Respect God, By Respecting Yourself!

Friday's Devotion (1-28-05)

"What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (KJV)

The first thing that I should ask and that you should ask yourself is... do you have respect for the Holy Ghost (The Spirit of God)? I hope you didn't have to think much on that and I hope your answer was a firm and bold, "YES!". The Holy Spirit, definitely deserves our highest regard/respect, but do you know what this means for you? This means that we have to respect ourselves, we have to respect our bodies. Why? The scripture answers the question, "...your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you...". I'm meeting a lot of Christian teens or hearing about them and I'm learning that a lot of them want to be right with God, but they're doing stuff like: Have unmarried sex, etc. What we need to realize is that this isn't only a disrespect to yourself, but to the Holy Spirit, which lives within you... He's there with you and He's telling you, "Don't commit this sin my child.". He doesn't want you to do it because you're special, you're worth it to wait for marriage and you and your body isn't to be defiled... because the Holy Spirit, uses your body as His temple. Save yourself for marriage and if it's too late for that then repent of your sin and cease from unmarried sex. God, sees you as special and wants you to have a special relationship with someone you love and are married to.

There are several other things we do to our bodies that we shouldn't: Self-destruction, drugs, suicide and etc. We may often despise ourselves and not care about ourselves, but if we care about God, then we must care about ourselves because God, lives in us through the Spirit. We also need to look at the consequences of sin against the body and these consequences are there to show us that it's wrong to do these things: If you shoot drugs then it'll do all kinds of damage that you can see on the outside of the body and on the inside, if you have sex with more than one partner you may get a sexually transmitted disease (HIV, etc). There is punishment for sin. Any sin that you can commit you will notice that there is some kind of consequence to suffer for it. The main point of today's message is this: The first step to respecting God, is respecting yourself.

Prayer: Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this message and for all things. Please forgive us of all our sins and we forgive all those who've wronged us. Please help us to have great reverence for you, your Spirit and your Son. May we realize the important role of our bodies as your Spirit's temple and may we not do anything to pollute our bodies. In Jesus, name. A-men!

Request: Please share this with those who need it most. Share it with those who truly want to be right with Jesus Christ, but are putting up a wall between themselves and Jesus, by polluting their temples (Bodies).

God bless!

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