Honor God With Your Body
1 Corinthians 6:19 - 20 Lifestyle motivation from the Apostle Paul that is still applicable today
“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, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.”
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NLT
I happened upon these verses today as I was looking for Scripture about temptation, and I immediately thought of two things:
If my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, He must be pretty upset with the run-down condition of the temple!
God is the ultimate lifestyle coach.
When Paul wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians, he was primarily concerned with one widespread sin pattern that the people of Corinth engaged in — sexual immorality. Think today’s progressive fixation on sex is bad? In 55 AD, the typical Greco-Roman citizen actively participated in pornography, homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, and bestiality, and some of the early church members hadn’t yet moved on more godly lifestyles. They weren’t just tied up in the sins of the flesh, but worshipped idols, stole property, swindled others, and were often drunk.
The epistle pointed out some specific members of the church, but Paul rightly wanted the entire body of the church to mend their ways. His way to do that was to point out that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit. Temples are places sacred to God, pure from immorality, so when we’re filled with the Spirit, that should influence our behavior. By committing various forms of immorality (especially sexual immorality) as Christians, we are trashing God’s temple.
Paul explains that we belong to God, being purchased at the price of Jesus’ blood on the cross. Honest people take good care of things that don’t belong to them, so we don’t have the right to abuse what is God’s! Instead, our bodies should be used to glorify God. Charles H. Spurgeon, who had memorable insights about the Bible, said this about 1 Corinthians 6:20 —
“Your body was a willing horse when it was in the service of the devil, let it not be a sluggish hack now that it draws the chariot of Christ.”1
What great motivation for taking better care of our bodies and souls through the prompting of the Holy Spirit!
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Heaven Father, I thank You for creating my body, my spirit, and my soul. I thank You that I have been saved by grace through faith in Christ, and praise You for the Holy Spirit dwelling in my body. May my body be a living sacrifice, acceptable to You, and I pray that You guide me away from sin patterns that defile Your temple. AMEN.
Spurgeon, Charles Haddon "The New Park Street Pulpit" Volumes 1-6 and "The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit" Volumes 7-63 (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim Publications, 1990)