This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you to day five of our look together through 1st Corinthians
chapter 6. I hope that God's been refreshing your life this week. I'm very aware
that when we talk about the body and sin and immorality in this world where
there is so much sin and immorality that you could go down the road of guilt.

You could go down the road of the past. You could go down the road of sorrow and
regret. And my prayer through this week is that instead you go down the road of
looking towards the future.

You head down the road of what God could do in your life, how he can make
changes in your life. And today we're going to be seeing how he can make those
changes. Actually, we've been seeing it all week.

You make those changes when you determine not to misuse your body. You make
those changes when you determine to have the right perspective on your body. And
in this last couple of verses of 1st Corinthians 6, Paul says you make those
changes and when you determine to glorify God with your body.

To live out everything we've been talking about this week, you have to live out
two important truths. It's in the last half of verse 19 and verse 20. Here's how
this chapter ends.

You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with
your body.

There's the two truths. You want to glorify God with your body? You start with
those two truths.

You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore you glorify God with
your body.

First, you are not your own. I don't know what your attitude is towards your
body. In fact, you might just mentally right now go through this checklist.

Is your attitude towards your body, here's three possible answers. One, I'm the
sole owner and proprietor. Two, I am a willing or unwilling passenger.

Three, God is the caretaker and the manager of what he has given to me. I'm
giving it back to him. Number three, I am not my own.

It's his body and I get to be the manager of what he is managing in my life. You
see, if you think of what it's like to have a guest in your home and you think
of what it's like to have somebody living in your home, that's the difference
here. And you think of what it's like to own a home.

If you have a guest in your home, you might go all out to please your guest. You
might serve him lavish meals. You might even sleep on the floor so your guest
can have a bed.

Actually, you usually make a kid sleep on the floor. However, no matter how
comfortable you try to make your guest, it's always known it's your house and
they're the guest and you are ultimately in control. But when you live in the
house, when you own the house, then it's entirely different.

You get to call the shots. You get to make the decisions. Here's the point.

God's Spirit does not want to be a guest in your life. He wants you to recognize
that you're handing over the ownership papers to him. He owns it anyway.

He made you. He created you. He's going to have you with him for all eternity as
you choose him.

He wants you and I to honestly admit every fault, every scar, every sin to him.
He knows it all anyway. He wants us to surrender every part of our lives to him
and then recognize he is the owner and we're not.

To glorify God with your body, you realize it's his and I'm a steward of what he
has given. Now, I recognize that's entirely countercultural. We live in a
culture that thinks, "No, it's my body.

I get to do what I want with it. " But that's not true for followers of Christ.
I can't put that on everybody in culture.

I can only put that on myself and on each of us as followers of Jesus. As
followers of Jesus, we live as those who are not our own. We didn't make this
body.

We didn't create this body. We're not going to ultimately determine what's going
to happen with this body. In God's timing that we live, in God's timing that we
die, we're not our own.

As I'm teaching this week, just this week I've had a new grandbaby, new
granddaughter born, that little baby that came into the world. She was not
created by her parents. They got to participate in the process, no doubt about
it, but she was created by God.

Everyone knows that. And that little baby, as she grows through her life, lives
through her life, she may think at sometimes that she owns the body that she was
given, but it will never be true that she owns it. It's always God's.

It's always on loan for a time. There will come a day for all of us when this
human body dies, and it's either resurrected to be with him or apart from him
for eternity because it is his. You want to glorify God with the body that he
gave you this week.

Just recognize that the depth of your soul, it's not mine anyway. It's his. So
Lord, how can you use it in the best way?

First you recognize I'm not my own, and secondly you recognize I've been bought
with a price. Not only did God create you, but he also bought you back. You see,
he created us, he made us, but we ran away from him.

We ran in the opposite direction. So what did he do? He bought us with a price.

The idea of being bought with a price is the idea in the scripture of redemption
being redeemed. It's being bought back, and he bought us back to be able to live
a life of freedom in him, in relationship with him. Now what is the price that
was paid to buy us back?

First Peter chapter 1 talks about that. First Peter 1, 18 and 19 says, "You know
that in the past you were living in a worthless way, a way passed down from the
people that you lived, who had lived before you. But you were saved from that
useless life.

You were bought, not with something that ruins like gold or silver, but with the
precious blood of Christ, who was like a pure and perfect lamb. " I was bought
with the blood of Christ. I paid for your redemption, my redemption with the
blood of Christ.

Now that may sound theological, the blood of Christ and the cross, and it is
deeply theological. But theology, doctrine is also deeply personal. Jesus loved
you enough to buy you back, to shed his own blood.

Think of how personal it would be if you were in prison and somebody came and
said, "I'm going to put myself in that prison and you're going to let that
person go. " And you were free because they took your place. Think of how
personal it is that you and I were looking forward to death, the separation from
God.

And Jesus said, "I'm going to suffer death. I'm going to suffer separation from
God even on the cross so that they can experience what it means to be with him
for all eternity. " That's how personal this is.

I am not my own. I was bought with a price. And so therefore, the scripture
says, now that word therefore, anytime you see the word therefore in the Bible,
you should ask, what's it there for?

Why is it there? Because it always means the truth that's to follow is based on
the two truths that were or however many truths that were just before. The two
truths that were before, you're not your own, you're bought with a price,
therefore, because of those two truths, what do I do?

I glorify God in my body. I glorify God in my body. Your body is more than just
simply excess baggage that you're dragging around through planet Earth with your
spirit, with your soul.

It's an opportunity to glorify God. Your body is more than just that ugly
looking thing that you see in the mirror. You may think it's beautiful, I don't
know, or that thing that you see in getting older and older every day, that
thing that you see getting acne like you don't want every day, that thing that
you see not doing what you want it to do, growing like you want it to grow.

Your body is so much more than what you see in the mirror. It is a member of
Christ. It is a temple of the spirit, not your own, bought with a price.

So what do you do? You glorify God with your body. That points to the motivation
behind all physical fitness for the follower of Christ.

Do you exercise to glorify yourself? Wow, look at how I look in the mirror. Look
at those muscles.

Or do you do it to glorify Him? How can I use these muscles to do work for Him?
That points, this points to the motivation behind all sexual purity.

Are you sexually pure to protect yourself from disease or to protect yourself
from getting caught or in order to glorify Him? You see, it's only this last
motivation to glorify God that's going to last through your entire life and all
the way into eternity. You and I, we have to live with these bodies every single
day.

And yet we often look right past the real truth about them, not my own, bought
with a price, temple of God. Are you glorifying God in your body? That can begin
today.

That can continue today. As you become a member of Christ, through trust in Him,
through saying, "Jesus, I want to live a relationship with You, I want to live
in connection with You," and then as you continue in that relationship with Him.
As you become a temple of the Spirit, as you begin a relationship with Christ,
He sends His Spirit into your life.

That's when the Holy Spirit comes into your life, when you begin that
relationship. As you become a temple of the Spirit, or as you continue to live
as a temple of the Spirit. As we pray today, let's pray, let's pray that God
helps us to see ourselves in a new way.

Jesus, we need your help with this. We're surrounded by a world that sees the
body in one way, as just physical, as just about pleasure, as just about
ourselves and pleasing ourselves. Lord, we don't want to live that way.

We don't want to live even for what's just permissible. We want to live for
what's right, we want to live for what glorifies You. And so Lord, instead of
seeing our bodies as things, help us to see them as members of Christ, as
temples of the Spirit.

Lord, we need your Spirit to help us to see in that way. So we're asking for
something beyond even our minds, our thoughts here, we're asking that your Holy
Spirit would bring into our thoughts, into our minds, this new way of seeing
ourselves. So that we could live in this world, even this evil, immoral world,
but we could live to be a light in this world, we could live with purity in this
world, we could live with joy in this world.

Lord, we need you to help us to see this, and we pray that you'd help us to see
this even now. In your name we pray, amen. Join us next week, Paul's going to
answer for us some tough and honest questions about marriage.

He's going to tell us how to keep a healthy marriage when facing struggles, and
how to help a struggling marriage to get healthy. See you next week.