Something That Every Christian Should Know

1 Corinthians 6:19

The ancient philosopher Socrates said, " Knowledge is the one good;
and ignorance is the one evil."

Nothing can be as damaging or as dangerous as ignorance.
What you don't know can hurt you.

An ambassador from Spain, who did not know the English language very well,
came to America to serve his country.
He met an American diplomat and they begin to talk with each other.
The American asked the ambassador if he had any children.
The ambassador tried to explain that it was unfortunate, but his wife could not have a child.

The ambassador said, "My wife is impregnable."
Looking at the face of the American, he knew that was not quite the right word,
and so he tried again, "What I mean is my wife is inconceivable."
That obviously made matters worse, and he thought for a moment, and then, finally triumphantly said,
"What I'm trying to say is, my wife is unbearable."

The man was victimized by his own ignorance.
There are many Christians just like that man who are trapped by their own spiritual ignorance.

Jesus said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." (John 8: 32)
Notice it is not just the truth that sets you free; it is knowing the truth that sets you free.

There is a wonderful truth that every Christian should know.
Every Christian should know the truth of 1 Corinthians 6:19.
Verse 19 says, "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit."
Every Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
When Christians understand the importance and the implications of this great truth,
it will radically transform his or her life.

Every Christian's body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
There are those who would teach that being saved and receiving the Holy Spirit
are two different experiences.
They would say that first you get saved.
Then, later on in some kind of mystical experience, you receive the Holy Spirit.

There is a problem with that teaching because if you don't have the Holy Spirit you cannot
possibly be a Christian to start with.
Romans 8: 9 states, "If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His."
When we are saved, we receive the Holy Spirit or else we are not saved.

We must also understand that the Holy Spirit is not only a power that comes upon us;
He is also a Person who lives within us.
There is much talk about the power of the Holy Spirit, and that every Christian should have
the fullness of the Spirit's power.
We need to remember, that just as important as having the fullness of the Spirit's power, it is
also important to have the fullness of the Spirit's presence within us.

Our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
The temple in the Bible was a place of worship.
So, we must understand that our body, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, is also to be
a place of worship.
The Holy Spirit lives in our temple 24 hours a day.

Therefore, every waking moment of everyday, my body is to be a place of worship.
We don't come to church to worship, we bring our worship with us.
Our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit twenty four hours every day, seven days a week,
fifty two weeks a year.
Our body is not a hotel with a checkout time at 12 noon on Sunday.
Our body is a temple where the Spirit of God lives every moment of everyday.
Knowing this tells us how we need to treat our body.

When we speak of the body as being holy, that does not mean we ought to worship it.
People have a tendency to go to extremes when it comes to how they treat their bodies.
Some people ignore their bodies.

They let their bodies run down like an abandoned shack.
They let them get fat, flabby, and floppy, treating their stomachs like garbage disposals.
They looked like a "before" picture in a health club advertisement.

Then, there are those who go to the other extreme and idolize their bodies.
They run, lift weights, take vitamins, go on rigid diets to make their bodies healthier and stronger.
We should take care of our bodies, but not to go to extremes.
We shouldn't ignore the body, but we shouldn't idolize it either.
We should pick a middle ground.

We must have a real respect for our bodies.
We see the church building as a sanctuary that is holy and set apart to worship God.
When men come into the sanctuary, they remove their hats out of respect.
We teach our children not to be boisterous or frivolous in the church building because
it is the house of God.

A church building is not really the house of God.
You are the house of God.
You must have more respect for your body than you do for any building.
Consider the maintenance and care that goes into keeping up church buildings.
We must also give maintenance, care, respect, and love to our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit.
Our bodies must be treated as holy bodies that are set apart for the glory of God.

Your body that has been set apart for God's glory should be a healthy body.
The fact that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit should be a message to those who use tobacco.
We're told that on an average year more than 400,000 Americans will die with tobacco-related illnesses.
Most all of those who do smoke would say they know that they should not smoke.
God's Holy Spirit does not want His temple to be filled with smoke from tobacco.

Someone asked a pastor, "Do you believe that a Christian will go to heaven if he smokes?"
The pastor answered, "I not only believe that, I believe that he will get there much quicker."

1 Corinthians 6:19 also warns against gluttony.
It is just as wrong to stuff God's temple with food as it is to stuff God's temple with smoke.
Someone has said that "We dig our graves with our fork, embalm ourselves with alcohol,
and lay a tobacco wreath on the grave."
Someone has said that "rather than eating to live, too many of us live to eat."

That is why Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:13 said, "Foods for the stomach and the stomach
for foods, but God will destroy both it and them."
So we must not make a god out of our bellys.
Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.

We must strive to have healthy bodies not so that we will live longer, but so that we will live better.
A person with a sound mind and a sound heart live much better in a sound body.

In 1 Corinthians 6:20 Paul said, "For you were bought at a price."
The reason why God the Spirit lives in our bodies is because God the Son has bought our bodies.
This verse reminds us of our redemption.
The word, bought, comes from the Greek word meaning "marketplace," and it refers to how
a slave on the block in the marketplace would be bought, paid for, and given his freedom.
Once we were in the sin market, and we were slaves to iniquity, but Jesus paid for us and set us free.

This redemptive purchase focuses on some important truths.

First, we were bought with a price.
In 1 Peter 1: 18-19 Peter writes of the price that was paid.
"You were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold… but with the
precious blood of Christ."
The price paid was that of our Lord's blood as He died for our sins on the cross.

The grace of God is free, but it isn't cheap.
Real freedom is never free.
We are free today because courageous men of years past shed their blood that we might have freedom.

And Jesus paid with His own blood for the freedom that we now enjoy from sin, Satan, judgment,
and hell.
Jesus paid for our debt, putting us forever in His debt.
Jesus paid a terrible price for you and me: “His own blood.”
When someone said that "Jesus paid for us with His own blood," someone asked
the question, "Is He getting His money's worth?"

Not only was our redemption at a high price, but the blood of Jesus came at a high price.
I don't believe anyone in the world can understand the agony, pain, and suffering that
our Lord endured before and during the cross.
It began in Gethsemane.
While a world was sleeping, Jesus was praying.
The lamb that was slain before the world was now to be crucified for the world.
In that garden was an agony almost greater than even the Son of God could bear.

Luke 22: 44 tells us that Jesus literally sweated drops of blood.
Doctors describe this very rare phenomenon as " bloody sweat," or a more proper term, "hemathidrosis."
Under great emotional stress, tiny capillaries in the sweat glands can break, mixing sweat with blood.
This process is so traumatic that it can cause a person to go into shock and even cardiac arrest.
The agony that Jesus bore on that night was so great that Luke tells us that an angel had
to come from heaven to minister to Him and strengthen Him.

Then, Jesus was taken by force before a vicious and violent crowd.
He was beaten with bamboo rods.
He was struck in the face until probably every tooth was loosened.
His beard was plucked as He experienced indescribable pain.

Then, the most terrible scourging took place.
Jesus was stripped of His clothing.
Totally naked, His hands were tied to a post above His head.
Then a Roman legionnaire stepped forward with a flagellum in his hand.
It was a short whip consisting of several heavy thongs with two small balls of lead and bone
attached near the end.
Again and again, Jesus' back was struck with that whip.

At first, the heavy thongs cut through the skin, but as the blows continued, they cut deeper
into His muscle, and then into His veins, until finally the skin of His back was hanging in long ribbons
and His entire body was an unrecognizable mass of torn, bleeding tissue.

Then a wreath of thorns which could be up to an inch long and as sharp as raisers was jammed
down into His scalp.
His tormentors literally hammered this crown of thorns into the flesh and almost into the skull itself.

At this time Jesus was literally unrecognizable.
Had we been able to see Jesus before he was hanged on the cross, we would not have recognized him.
Isaiah 52:14 prophesied: “His visage was marred more than any man."

The persecutors then took His broken body and hung on a rough-hewn timber.
They took nails as big as railroad spikes and drove those nails deep into his wrists
and into both of his feet.
Every nerve of His body felt searing pain flashing through it hour after hour.
Jesus would struggle every minute just to catch His breath.
He would rise up on His feet so He could exhale, but the pain was too great, and when
He slumped forward, He could not inhale.

This scene was gruesome, but we need to have some idea of the tremendous pain that Jesus
endured for our salvation.

Yet, that was not the greatest pain He endured.
The greatest suffering was spiritual not physical.
The greatest pain was the pain of separation, when even God turned His back on His own Son.

Martin Luther said, " Our suffering is not worthy of the name of suffering.
When I consider my crosses, tribulations, and temptations, I shame myself almost to death
thinking that what are they in comparison to the sufferings of my blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ."

1 Corinthians 6:19 says, " You are not your own."
God owns you.
God owns me.
Someone has said, "He not only owns you lock, stock, and barrel, He owns your liver, spleen,
and brain."
Every part of you belongs to the Lord.

Christian, you cannot say, "These are my lungs, I'll smoke if I want to."
They are not your lungs.
You cannot say: "They are my eyes, I will see what I want to."
They are not your eyes.
You can no longer say, "It is my mouth, I will say what I please."
It is not your mouth.

A Christian man was asked by a girl in college to go to a dance.
He said, "I'd love to go to the dance with you, but I can't."

When asked why, he said, "I have no feet."

The girl could see that he really did have feet, and he could dance.
He simply told her that when he got saved, he lost control of those feet and that he didn't
have any feet for dancing.
He told her that his feet belonged to God.

You have been bought with a price.
You are no longer your own.

God has two claims on every Christian.
He has the claim of creation, and He also has the claim of redemption.
God owns you because He made you and also because He bought you.

Years ago my pastor told the story of a little boy who made a little red sailboat.
He put his little boat in a pond, but due to his carelessness he allowed it to sail away from him,
and he lost it.
Sometime later, he was walking by a secondhand store and saw that same little red sailboat.
He went into the store to ask for the boat, but the proprietor would not give it to him.
He told the boy that he had to buy it.

The boy went home; got all of his savings, and came back and bought back the little red boat.
He hugged that little boat to his chest as he walked home, and he said,
" Little sailboat, you are mine. You are mine twice.
You are mine because I made you, and you are mine because I bought you."
That is the same claim that God has upon us.

Finally, in 1 Corinthians 6:20 Paul says, "Therefore, glorify God in your body."
Because God the Spirit lives within us, and God the Son has paid for us; we ought to live
to glorify God the Father.
We have been put here for one purpose, and that is to glorify God.
"The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."

We're not only created to serve God, but we were also created to glorify God.
Isaiah 43:7 says, "Everyone who is called by My name, I have created for My glory."
God created us for His glory.

First Corinthians 10:31 says, "Therefore, whatever you eat or drink or whatever you do,
do all to the glory of God."
Everything you say with your lips, see with your eyes, hear with your ears, taste with your mouth,
and do with your hands, are to bring glory to God.

The word, "doxology," comes from the word glorify.
A doxology is a word of praise.
This is what our body is to be for the Lord every day.
It is to be a walking, living, breathing, talking testimony of praise and glory to our Heavenly Father.

The words of the old hymn should be ours daily:

"Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my hands, and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love.

Take my feet, and let them be
Swift and beautiful for Thee;
Take my voice, and let me sing
Always, only, for my King.

Take my love, my God, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure store;
Take myself, and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee."
-- Francis R.Havergal

When we are not sure what we should do about a certain thing.
When we're not sure what is right or wrong, then we need to ask,
"Will it bring glory to God?"
This is the only question we must ask.

Remember that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Remember that you have been bought with a price, so whatever you do or say
should bring glory to God.
Whenever God gets the glory He deserves, we will have the blessing and a victory
that we desire as His children.

Is your temple a place where the duties of the Lord are carried out?
There are many areas where we are duty bound before the Lord.
In witnessing, in worship, in prayer, in tithing, in obedience, in holiness, in righteousness
and in thousands of other ways, we are duty bound before God.

Sermon adapted from several sources by Dr. Harold L. White