Thoughts...

I've been thinking about how easily we throw around phrases that have so much potential to be powerful in our lives. But because they are so familiar, they lose their impact, and their powerful truth becomes nothing more than a cliche.

First Corinthians 6:19 says, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?" Pretty incredible stuff if we stop to think about what this verse is saying. The Holy Spirit, part of the Trinity, actually resides in me. I really can't grasp all of the implications here. But one thing that I'm coming to understand is that too often we don't treat our bodies that way.

Imagine for a moment walking into a beautifully ornate cathedral with your bags of garbage and dumping their contents up and down the aisles. Or taking a can of spray paint and writing crude sayings all over the walls. It would show total disrespect for a place of holiness, a place where God's presence should be found.

And yet today, as Christians, most of the time we don't seem to have a grasp of what it means for our bodies to be the temple of the Holy Spirit. While we would be horrifed to walk into a church and dump trash all over it, we readily fill our stomachs with garbage and our minds with the same. We make no effort to exercise or get enough rest and so our "temples" become trash bins. Either we don't truly understand and believe that the Holy Spirit resides in us, or we simply don't care.

Personally, I believe that we don't totally grasp the truth that God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, is alive and living in us. Yet, I want to fully understand this! I want to claim the power that comes with that understanding! And here's, the wonderful part...God wants me to have that power!

My prayer is that the choices I make in regard to my body... the food I eat, the exercise that I do, and the things that I watch and read will all serve to nourish this temple. I want it to be a place of beauty for its honored Guest.