My attention was arrested this morning by a strange passage:
“I discovered the evil that Eliashib had done on behalf of Tobiah by providing him a room in … God’s house. I was greatly displeased and threw all of Tobiah’s household possessions out of the room. I ordered that the rooms be purified, and I had the articles of the house of God returned there, along with the grain offering and frankincense” Nehemiah 13:7-9.
Eliashib was the priest and he gave Tobiah an apartment INSIDE THE TEMPLE.
What? He let the man move into rooms inside the TEMPLE? That’s crazy. No wonder Nehemiah was angry. When he found out, he threw Tobiah’s things out. Then he purified the rooms, because God’s holy temple had been defiled. It had been treated as something common, something ordinary. But it gets worse.
Tobiah was an enemy of God. He had been one of the two who fought the hardest to stop the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem. He had mocked the workers and done everything in his power to stop the work God sent Nehemiah to do. Then once the work was done, he managed to move into God’s House! (What?! Isn’t that a weird story?)
“Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit… you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price” 1 Corinthians 6:19.
Are you treating your body like a temple? Or do you treat it like something common, something ordinary?
Do you allow the enemies of God to live in the temple?
Jesus bought you with HIS BLOOD. His temple must be treated with care as something holy. We must love our bodies, feed them well, exercise them, and never let sin touch them. Never sin with your body. It’s bad enough that it gets into your mind.
Temptation is like a bird: you can’t stop it from flying over your head, but you can keep it from building a nest in your hair!
God, teach us to think of our bodies as YOUR TEMPLE.
ΑΩ
*The picture above is a dove that built a nest in one of my daughter’s hanging baskets. Twila took this picture yesterday!
Household Words: 