DAY 191 - BIG PICTURE IN A YEAR - THE WILDERNESS

We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did

1 Corinthians 10: 8

Reading: Deuteronomy 5: 18; 1 Corinthians 6: 19, 20

Yesterday we began to look at the sin of sexual immorality in the Wilderness wanderings – and how the Lord responded to it. Today we’re continuing this discussion.

Human beings are sexual beings. We are far more than that, of course, but our sexuality is a part of who and what we are, a good gift of God given to bind together a husband and wife and to expand the human race.

Sexuality is a very precious thing and is to be stewarded faithfully. It is to exist in marriage. Full stop. God hates sexual sin, he hates any defilement of the gift of sexuality, and he hates any dishonoring of marriage, the only right context for sexuality. But why?

The world today is incredibly promiscuous – every kind of sexual immorality is not just tolerated, but celebrated. Yet Paul, in 1 Corinthians, stresses that somehow, sexual sin is more serious than other sin. “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” Perfect, I hear you say, then that person will get their come-uppance in their own body. But that is not how God sees the body of a Christian person. I hate to break it to you, but your body is now no longer a mere body – it is none other than the habitation of God.

What makes us Christians is this – we have been united with Christ through the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit indwells our bodies. Apart from the obvious damage that adultery and other forms of sexual immorality causes to people, families and society in general, sexual sin degrades and misuses the body in which God dwells as His temple.

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

Prayer

Lord, I want to glorify you in my body. Show me how.

For the family

Over the next few days, watch parts of this brilliant video together about the Wilderness region in Israel where the people wandered.