Honoring God with Your Body
“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)
We hear the chant today, “My body, my choice!” Those who have lost a Biblical worldview may say that, but the Christ follower cannot. As a Christian, we have yielded our right to ourselves to a higher calling, and we recognize that our body is a sacred place where the Holy Spirit lives. Because of rampant sexual immorality and gender confusion in Paul’s day, he writes to the Corinthian church, “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) The Living Bible paraphrases this passage with even more clarity, “Your own body does not belong to you. For God has bought you with a great price. So use every part of your body to give glory back to God because He owns it.”
We honor God with our bodies when we commit our whole self - body, soul, and spirit to the One who gave His life as a ransom for us on the cross. His death provided for our atonement with God, and His resurrection life indwells our bodies by His Holy Spirit to transform us from the inside out into the likeness of Jesus. When you committed your heart to Jesus, did you commit your body to Him as well? In Romans 12:1 (NLT), Paul continues to stress this theme to Christ followers in Rome. He says, “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him.”
Before we trusted Christ, we used our body for sinful pleasures and purposes, but now that we belong to Him, we want to use our body for His glory. We honor God by being good stewards of the body He inhabits. That means taking care of our bodies, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Honoring God with your body includes scheduling times for physical exercise and fueling your body with a nutritional diet. One health expert said, “The best diet and exercise program is the one you will do.”
Honoring God with our body also means we guard our minds to think on those things that are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. In Philippians 4:8, we’re told to “Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” You can do that by being intentional in giving God your mind. In Romans 12:2 (NLT), the Bible says, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
When we commit our bodies to God, He begins to do new work in us. He alters the way we think recreating us in Christ so that we may know His will for our lives. Your thoughts will either be controlled by the world or by God’s Word. God wants to transform our minds. That word “transform” literally means “metamorphosis.” It describes the change from within that the Holy Spirit brings when we commit our minds to God. Are you conforming to the thinking of this world by the pressure of our culture or being transformed from within by the power of God’s Word?
I challenge you today, if you have not already done this, to give your body to God. Tell Him your desire to honor Him with your body and ask Him to fill you completely with the Holy Spirit, to teach your mind, control your emotions and so direct your will that it will become demonstratively obvious to everyone around you that Jesus lives in you. Let Him do the work of changing you from the inside out so that others see Christ in you by the way you act and speak and love. This is countercultural but it will honor God.