What is the use of a temple without worship?  And what kind of worship is that in which the centre point is not an altar?  That is the sort of temple that a great many professing Christians are.  They have forgotten the altar in their spiritual architecture.  Have you got one in your heart?  It is but a poor, half-furnished sanctuary that has not.  Where is yours?  The key and the secret of all noble life is to yield up one’s own will, to sacrifice oneself.  There never was anything done in this world worth doing, and there never will be till the end of time, of which sacrifice is not the centre and inspiration.  And the difference between all other and lesser nobilities of life, and the supreme beauty of a true Christian life is that the sacrifice of the Christian is properly a sacrifice—­that is, an offering to God, done for the sake of the great love wherewith He has loved us.  As Christ is the one true Temple, and we become so by partaking of Him, so He is the one Sacrifice for sins for ever, and we become sacrifices only through Him.  If there be any lesson which comes out of this great truth of Christians as temples, it is not a lesson of pluming ourselves on our dignity, or losing ourselves in the mysticisms which lie near this truth, but it is the hard lesson—­If a temple, then an altar; if an altar, then a sacrifice.  ’Ye are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, that ye may offer spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God’—­sacrifice, priest, temple, all in one; and all for the sake and by the might of that dear Lord who has given Himself a bleeding Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, that we might offer a Eucharistic sacrifice of thanks and praise and self-surrender unto Him, and to His Father God.

IV.  And, lastly, this great truth of my text enforces the solemn lesson of the necessary sanctity of the Christian life.

‘The temple of God,’ says the context, ’the temple of God is holy, which (holy persons) ye are.’  The plain first idea of the temple is a place set apart and consecrated to God.

Hence, of course, follows the idea of purity, but the parent idea of ‘holiness’ is not purity, which is the consequence, but consecration or separation to God, which is the root.

And so in very various applications, on which I have not time to dwell now, this idea of the necessary sanctity of the Temple is put forth in these two letters to the Corinthian Church.  Corinth was a city honeycombed with the grossest immoralities; and hence, perhaps, to some extent the great emphasis and earnestness and even severity of the Apostle in dealing with some forms of evil.

But without dwelling on the details, let me just point you to three directions in which this general notion of sanctity is applied.  There is that of our context here ’Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?  If any man destroy the temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God is holy, and such ye are.’