No Earthly King

Our king tells us in his written word that our bodies our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. First Corinthians, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from god you are not your own you are bought with a price so glorify god in your body.”

Do you believe that? Do you believe that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? Do you take it seriously?

Among all the other things that that implies, if you do take it seriously, is this: no earthly king or president or public health official or billionaire technocrat gets to dictate what we must put into our bodies – into these temples of the Holy Spirit.

Because that’s between us and God. Do you hear what I’m saying?

Now if you think about it in a kind of strange paradox, it’s easier for a Christian living today in a repressive totalitarian regime to maintain that perspective of the heavenly kingdom than it is for us.

I’m sure, for example, that Christians living in the Roman Empire of the first three centuries or in the Soviet Union of the 20th century or today in radical Islamic countries had and have an easier time acknowledging in their hearts their primary allegiance to king Jesus than do most Christians living in America today. And I think the reasons are obvious. I say it because there is little or nothing, there was little or nothing, in the societies of ancient Rome or of the Soviet Union or today in radical Islam to compete with the Christians’ attention or affection.

But there is much in our modern western culture of freedom peace and prosperity to attract us and thus to distract us from our allegiance and responsibilities to the one whom we verbally confess as Lord.