Love Is LoveSample

Honor God with your body

Few things are harder than honoring God with your body. Your body is where you feel attraction and desire, long for pleasure and connection, and ache for romance and the joy of sex. Taking all those desires and laying them at the feet of Jesus is not easy.

The early Christians could relate to that struggle because the Roman culture was not exactly biblical with their bodies. It was culturally cool for a Roman man to wake up with his wife, take his lunch break with a prostitute, hook up with an underaged boy, sleep with his servants (male and/or female), and then wink at his wife as he crawled back into his marriage bed.

Imagine the challenge, then, for the Ephesians to read Paul’s letter: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality. . . . These are improper for God’s holy people. . . . Find out what pleases the Lord” (Ephesians 5:3,10). Doing what’s proper and pleasing to God isn’t easy, especially regarding sexuality. But we Christians find the strength to do just that because we know who God is and what God did.

If God loved us enough to make us holy, then he is worthy of our obedience. If God calls us his own, despite the messiness of our past, then he must want what is best for us. While Jesus never promised us an easy road, we humbly try to love God with our bodies, believing that he loved us first.