After my last post I could hear it coming. “But, your body is a temple.” Okay, if our bodies are temples why are we the most overweight nation in the world? Why has it taken over two hundred years of American legislators to finally do something about the tobacco industry? Why are so many teenagers so stressed out that they have to take prescription drugs to cope with the world around them? And why is the church virtually ignoring the AIDS crisis in Africa that has gone beyond epidemic and is now being called “pandemic”?
Isn’t it a good and healthy thing when we take care of the body God has given us? Yes! Is this what Paul was talking about in I Corinthians 6:12-20? No!
Paul wrote these specific words to the church in Corinth because before he had come there with the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Corinthians liked to have sex. A lot of sex. In those days there was a widely held belief called Gnosticism. This is a belief that your body and your mind are separate. What you do to one doesn’t affect the other and vice a versa. We can relate this belief to a bumper sticker that reads, “If it feels good do it.” Before becoming Christians many Corinthians practiced the worship of Aphrodite. To worship this goddess, what you basically had to do was visit her temple and pay to have sex with one of the temple prostitutes. The reason Paul wrote these words was because after accepting Christ as their rescuer and leader the people in Corinth were still visiting the temple prostitutes. Because of this widely held Gnostic belief, having sex (the body) didn’t interfere with their spiritual life (the mind). Paul was letting these folks know that since they had a relationship with Jesus and now that the Holy Spirit had come to them, they had a new temple. And they were to treat it with love and respect.
The society in Corinth sounds a lot like ours. “Just do it.” “If it makes you happy.” It seemed when I was growing up as a teenager that guys where the “Gnostic” thinkers. The media portrayed guys in my generation of not caring about the emotional outcome of having pre-marital sex. We saw this in the TV shows and movies we watched or in the lyrics of classic music like Meat Loafs, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. Something has dramatically changed over the past fifteen or so years. As I study pop-culture it has become more evident that the young woman of our society are thinking more like the Gnostics of old than ever before. The girls in our culture are much more sexually aggressive then in the past couple of decades. And I’m not just talking about making the first move with a guy by calling him on the phone or asking him out. It goes much deeper than that. Proof? I got three words for ya, “Girls Gone Wild.”
And don’t think for a minute this Gnostic attitude only applies to Spring Breakers and college students in the Greek system. It’s taking hold in our churches as well. Just last year my wife and I had a young engaged Christian couple in our home for dinner. In our small community this couple is looked up to and lauded over as the perfect Christian couple. The young ladies father was a prominent member of the pastoral community in our town. While we were getting to know the couple over dinner, I could see they did not have strong accountability in their lives and I asked them how they were doing with the “purity” issue in their relationship. After several moments of awkward silence they both spoke up about how they had been sexually active together for most of their relationship. My wife and I shared our brokenness about some things in our marriage and graciously offered to council them. A couple of weeks later, a relationship with my wife and I was soundly rejected by this couple. Did this couple wind up getting married? Yes. Will they have a long happy marriage? Heck, I don’t know. But just because you had the perfect wedding day doesn’t mean you will have a perfect marriage. I can say from personal experience that this young couple has taken scars into their marriage that will take years even decades to heal.
Paul was talking about sex. He was talking about the connection between the body and the mind. There are more and more studies being done about the emotional scars left on a women after she gets an abortion. And I’m sure that after the alcohol wears off and those girls see the videotape of themselves flashing for beads, that something inside them is going to feel a little less dignified. The misuse of your body sexually has an emotional price tag. It’s a price not worth paying.
(P.S. Just like we honor the Lords temple by putting up banners and making beautiful stained glass murals, I tattoo my body with things that will please the Lord.)
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