November 19 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

¹²All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
¹³Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.
¹⁴And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.
¹⁵Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
¹⁶What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.
¹⁷But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.
¹⁸Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
¹⁹What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
²⁰For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

Devotional:

There was a day when sex outside marriage was considered the grossest of sins. It was in a place by itself, the only sin for which a young woman was singled out with a scarlet 'A' which she would have to wear embroidered on her clothing until the day of her death! What has happened today? Have we come to gloss over sexual sins? Or have we come to understand that these sins are not alone to be considered gross, but that hate and envy and materialism are gross, too? At any rate, we can more readily accept the person who lapses into sexual sin but who truly repents, than could our New England forebears. Jesus by His example teaches we must accept such an one.

However, let us not lose sight of the force of verse 18. Very clearly it states that sexual sins are sins against our own bodies. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We do not own them. They were made by God and they have been bought back by God at the price of the death of His own Son. The fact that we recognize the gravity of other sins does not mean that we can minimize in our thinking the gravity of this particular kind of sin.

We sin against our bodies in ways other than by illicit sex. Neglect of health can be sin, whether by failure to get medical care, or by failure to get sufficient rest or a proper diet or sufficient exercise. The use of tobacco, alcohol, or drugs which weakens the body or our control of it, surely does not honor our Creator. In many ways we sin against our bodies.

Who is not guilty of disrespect to the temple of the Holy Spirit? What a gracious God we have who does forgive all the sins of his people, even those against our own bodies, as we come to Him, confessing our sins, in our Saviour's name.