100 Days to a Healthier ChurchSample

Day 75

Today’s Big Idea: Your body, a temple. Temples are places of worship, but we don’t worship the temple, we worship the God who lives there.

Key Verse: Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

Thoughts to Consider: The information in the verse today is almost overwhelmed by the attitude of Paul as he delivers it. “Don’t you know?” he asks, as if he’s shocked that this isn’t obvious to them. He’s not informing them that they’re God’s temple, he’s reminding them of it and reprimanding them for not acting like temples should act—that is, by honoring the God who lives there. That is the purpose of a temple after all. It exists to honor the deity who lives in it, not to serve the priests who work there.

We, as God’s people, are not our own. Our bodies are not ours to do with as we please. We serve the One who lives in us, and everything we do should honor Him. In this passage, Paul indelicately says we shouldn’t join those bodies with prostitutes, which was an apparent problem in Corinth. But more than just abstaining from such evil acts, we should ask ourselves every day, “Is the way I’m treating my body the way I want to treat the home where a holy God lives?”