I grew up in a pretty Christian town in the 90s, which means I grew up in a town where the Christian adults were fighting hard against the sex and drug culture of the 1970s that they had grown up with, the sex and drug culture that had very much become a default part of their kids' mainstream culture. All of this is to say, what the kids in my town heard from their pastors and youth group leaders and parents was “your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, as 1 Cor. 6 tells us. So don’t defile it with premarital sex, with drugs, with alcohol, with smoking.” So that’s what kids promised they wouldn’t do. They’d go to youth group events and wear the rings or the bracelets indicating that they were intent on staying pure until marriage and they’d have various ways of indicating that they wouldn’t do drugs either. They were intent on treating their bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit. And then a bunch of those kids went off to college, forgot all their promises. But more to the point, they never found repentance and drifted away front he church. What happened?
There’s an answer in our reading from 1 Corinthians 3. So here Paul is using the you-plural in verses 16 and 17. If we translated the Bible into Texan, these verses would read “do y’all not know that y’all are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in y’all? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and y’all are that temple.” And, contextually speaking, the temple-destroying actions that Paul is referring to here are division within the church, doctrinal division as well as division of the hearts of the people. So when the church divides herself, when Christians split off from each other, when they hate each other and follow false doctrine, they are destroying the one temple that God has made out of all our bodies.
So, yes, 1 Corinthians 6 tells us to treat our bodies individually as temples, to avoid defiling the temple of the Holy Spirit with sexual sins. And Christians must turn from fornication and drunkenness. But that teaching about our individual bodies as temples is built upon this first teaching above doctrine and love. And a lot of those kids I grew up with were in churches that had absolutely no interest in teaching them doctrine. They were not taught to love and cherish and defend the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of justification, the doctrines of holy baptism and the supper. Nor were they taught that the existence of various denominations in our town was a tragic thing, a fracturing of the temple of the Holy Spirit that desperately needed to be healed. Many of them only knew that if the kids from your church wore the right bracelets, they were good and if they didn’t, they were bad. So it’s not at all a surprise that the children who weren’t taught to avoid the defiling of the Y’all Temple lost interest in keeping their individual temples undefiled.
Doctrine matters. And as I said a couple days ago, no Christian gets to opt out of learning the answers to the question “what does the Bible say?” Loving your brothers and sisters in the faith matters. Healing our divisions matters. So if we want to tear down the temples of licentiousness that our culture has built, it will take far more than purity pledges. It will take more Jesus, more Christ crucified, more doctrine, more teaching the catechism to your children, more prioritizing church over sports and dance and sleep, more fellowship with the saints, more learning together, more communing. The more we heal the cracks in the foundation of the Y’all Temple, the more successful our children and grandchildren will be in preserving the temple of their own individual bodies. May our crucified and risen Lord give us the strength to do this.
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