Description
Meditating on Our Bodies as Temples of the Holy Spirit
Reflecting on 1 Corinthians 6:19, this episode explores the prof… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
I’m sure like me, you’ve heard people say with great piety, “My body is a temple!”, meaning that they’re very careful about what they eat or drink. Well, let’s take that phrase in its original context, meditating on one Corinthians chapter six, verse 19. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own.
So the Holy Spirit is placed within us as Christians, as a gift from God. That makes us a temple. We have the Holy Spirit inside us and we in our bodies, we are somehow mysteriously enclosing God, in much the way that God’s presence came into the tabernacle, in the times of the ancient Israelites.
Well, what does it mean then to be a temple of the Holy Spirit? At the end of the verse, it says, you are not your own. That’s part of what it means, isn’t it? We are not to do sacrilege to the temple of God. And that goes much, much further than what we eat and drink.
It’s all about what we take in and what we output. My friends, is it only holy things coming in and going out from you? I cannot claim that to be true for myself at all times.
But we aren’t our own. We’ve been bought, haven’t we? And our whole lives are now to be laid down in the service of the One who loves us. And we do that with pleasure and delight because he loves us and we love him.
And so for this reason, we don’t desecrate this temple, we only enter into holy relationships. We make sure that what we’re watching, what we’re reading is glorifying to God.
And yeah, this is a challenge because there’s so much around that interests us that isn’t glorifying to God. But we aren’t our own. So what does that mean? What are our responsibilities? This verse takes some further meditation, doesn’t it?
