Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor misfortune. So I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord said to my father David, ‘Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, shall build the house for my name.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, October 26, 2025
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God’s residence in the temple of Solomon is marked by what cannot be seen, whereas the temple God builds for us in Christ is marked by what can be seen.
The readings for today bid us to juxtapose two temples: that of Solomon and that of Christ. At first, the framing provided by the narrative lectionary appears to set them at odds. In 1 Kings, we have the building of the temple and God’s glory filling it, whereas in John, we have Jesus prophesying the destruction of the temple. All but the most biblically literate listeners will need reminding that the temple of Jesus’ day was the one built to replace the temple of Solomon after it was destroyed by the Babylonians nearly six-hundred years earlier. The destruction of the first temple was old news by the time of Jesus as evidenced by its recent renovation and expansion under Herod the Great, but the wound of its destruction still carried significant cultural weight. That Jesus’ prophecy of the temple’s destruction is contained in all four gospels testifies to the impact it would have had on his hearers.
While neither the first or second temple probably means much to the people in our pews today, there is a temple whose destruction they are likely witnessing and mourning: their local congregation. It is no secret that congregational life is undergoing a transformation in the United States which many are experiencing as destruction. Like the temple of Jesus’ time, many of our members spent decades of their lives building something up which is now needing to undergo a radical change if it is going to meet the needs of our world as it is today. Regardless of what the preacher might want to preach on, the potential for these passages to evoke heavy sentiments cannot be overlooked.
With that in mind, what can these passages say together to your listeners? For those on the younger or newer end, those members who have a sober hopefulness for what is ahead for the church, these passages bid us to attend to the loss among us. Our eagerness for the new thing that God is doing should not deafen us to the grief of those who, like Solomon, experienced the joy of building a place where they truly came to know God, come to an end. It is a mistake to chide those who are morning the loss of something as somehow failing to trust in God doing a new thing, even as they might resist those changes as a form of denial that change is coming. For those who are experiencing these feelings of loss, these passages remind us that destruction and rebuilding are part of the essence of what it means for a temple to belong to God. God built a temple for Godself in Jesus for the express purpose that it would be torn down, all so God could raise it up again, and us with it.
We do not have to like destruction and change, nor are we necessarily called to be the agents of it. The idea that we are called to change the church by hastening its “destruction” is here, too, repudiated, as destruction always comes from without, not within. What we can find here is the call to be faithful in the midst of change. This is both a faithfulness to one another as we mourn change and faithfulness to a God who works salvation from destruction and does a new thing always and only for our benefit. What was given by God and what will be given have one thing in common: the heart of God’s abiding love with and for us.
