Honor God with Your Whole Body

1Cor. 6:9-20 NLT  

   9 Don’t you realize that those who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, 10 or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God. 11 Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 

   12 You say, “I am allowed to do anything” —but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything. 13 You say, “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” (This is true, though someday God will do away with both of them.) But you can’t say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. 14 And God will raise us from the dead by his power, just as he raised our Lord from the dead. 

   15 Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! 16 And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.” 17 But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. 

   18 Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 19 Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, 20 for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

I overheard a conversation about how terrible the society was these days. Then the conversants proceeded to identify the violence around the world, the obsession with perverse sexuality, the obsession with addictive experiences and such. It occurred to me that what they were discussing was with us always. Since the fall humanity has lived as a fallen race. We have fallen into sin. Sin is the obsession with self over God. Anything the individual desires becomes first, regardless of who it harms or of whether God wants it or not. In fact, God is left out of consideration totally. But these are not the actions of Christ-followers, are they?

They should not be, though we certainly have to recognize that our church pews are filled with people claiming Christianity but engaged in the same behaviors as those lost in the world. And this was the case back when Paul wrote the Christians at Corinth in AD 60. They had come from a very fallen people as well and they struggled with residue of their fallenness in their church, just like we do in our churches today. Yet they dared to claim they were more spiritual than others who were Christians. Anytime you or I find ourselves reporting ourselves as better, somehow, than another brother or sister, we must watch out for an attack upon our Spiritual life has begun. We are not to look at how much better we are or are not than another. We are simply to look at what God requires of His people and seek His grace so we can live that way. And we should seek His grace so we can coach others to live that way-- doing so in unconditional love. The key is that we must honor God in all we do.

Your servant in Christ's Grace
Dan
drdanelliott@gmail.com