To Encourage You

John 21:18-19 “ ^‘Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.’ (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

Before a person becomes a follower of Christ, they are self-focused, doing whatever they want with their most fundamental possession, their own body.  One of the mottos of the feminist movement is “It’s my body. It’s my choice.”  What a succinct summary of what Jesus told Peter in John 21 above.  In essence He was saying to Peter, “Peter, at one time you did with your body whatever you wanted. You dressed it however you wanted. You took it wherever you wanted. You had the view ‘It’s my body. It’s my choice.’  However, Peter, now things have changed. If you want to follow me, you are no longer in charge.  It’s no longer your body.   You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, now Peter, you must glorify God with your body.” 

That’s what it must always come down to for a true Christian.  For the believer, a motto could be “It is not my body, and it is not my choice.  I’ve been bought.  Jesus paid a very precious price for me, the price of His own blood.  Now my body, my possessions, my will, my everything is His, no matter what the price to me.” 

For many believers that price is death.  That’s the way it ended up for Peter, Paul, James, and all the other apostles, except John – and for John, it meant lonely exile on the Isle of Patmos in his final years.  For many of the first century Christians in the Roman empire it meant crucifixion, burning at the stake, or torture and death by wild animals in the coliseum.  For John Hus, it meant death by burning.  For many of the believers mentioned in Hebrews 11, it meant “mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.” 

We need only look to China, North Korea, Eritrea, Cuba, and many nations in the Arab world to see this same thing playing out in our day.  In America, while following Christ may not result in such extremes, it still means surrender to Christ, and the very antithesis of “It’s my body. It’s my choice.”  Yes, for the unbeliever, it is your body, and it is your choice, but in the end the responsibility for what you did with your body will be yours, as well. 

Jesus gave all of us some very solemn warnings about how we use our bodies and the parts thereof. For example, He said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell” (Matthew 5:30).   And He also said this: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul” (Matthew 16:24-26)? 

May God help us to glorify Him with our body, and everything else, for that matter, for all of it, everything we are and have, is nothing more than a wonderful gift from Him.