1 Corinthians 4-7
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” (v.19) As a kid growing up in the church, I didn’t particularly like this passage. My parents would use this passage to enforce some sort of rule to restrict my behavior; for instance, this was the principle verse they used to discourage me from getting tattoos or dying my hair. I thought of it as one of those ‘kill joy’ passages that made the Christian life boring.
It was unfortunate that I thought of this verse as God’s restrictive voice. Like many other times throughout my life, I have mistaken God’s compassion and care for a harsh ruling judge. When I do this, I forget that Paul is making an important point here: that we should not separate the actions of our body from our spirituality; and that actions of the body can harm our spiritual life. In these chapters, Paul especially notes that sexual immortality harms our spiritual life. The action of uniting our bodies with anything that pulls us away from God is detrimental to our relationship with God, and it shows a dependence on something that God wants to free us from: sex, food, drugs, body image, etc.
Our bodies do strange things: they try to control us in many ways. Our bodies command us to eat and sleep and desire all sorts self-fulfillment. Our bodies are also amazing creations. They are the homes that God has given us for this life. In these past chapters, I get the sense that we should not devalue these bodies that God has given us, no matter how weak or strong we feel in them. For the life that God has given us is both physical and spiritual, and God intends for us to glorify Him in both realms.
Jim
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