“Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself.” 1Corinthians 6:19(NLT)
In Hosea 4:6, God tells us that His people are destroyed because they lack knowledge; they refuse to seek and acquire knowledge about Him. We cannot overlook the reality that He’s talking about His very own people here, those who claimed to love and adore Him. From this verse, you and I can know resolutely that we can be severely harmed by not having the right knowledge from God’s Word, and by refusing to know it. In Proverbs 4:7(NLT), He tells us how to remedy this. It says, “Wisdom is the principal thing; Therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.” A whole lot of people have knowledge about this or that. Some of them study books all day every day, but simply acquiring knowledge isn’t the same thing as having wisdom. Wisdom is a spiritual awareness of knowing what to do with the knowledge we’ve gleaned; it’s knowing how to practically apply it in a way that achieves God’s purpose.
We must get wisdom because God tells us that wisdom is the principal thing; it’s the whole shebang! “Understanding” is the process by which knowledge is honed into wisdom. Understanding is the oven that bakes all the ingredients of the knowledge we’ve heard and learned; it makes it something delicious and easy to digest. So, we can do a whole lot of reading and studying, but until we find the piece of knowledge or have an experience that helps us UNDERSTAND what we’ve read and studied, or helps our brain cells to bake the information, we will not get to the point of turning the raw ingredients of knowledge into a delicious dish of wisdom.
If you are a person who desires a relationship that is built on loyalty, honesty, commitment, respect, and love; you must settle your mind that it will take more than just the knowledge of those things. You must have wisdom about them. Without wisdom, you cannot govern your own life according to the standard God has set forth. You must have wisdom to govern your own life before you can successfully partner and sow into someone else’s life. If we can’t successfully govern our own being, we certainly can’t help someone else to govern theirs.
1Corinthians 6:19(NLT), says, “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself.” Honoring your own body temple is proof positive that you have wisdom about loyalty, honesty, commitment, respect, and love; for if you cannot have loyalty, honesty, commitment, respect, and love for your own body, you certainly cannot have it for someone else’s. You and I don’t get to put our own stamp on what honor looks like. God has defined it for us, and no better image and definition of honor exists. To govern our bodies according to God’s Word is to honor our temples and keep them holy, because God owns them; they don’t belong to us. This is why premarital sex is so damaging.
Premarital sex is fornication, and God has told us not to do it. 1Corinthians 6:18(NLT) tells us, “Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body.” Fornication is a refusal to govern our bodies the way God has decreed they should be governed. We will examine a little more about the ‘why’ of God’s commandment, but the ‘why’ isn’t nearly as important as our commitment to trust that Heavenly Father knows best. He would not tell us to abstain unless not doing so harms us and our relationship with Him in some way.
I remember behaving poorly as a young girl, and my mother would sternly tell me to cut it out. I would ask “Why?” and she would say, “Because I told you so, that’s why!” I heeded her warning because I knew the consequences of persisting in the behavior would not be pleasant. All it took for me to stop the behavior was my mother’s verbal warning. I respected her authority, and she is only a mere human-being. We would be the equivalent of crazy to disrespect the authority of the Word of our awesomely amazing, omnipotent, omniscient, Jehovah God! If He said “Don’t do it!”, then this is what He means, and it should be enough for us to cease and desist IF we honor His authority.
Jesus Christ shared a piece of yumminess in Matthew 6:21 that is essential for anyone hoping to acquire wisdom. He said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Whatever we value most speaks loudly about what is in our hearts. We value, cling to, and prioritize preeminently the thing that has captured our heart. This is the person or thing we will treasure, and this is what we will submit to and follow. If the person or thing we value, cling to, and prioritize preeminently is not Jesus Christ or His love, we are in deep trouble.
Jesus Christ instructed us in Matthew 6:33(KJV), “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” The equation here is a simple one. If we seek God’s Kingdom and righteousness first, blessings will be added. If we seek anything other than God’s Kingdom and righteousness first, blessings will be subtracted. Regarding the latter, many of us have indeed done this and are doing it in our relationships today. We allow a person to seduce us to violate our own body temples. We honor the person we’re involved with above God’s Word, and it is the greatest indication that we have stepped into the realm of obsession and abdicated our responsibility to love God and love ourselves. He will help us to regain balance and emotional stability, but we must repent for treasuring anything more than we treasure our relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ.■
“Why Is Premarital Sex So Damaging?” written for Crazynlove.com ©2019. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!