Jesus never leaves things in this sinful world the way they already are. When He went to the Temple, He saw how the religious practices of the time had become corrupt. He saw how people had taken the Old Testament sacrifices and turned them into something purely transactional, imagining that salvation was something that could be bought with money. And so He turned over the tables of the moneychangers, even as He tried to revolutionize their way of thinking.

But purifying His people’s hearts and minds would ultimately require much more drastic action. Just a few years later, Jesus would allow the Temple of His own body to be destroyed, when He was arrested, beaten, and crucified. He held nothing back in His struggle to cleanse His people of our sin.

So, what does all that mean for us? Simply this: if we would follow Jesus, we must not tolerate any of the remnants of sin in our lives. Just as we have transferred our trust to Jesus and away from all the legalistic ways in which we may have tried to save ourselves, so we must root out anything within us that continues to be self-centered, anything that is not focused on God and His glory. In short, followers of Jesus must share His zeal for the pure worship of God (2:17).

So, in this New Year, will we confine our resolutions to those that will bring us and our loved ones greater health or wealth or happiness? Or will we also seek holiness in the same unqualified, uncompromising way that Jesus did?

John 2:13-25 (ESV)

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there.
15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.
16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”
19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
23 Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.
24 But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people
25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.