It's Not About Me - Max Lucado [23]
Hold on there. I heard that sigh. Maintain my body? I don’t want to talk about my body.
YOUR BODY IS GOD’S
INSTRUMENT, INTENDED
FOR HIS WORK AND
FOR HIS GLORY.
We’ve heard it all, haven’t we? Eat balanced meals. Exercise regularly.Avoid fat. Eat protein. Get rest. We’ve heard it all. And we’ve blown it all. Each of us has. To one degree or another we have mismanaged our bodies. You’re thinking, Lucado is reaching for the guilt hammer. I’m not. You don’t need a reprimand. A reminder maybe, but a reprimand? No. Yes, your belly may be a bit soft, but so is your heart. Soft for Christ. Soft for others. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. Stay that way. “Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever” (1 Timothy 4:8 MSG). If forced to choose, take the soft heart over the hard body.
But I don’t think a choice is required. Maintain God’s instrument. Feed it. Rest it. When he needs a sturdy implement—a servant who is rested enough to serve, fueled enough to work, alert enough to think—let him find one in you. He uses you.
Greater still, he lives in you. “Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19 NLT). Paul wrote these words to counter the Corinthian sex obsession. “Run away from sexual sin!” reads the prior sentence. “No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body” (v. 18 NLT).
What a salmon scripture! No message swims more upstream than this one.You know the sexual anthem of our day: “I’ll do what I want. It’s my body.” God’s firm response? “No, it’s not. It’s mine.”
Be quick to understand, God is not antisex. Dismiss any notion that God is antiaffection and anti-intercourse. After all, he developed the whole package. Sex was his idea. From his perspective, sex is nothing short of holy.
He views sexual intimacy the way I view our family Bible. Passed down from my father’s side, the volume is one hundred years old and twelve inches thick. Replete with lithographs, scribblings, and a family tree, it is, in my estimation, beyond value. Hence, I use it carefully.
When I need a stepstool, I don’t reach for the Bible. If the foot of my bed breaks, I don’t use the family Bible as a prop. When we need old paper for wrapping, we don’t rip a sheet out of this book.We reserve the heirloom for special times and keep it in a chosen place.
Regard sex the same way—as a holy gift to be opened in a special place at special times. The special place is marriage, and the time is with your spouse.
Casual sex, intimacy outside of marriage, pulls the Corinthian ploy. It pretends we can give the body and not affect the soul.We can’t.We humans are so intricately psychosomatic that whatever touches the soma impacts the psyche as well. The me-centered phrase “as long as no one gets hurt” sounds noble, but the truth is, we don’t know who gets hurt. God-centered thinking rescues us from the sex we thought would make us happy. You may think your dalliances are harmless, and years may pass before the x-rays reveal the internal damage, but don’t be fooled. Casual sex is a diet of chocolate—it tastes good for a while, but the imbalance can ruin you. Sex apart from God’s plan wounds the soul.
Sex according to God’s plan nourishes the soul. Consider his plan. Two children of God make a covenant with each other. They disable the ejection seats. They burn the bridge back to Momma’s house. They fall into each other’s arms beneath the canopy of God’s blessing, encircled by the tall fence of fidelity. Both know the other will be there in the morning. Both know the other will stay even as skin wrinkles and vigor fades. Each gives the other exclusive for-your-eyes-only privileges. Gone is the guilt. Gone the undisciplined lust. What remains is a celebration of permanence, a tender moment in which the body continues what the mind and the soul have already begun. A time in which “the man and his wife were