AP

1 Corinthians 3:16-17   Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?   If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

What a blessing it is to us that the Church in Corinth was plagued with so many internal problems!  It means that we have in the canon of God’s inspired Word two of the letters the Apostle Paul had to write to them to clear up these problems and to set them on the correct spiritual course.  As we read through this correspondence we see that fallen human nature is the same in every age, and we need Paul’s admonitions today as much as they did then.  And hopefully we can all benefit from them.

Our culture today is constantly reminding us of our need to care for the planet on which we live.  This ought to be obvious to Christians because of what God tells us about WHO we are (‘made in the image and likeness of God’), and WHAT he requires of us in that capacity (to “rule over [be responsible CEOs for] the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”)  (Genesis 1:26).  However, our present culture DOES NOT remind us of our individual responsibilities as ‘temples of God’s Holy Spirit’!  In fact, it goes out of its way to divert our attention AWAY FROM our responsibilities as God’s ‘sacred’ image-bearers.  Of course, our SIN has MARRED our image-bearing and HAS SEPARATED us from our relationship with our Creator, and we are only restored into this relationship when, by repentance-and-faith, we commit our lives to Jesus Christ as Saviour-and-Lord.

As the Apostle will say later in this letter, “Do you not know that your body is a temple 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 HONOUR GOD with your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).  It is important for us, as Christians, to keep clearly before us what our responsibilities are as ‘God’s sacred temple’, and the impact this has on the way we live out every aspect of our lives in the daily presence of all our family members, friends, neighbours and colleagues.
– Bruce Christian