You don’t need to escape this body so that you might live a holy life and glorify your Father in heaven. Rather, the apostle Paul says right now in your body—with its weaknesses, with its sin nature and its indwelling sin, with all the problems you encounter, the injuries you endure, the temptations you have—you can glorify God in your body. That’s where the calling is. You can’t get apart from this body to glorify him. You’re called, as a Christian, to glorify your Father in heaven and his Son and the Holy Spirit through bodily life.

YouTube video link: here

Glorify God in Your Body

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says,

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, whom you have within you from God? You are not your own, for you are bought with a price, so glorify God in your body.

That is a majorly counter-cultural statement to say, “You are not your own.” We hear at just about every turn in our world that you are your own. You make your own decisions about your body. And the apostle Paul says you’re not your own. God made your body. He owns it. And in fact, he doubly owns it because Christ purchased it. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

We can come to this major reality of your body being a temple with the wrong starting point. We think about our bodies being or needing to be impressive because they’re temples. But the main thing about the temple is not how the temple itself looks. The temple is a reflection. It’s a covering for the reality that’s inside. So that’s where the apostle Paul starts—with the presence of the Holy Spirit—which is so amazing.

The apostles say this over and over again, that the Spirit dwells in us, that you have him within you. It is almost too spectacular a thought to even have unless the apostles tell us that God himself, in his Holy Spirit, dwells in us. So, this is the most important reality in these verses, that God himself, in his Holy Spirit poured out by his resurrected Son, has drawn near to us who are in Christ. We have the Holy Spirit. So, then we think of ourselves as temples and our bodies as temples because of this treasure that we have in these jars of clay—that the Holy Spirit himself is in us.

But Paul doesn’t only mention the Spirit’s presence; he also mentions Jesus’s purchase. He says, “You’re not your own, for you were bought with a price.” We are doubly his if we are in Christ.

Read More