TENANT OR HOMEOWNER

You realize, don’t you, that you are the temple of God, and God himself is present in you? No one will get by with vandalizing God’s temple, you can be sure of that. God’s temple is sacred – and you, remember, are the temple.

1st Cor. 3:16 (MSG)

If someone comes up to you and says “my house is always disturbing me that it is too cold so I tore open the roof to allow the sunlight find its way in. The rain may soak all my furniture and drench me but it really doesn’t matter. I just want my house to be happy”. Your initial reaction might be to wonder if it he was joking or perhaps he has some more treatments to undergo before being discharged from the psychiatrist home he apparently ran away from.

That is the way some humans talk to God with the way they use their body especially when it comes to acts of sexual immorality. When God had formed man, He breathed into his nostrils and man became a living being. Without the breath of God, man is mere dust. (Gen. 2:7). Man is a spirit having a soul and living in a body. The real man therefore is not the container but the content. We are occupants of a house-body and we see our world by looking out through two windows called eyes (Eccl. 12:3). Some of us are storey buildings whilst others are bungalows. Some are narrow, others are wide. Our roof or paint can either be black, brown, white etc depending on the Makers design or the home owner’s renovation.

Sexual immorality is fast becoming a norm in our society with the illusion that “everybody is doing it” – nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that a man can be reduced to a loaf of bread and that his soul is destroyed when he indulges in sexual immorality remains ever true (Proverbs 6:26, 32). 

Are you a tenant in you own body, paying the rent of indulgence to your body at the detriment of your soul? You are meant to mortify the flesh and all the lusts thereof: and that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That’s a life shaped by feelings instead of by God. It’s because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger…you know better now, so make sure it’s all gone for good…(Colossians 3:5-8; MSG)

Same principle of chaste applies to our feeding habits. It is said that the most common form of malnutrition in the western world today is obesity. We are finding it more and more difficult to watch what we eat and it is apparent in lives being cut short because of improper feeding. It’s your house; make it cozy and comfortable for your spirit. Your body doesn’t own you, you own it and God owns you (1st Cor. 6:13; 9:27).