Doing Me Better
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?
1 Corinthians 3:16 (NIV)
As you nurture your spirituality, as you feed your faith, as you grow to understand your gifts, as you move to steward your anointing, to honor your ministry, to offer God your service, to render to Him your sacrifice, to lift to Him your praise, to offer to Him your worship—don’t be tempted to be different from those who handed down the Christian faith to you. You’re not going to grow any stronger without prayer, without the intake of Scripture, without worship, without witness, without testimony, without giving.
You are the temple of God and God dwells in your midst. You house the presence of the Spirit. The “temple” is not just describing the sanctuary; it’s including everything peripheral and attached to it. The courtyards, the auxiliary buildings—it all describes the temple, and it means the same thing for us: the dwelling place of God.
Nurturing a better you starts here: I am the dwelling place for God. More than God around me. More than celebrating that God is for me. More than offering my ideas for God. More than God shaping me, blessing me, using me, accepting my life, my offerings. More than my ministry. Larger than any of these is this truth: God dwells in me. This is why we have to love ourselves, care for ourselves, accept ourselves as we are even with all our specificities and peculiarities.
You house God’s Spirit. Your personality has to be shaped by this revelation. You are not just flesh and blood. You are not just hair, nails, and clothes. You are not just your car and your employment. You are not just your neighborhood and your square footage. You are God’s temple, which means you also have to guard who gets to traffic in and through your life.
You have to guard who gets to speak into your life.
You have to guard who gets to have a word that matters in your life.
Your purpose is defined by it.
Your thoughts have to always consider it.
You have to filter your every experience through it.
You have to consider everything based upon it.
You have to discern everything through this lens: you are God’s temple.
Responding to life’s hard hits is completely different when you see yourself as a temple of God. You carry conviction that you can survive anything, recover from anything, settle for what God intends, and believe God for everything. Do you better by seeing you better. You’ll start seeing yourself better by living with the conviction that you are the dwelling place for God.
