ when He described from where sin is flowing in man’s life, out of the heart of man comes….

So during Passion Week Jesus again drives out the money changers, those buying and selling in the temple and proclaimed ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’. What is prayer? Prayer is another word for talking with God, communicating with God. It’s not supposed to be a one way communication but a two way conversation. The temple was created to be a meeting place between man and God, just as new creations in Christ we are the temple of God and God has planned our hearts, our inner life to be the meeting place between man and God.

When this space is being filled up with all kinds of stuff not needed for that meeting to take place, the relationship breaks. The way to restore it is prayer. Not just long and loud but lovingly and intimate, silent and passionate. Prayer means worship, adoration and expressing my love for the one I love. This simply means time!

All love relations needs time, place and occasion otherwise they slowly die, fades away, disappears without us even notice it sometimes. And one day we wake up to the fact we’ve lost what we’ve had, we’ve become strangers living under the same roof, involved in some common projects and have maybe some common interests, but the passion is gone, the loving touch has long gone into hiding. What do we do then

Prov 1:23 ‘Turn at my rebuke; Surely ^pI will pour out my spirit on you;  I will make my words known to you’

Matsjan