Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple
And that God’s Spirit lives in you?
. . . God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.
1 Corinthians 3:16-17
“Button up your overcoat, When the wind is free, Take good care of yourself, You belong to me,” are the famous lyrics penned by Johnny Mercer. Embodied in those words is a basic human longing: the need to belong to someone who cares about us. As teenagers, most of us dreamed of the day when that special someone would come along and say those magic words, “you belong to me.” Sadly, however, for some of us that dream negated the responsibility of self-care. After all, at some point in time, someone would come along and be responsible for our happiness. For others, the longing for someone to love, appreciate, and value us turned into an endless cycle of being in love with love. Although we usually think of love as a positive emotion, the exhilarating feelings associated with “being in love” can alter our moods and allow us to escape reality. When used in that way, love addiction is every bit as destructive as drugs and alcohol, compulsive overeating, or binge buying. Instead of trying to fill the emptiness inside our soul with a substance, we vainly try to fill it with relationships—and a compulsive need to be in love.
Sadly, when we look for love in all the wrong places, we travel further and further away from the only One who can satisfy our hungry souls. In our search for Mr. or Ms. Right, we often forfeit a right relationship with God, and in the process we fail to hear our loving God crooning daily, “Take good care of yourself, you belong to me.” Throughout Scripture, we are assured that God wants us to take good care of ourselves because we belong to him. We are important to him; so important, in fact, that he sent his one and only Son to die so that we might have life and health and freedom. And, as objects of the Lord’s never-ending love, we have a responsibility to care for ourselves as he commands.
The Apostle Paul reminds us that God’s temple is sacred, and that we are all his sacred temples. God no longer dwells in buildings built by human hands; he dwells in our hearts through faith. We are to be as diligent in caring for our physical bodies as the ancient Israelites were to be in caring for God’s temple. And, should we fail to do so, we will suffer the same consequences the Israelites experienced when they allowed God’s temple to fall into disrepair.
Part of living a life pleasing to God is loving what he loves and caring for what he cares for. And our Lord is very clear: he cares for you and me—and calls us to love and care for ourselves as a reflection of that love. Our prime motivation in caring for our bodies should always be so that we can offer them as living sacrifices to the One who died for us so that we can live for him. God’s temple is sacred and we are that temple!
Today, as you listen for God’s voice, I pray you will hear him crooning, “Take good care of yourself, you belong to me. And, having heard his instructions, I hope you will not put off until tomorrow what your Lord is asking you to do in the calendar square called today.
To accept the responsibility of being a child of God
is to accept the best life has to offer you.
~~Stella Terrill Mann
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