What does it mean to glorify God in your body (1 Corinthians 6:20)?

To glorify God in our body is not so much activity in service as subjection to His will. This may mean to suffer the utter subversion of our plans and the deprivation of all; but in every case it is heart-obedience to God. That we are enabled thus to glorify God unfolds the greatness of our redemption and the price paid. How this teaches us to bear our light momentary affliction, and to weigh everything connected with the body in the light of grace and truth! If the body is carefully adorned with the things of this world, if we indulge the desires of the flesh or the mind, how can we glorify God thus? Let us ever remember that we are bought with a price. "Wherefore glorify God in your body." R. B.

Now note the implications of these facts. How can we make the members of Christ the members of an harlot? Again, how can I treat my body as if it were exclusively my own? We are not our own. We are Another's, spirit and soul and body. Hence, "glorify God in your body," is the word for us. The whole idea of the unconverted is to gratify and glorify themselves in and through their bodies. Be it ours to gratify and glorify God.

What a lofty standard is set before us in these things! We may feel that it is indeed high and that we do not attain to it. Still we would not have it altered. A great present blessing lies here, and also a great pledge of future glory. If already our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost. how sure it must be that the redemption of our bodies is coming. Then the Holy Spirit will have a temple perfect in holiness. Meanwhile He promotes holiness in us, and that is for our highest blessing.

What then, today, is God’s temple? Let us begin at the lowest point. In 1 Corinthians 6:19 we read: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own, ye are bought with a price?” Here the body of the individual Christian is that temple; his body—it does not say soul—but the body, which is the instrument of his activities, volition, passions, and the like. This is (most wonderful fact, and to be duly pondered) the temple of the Holy Ghost. Do we know it? Are we influenced by such a marvellous fact? Let me lay hold of it in power, then I will shrink from sin of every kind, and cherish the holiness that the presence of such a Guest involves. I shall seek not to grieve Him, but the rather to encourage Him. I am not my own. I am bought with a price that I should glorify God in my body. Oh! for grace! Spend time in reading the context.

But the doctrine that the body is for Christ decided another question, to which the depraved habits of the Corinthians gave rise. All fornication is forbidden. To us, with our present Christian habits of mind, it is a thing of course — to Pagans, new; but the doctrine exalts every subject. Our bodies are the members of Christ. Another truth connected with this is of great importance: if (by union according to the flesh) two were one body, he who is united to the Lord is one spirit. The Spirit whose fulness is in Christ is the same Spirit who dwells in me and unites me to Him. Our bodies are His temples. What a mighty truth when we think of it!

Moreover we are not our own, but were bought with a price — the blood of Christ offered for us. Therefore we ought to glorify God in our bodies, which are His — powerful and universal motive, governing the whole conduct without exception. Our true liberty is to belong to God. All that is for oneself is stolen from the rights of Him who has bought us for His own. All that a slave was, or gained, was the property of his master; he was not the owner of himself. Thus it was with the Christian. Outside that, he is the wretched slave of sin and of Satan — selfishness his rule, and eternal banishment from the source of love his end. Horrible thought! In Christ we are the special objects and the vessels of that love. We have here two mighty motives for holiness: the value of Christ's blood, at which we are purchased; also the fact that we are the temples of the Holy Ghost.

Verse 18. "Flee fornication," etc. Instead of being regarded as a thing indifferent, or even as a trivial offence, this sin is to be dreaded and shunned as a leprosy; for it contaminates both soul and body. Other sins did so but in part; but this completely, by turning that which God has claimed for Himself to an use which He condemns. A wrong is thus inflicted on the body itself, by alienating it from its true honour as an instrument of righteous worship, and again degrading it to the service of sin. It is, therefore, morally, what idolatry is spiritually; and the dissuasive from both is expressed by the apostle in the same terms.8 Each sin is to be fled from, by those who would please God. But there is a further and especial sense in which a believer's body is said to be sinned against by such an act. And this also the Corinthians should have known.

Verse 19. "What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" There is such a thing as spiritual self-respect. A Christian is expected to forget his first parentage in the remembrance of the second. He is not God's creature only, but His child. As the Son of God became incarnate, to put Himself within reach of our sins, so the believer, who adds knowledge to his faith, should understand that his mortal body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. Sent down by the Father in the name of Jesus, He occupies this earthly house as a pledge and witness of its coming change.9 Now it is God's Spirit which we have of Him, and God's Spirit is His own essential presence. But what God dwells in is His temple. We have in this verse a distributive repetition of the doctrine already stated in an earlier chapter.1 Each Christian body is a temple of the Spirit, even as the collective assembly of saints is His temple, and the place where His honour dwells, in what locality soever that assembly is found. Now what God occupies is His, and not our own. We are not robbed of our natural ownership, but it merges in the higher honour of our calling. Our bodies are His temple — ours, therefore, only as ourselves are His; to be kept then, in sanctification and honour, in His Name.2 Thus a double duty is imposed on the Christian with respect to his own body. He is to manage and govern it with vigilance and godly decision, as a restive and unruly beast; he is to hold it in honour, and tremble to abuse it, because it is the temple of the living God. Are we Christians, and yet ignorant of these things? Once more, then, let the cross be our monitor and shame.

Verse 20. "For ye were bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body." Redemption to God by the blood of His own Son is the "ultima ratio" of all true Christian morality. Our bodies are the property of Him who has purchased us at such a cost; for He did not buy us partly, but entirely. Let, then, the God of our mercy have the willing service of those bodies which are His.3 The fleeting days of our sojourn here below are our opportunity of glorifying Him, by yielding ourselves to Him as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God.4

Here in the Christian, as in Christ, the body is the temple of God, He being glorified in it by the devotion to Him of those members in which humanity even in its highest faculties is manifested. The practical life glorifies Him, not only in the character exhibited in it, but this as the fruit of divine grace acting in virtue of Christ’s blessed work, and by the Spirit of God.

We have ever to remember that the body of the believer “is the temple of the Holy Ghost,” so that nothing unholy is to be allowed to defile that in which God’s Spirit dwells (1 Cor. 6:19), that in which we are to glorify God. On the one hand there is not to be the wilful “neglecting of the body” (Col. 2:23) in an asceticism that ministers to the vanity of the flesh; nor, on the other hand, has there to be anxious care in regard to raiment (Luke 12:22-23), for the Lord knows how to provide for our every need.

Some pious men have allowed themselves the narrow and unseemly thought that inspiration is confined only to matters of spiritual truth. This is to lose a great deal of the grace of the gospel, and to shut out from our souls the interest which the Lord takes in what concerns the body as well as the mind. The truth is that the grace of our God occupies itself with everything that relates to us, and our wisdom is to take up nothing in which we cannot look for the favour, guidance, and blessing of the Lord. Such is the wondrous fruit, not only of the incarnation of the Son, but of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. He makes the body the temple of God. If it were not so, the ordinary matters of this life would be left outside and clothed with nothing but a human connection. We wrong the Lord and defraud ourselves of much where we do not bring Him into even the least of the things that perish: "Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31).

This fact gives great importance to the body, and should make us very careful as to what we read or look at with our eyes, what we say with our tongues, what we do with our hands, what we listen to with our ears, where we go with our feet.

We are not our own. We have been bought with a price, and we belong to Christ. The Holy Spirit is put within us as the representative of our owner, and thus our body is His temple.

In this second Scripture the apostle refers to the body of the individual believer and speaks about very practical matters: "Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body" (1 Cor. 6:13). There is both a responsibility and an encouragement in these words. We are to acknowledge the Lordship of Christ and use our bodies in His service. In doing so we may be sure of His grace and support, as Paul says, "And the Lord for the body." The believer's body is indwelt by the Holy Spirit so how grave it is to use it for unholy practices. The apostle goes on to say, "For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's" (v. 20). We are all well aware that the great price referred to is the precious blood of Christ. What a claim this has upon our lives! In addition, when he says, "Glorify God in your body," we may well revert to the thought that display is connected with the truth of the temple.