Remember, the body is a temple.
Specifically, your body is a temple. The little nag shows up uninvited at the doorstep of my weakest moments. It’s insufferable, really. It isn’t impressed by the donut’s extra cream filling. It really cares what we look at. It always puts on a helmet. It totally lifts, bro. Oh, and it wanted to go to bed four hours ago.
“Fine. The body is a temple. Who let you in anyway?”
I submit, but I can count my lifetime temple visits on one hand and I have never worshiped at one, so I don’t pause to consider what this really means. I just hear this little killjoy’s incessant “No”. *sigh* Why can’t I have nice things.
Time to investigate this whole temple thing. Looks like the little verse in my head comes from 1 Corinthians 6. Great, but the Bible is huge, does it speak of a temple anywhere else? Oh. It’s everywhere.
I find it in the meticulously detailed Tabernacle of Exodus. I find it in the intentionality of the rituals of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I find it in the years of waiting and planning by the ancient Hebrew kings. I rejoice at its completion with Solomon. I mourn its destruction in Jeremiah. I long for its return. With each account I discover that the Temple represents something precious; something powerful. It is the statement there is something sacred, that something (or rather someone) is God, and that God is worthy of a sacred place.
Temple. Sacred. I don’t think in these terms…
…But as I work my way back from my Old Testament adventure to my little nagging friend in 1 Corinthians I begin to realize I had better. I realize it is not a pesky little nag, it is a life-altering claim: I don’t have a temple or sacred place to go visit because, if the Holy Spirit now dwells in me, I am the temple. I am to treat my body and my soul as the sacred dwelling place of the Spirit of God.
Honestly my mind can’t even handle that. I cannot fully grasp the ramifications of the Creator of everything sending His Spirit to dwell within me. God, You know me. You know me better than I know me, and I know that I am horrible. How. How can you see the same envious, judgmental, slanderous, prideful, sinful man I see and choose to be any part of that? But there it is:
1 Cor. 6:19-20 “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, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
This calls for a new paradigm.
I am not to avoid donuts, or harmful images, or laziness, or selfishness primarily for the sake of my own health, or even the honoring of my future wife, as noble as those reasons are. I am to do this because my body and my soul is a temple of the sacred, living God, and He is worthy.
So, my little nagging friend, come on in. Tonight, and every day after, you are my honored guest.
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