“But what if the servant is evil and thinks, ‘My master won’t be back for a while,’ and he begins beating the other servants, partying, and getting drunk? The master will return unannounced and unexpected, and he will cut the servant to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 24:48-51 NLT)
Have you ever loaned something to someone and it was either never returned or returned in such bad condition it was unusable? Early in my marriage I did almost everything myself. My kids, as they got older, asked me, “Dad, how’d you learn to do all this stuff?” My answer was simple: “Poverty!” When you can’t afford to hire someone, you learn to do it yourself or it doesn’t get done.
I remember loaning a set of jack stands to a friend, jack stands, I might add, I couldn’t afford at the time to replace. He brought them back, but one of them was so bent out of shape it was unusable. Did he offer to replace it? Nope, just returned it as though nothing was wrong. That’s a very sad story (yeh, I can hear you giggling😊), but unfortunately, that’s how we too often treat what belongs to our Savior, namely, our own bodies.
The very graphic example Jesus gave above of end times should be a wake-up call for those of us who profess the holy name of Jesus as our Lord. What are the implications for us? We too often forget Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “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, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.”
We wrongly believe that because we use “our” money to buy things: cars, houses, clothes, food, etc. that they belong to us, failing to realize, as James taught us, “So don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father…” (James 1:16-17a) Every penny we “earn” is a gift from God.
Who gives us breath? Life? Energy? The ability to think, work, move, have our being? We’re nothing without the Lord, yet, we think we’ve done our duty when we give to the church “our” tithe. It’s ALL HIS! – 100%! We just give 10% and beyond in recognition that it’s all His. As His children He owns us and everything we have, including our families, belong to Him.
Pastor Corky Calhoun nails it when he writes: “When it comes to our stuff we confuse temporal stewardship with eternal ownership.” A steward is a manager, not an owner. Another word for steward is servant. When we’re born again of God’s Spirit, we bring nothing to the relationship and whatever we receive in the process of serving Him is a gift for which we can take no credit.
When we treat our bodies, the very bodies that now house the Spirit of the living God, anyway we choose without thought of their “Owner,” we violate God’s right to us and treat something holy, sacred, and on loan from God as if it were our own. We cheapen, not only our own bodies in how we treat them, but our relationship with Almighty God.
We will one day stand before the Lord to give account for how we’ve used and abused our bodies with food, sex, drugs, and in other ways violated our commitment to treat our bodies as God’s sacred temple. We do not own our bodies; they are on loan from God. We’re their stewards, not their owners.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 