One of the most beautiful promises of the New Testament is that God will come to live inside of us, his children. We, both individually and collectively, are made into temples of God:

Romans 8:9     You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.  10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.  11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. 

1 Corinthians 3:16     Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 

1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 

2 Corinthians 6:16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Ephesians 2:21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 

Colossians 1:27 To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 

1 Peter 2:4     As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—  5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

According to the New Testament, the implications of this are that we are to be holy, set apart from “common” things, just as the Old Testament temple was a special, sanctified place. God lives in us! We aren’t meant for immorality. Christ in us, the hope of glory. We are meant for good, not evil. The sanctifying Spirit dwells in us. Because of that, we are to dedicate our bodies to God’s service. The church is the temple of God. Therefore, anything that we do to harm the church is an attack on God’s temple.

We need to recapture that feeling of awe, the recognition of the holiness that is ours, not because of our human efforts, but because the Creator of all has chosen to make a home within our hearts.