Charles Stanley - Wisdom for Good Health
How do you view your physical body? Well, you may say, "Well, that's really none of your business". I do understand that. If you had the power to change anything about it, would you change it? What would you change? If you could change anything about your physical body that you could, what would you change? Would you say that you pursue good health, that you're a person who is very health conscious and you are concerned about your body, and you're concerned about being everything that God wants you to be, including the physical body? How do you think God views the human body? Is He interested only in the spirit and in the soul or does He have an interest in these physical bodies of ours?
Well, that's what I want to talk about because it's a tremendous issue today. All the thoughts that are going into health, all the people who are doing everything and they possibly can in order to discover the causes of disease and how people can be healed. What does God have to say about these human bodies of ours? So, I want you to turn, if you will, to First Corinthians chapter six and I want to talk about this whole idea of the wisdom, that is wisdom that will lead us to good health. There are some things we can do that'll bring us good health. There are some things we do that will not bring us good health but bring us and they're very opposite.
So, I want us to see what God has to say, because most of the time people think that God is interested in our spirit, He's interested in our soul, but He has very little interest in our human body. But listen to what he says as Paul rights here in First Corinthians chapter six beginning in verse nineteen, "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body".
Now, those are two short verses but they're very packed and so I want to read them again. "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body". Now, those verses are powerful because they say something about the human body that should affect our attitude toward our own human body.
And so, what I'd like for us to do is to look at this from God's viewpoint because the truth is the kind of wisdom that promotes good health involves, listen, it involves God's viewpoint of the human body. That is, when we look at the human body the way the world looks at it, we see that primarily their interest is how it looks on the outside. Or how can we shape it up differently? How can we get more attractive or how can we gain attention? God doesn't view the human body that way. He views it in something entirely different. So, what we have to ask is: what's God's view of these bodies?
So, let's think about what he says in this passage and the first thing I want you to notice is this. And that is that God's viewpoint of the human body is what? That the human body is the temple of the living God. Now, listen to what he says. He says, "Don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit"? And I want you to turn to another passage. If you'll look in Second Corinthians because chapter six, because the Apostle Paul is dealing with a major problem here in the minds of these readers of his in Corinth and those who lived in Greece. Because their idea of the body was that it was nothing.
That is, it was unimportant and therefore because it's unimportant, in fact, they called it a tomb sometime. And that a person is sort of incarcerated in this tomb. That the body's not really that important. And therefore, because it's not important, you can do what you want to with it. Because it's not important, you can feed it what you want to feed it, or you can treat it the way you want to. And as a result, their thinking was a part of their whole immoral attitude. Because they had, they had priestess, a thousand priestess whose worship of god and their goddess included immorality, prostitution. And so, their idea was, well, the body's not important anyway so that doesn't really count.
But listen to what Paul says. In the sixth chapter the sixteenth verse, "What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said". So according to the scriptures, according to what God has said, this body is very important in His eyes, and He sees it as His temple. That is, it's His temple because we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. For example, if you'll go back to the third chapter of First Corinthians, and I want you to notice here what he says, "Do you not know," in the sixteenth verse, do you not know, "that you are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you"?
And you'll recall that Jesus said to His disciples that as He was going away, He said, "I will send another just like Me", that is, the Holy Spirit, "He'll be in you, with you, and upon you. He will abide with you forever". So that every single believer is indwelt by a portion of the Godhead, that is, God the Spirit. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And He sent the Holy Spirit to indwell us in order to live His life in us and through us. So, when somebody thinks about the human body, they may say, "Well, the body's just a body". No, from God's viewpoint, the human body is the temple of the living God.
You say, "Well, I'm not a Christian. How does that work in my life"? Well, the structure's there, you have just not allowed God to indwell this body which was created for the purposes of God. He says it is created for the purpose of, listen, housing the Godhead, housing God. God's desire to live in and through us in order to accomplish His purpose in this life. So, God's viewpoint's very clear. Your body is the temple of the living God. That should say something to us about its value. It should say something to us about the way we treat it. It should be a warning to us if we abuse it, misuse it, ignore it, and if we treat it wrongly. Because from God's viewpoint, this body is indeed the temple of the Holy Spirit. He says, "Don't you know that your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit"?
A second thing I notice here, notice here is this: that from God's viewpoint, God owns these bodies of ours. He's the one he says who possesses them. Listen to what he says. Do you not know that your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? That is, the Spirit of God was sent by the Father. He says and you're not your own. God made you for Himself. Now, most people are gonna live their entire life and never think that's true. God made you and me for Himself. That means that He has a right to have a will and a plan and a purpose for our lives. He has a right to control and dictate. He has a right to bless and honor us. He has a right to discipline us and give us good things. He has a right to call us to account. We are the possession of God.
These bodies as well as spirit and soul belong to the living God. He is the source of life. Your heartbeat, the first time by the goodness and love and mercy and grace and creative power of Almighty God. Now, if I feel like, if I believe this is mine, I'll do with it what I please, more than likely I'm gonna do the wrong thing. So, what you have to ask is this: What is your true view of your body? Do you see it as the temple of the living God? You say, "Well, I don't see it that-a-way". Doesn't make any difference what you do, whether you do or not, God says, that is the creator says your body is My temple, created for My purposes. I own it. I own it. He says we are His possession. He owns it.
A third thing I want you to notice about that viewpoint is this: Not only is this body the temple of the living God, not only does He own it, but listen, He purchased it. Look at this. Do you not know that your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you whom you have from God and that you're not your own? You have been bought with a price. Now, you say, "Well, what does that mean"? Well, God created these bodies absolutely perfect. They function perfectly. No disease, no weariness, no death, no aging, any of that. And then came sin into the world. And in the Garden when Adam and Eve sinned against God, their physical bodies began to show the effect of sin. So that today we have weariness and we become tired, and we become hungry and we get irritated.
And our bodies have all kinds of emotions. And our body changes will throw us into all kind of emotions. And as a result, of course, we also have sickness and we have aging and we have death. All of that is the result of sin. So that these temples of ours, these bodies, these temples of God, the Bible says that He purchased them. Listen. Don't you know that you've been bought with a price? Well, what was bought with a price? Usually, we think in terms of what God bought, what God purchased was our spirit and our soul. But when Jesus Christ went to the cross, that's what he's referring to, because man was absolutely helpless and could not save himself, God sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, to the cross to die, listen to this, an atoning death, a payment death.
That is, God the Father who gave the law that the soul that sinneth it shall die, and the requirement was death to pay that penalty, He also provided the payment in the death of His only begotten Son, Jesus, whose blood at Calvary paid our sin-debt in full. Therefore, any person who comes to the Lord Jesus Christ asking for the forgiveness of their sins, their sins are forgiven. And listen, what comes with the forgiveness of sin is more than the forgiveness of sin, but listen. In the process of forgiving us, He restores us into a right relationship with Himself. So that, listen, our spirit is restored. Now, listen, now, we can talk with Him and listen to Him, and we can have relationship with Him and fellowship with Him.
Not only did He do that, He did something to this soul of ours. He wants us to have the right view of ourselves, the right view of Himself, so that we can live not with depression and down in the dumps about things. We can live with joy and a sense of contentment and happiness in life. We can live with a sense of agreement and cooperation and love to get along with other people and love other people and be sensitive to them and have emotions of desiring them and loving them and helping them and serving them. All of these things come with it. But likewise, these physical bodies also God included.
Remember these bodies are the temples of the living God. They're owned by Him, purchased by Him. We belong to Him. He has a purpose for these bodies of ours. So that, if God says that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that He created us and owns us, He possesses us and He thought and He thinks that they're so valuable that in the forgiveness of our sin the purchase at Calvary also purchased our resurrection, then these physical bodies of ours must be very important in the eyes of God. Anything that He places that much value on, we should place value on, we should care for them, we should take care, we should pursue good health and good strength because we are, listen. We are the structures that God indwells, the temples of the living God.
Now, let me ask you a question: How do you view your body? Is this some means, a mechanism, of bringing you pleasure, that you can indulge yourself and gratify the desires of your mind and your heart and the naturalness within us, or do you see yourself as somebody very special? You say, "Well, I never have seen myself as somebody very special". I think that'd just be prideful. Let me ask you a question: If God says you're special, would you agree with it? Now, here's what people say. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yes, yes, I do. But down in their hearts they don't. Do you see yourself as somebody special? Well, your argument may be, "Well, you don't know me".
How do you know whether I'm special or not? Because God says so and I believe what He says. And you know what? My friend, if God thinks you're so special that He sent His only begotten Son to Calvary and died on the cross to save your body, soul and your spirit, yes, you are somebody very special in the eyes of God. Because you don't think so doesn't mean you're not special. Because you don't think you look worthy doesn't mean that God doesn't think you're special. Because you'd like to be tall or short or thinner or fatter. Because you'd like to have more of this and more of that and less of the other. And because you'd like to look other than you look, doesn't mean that you're not special in the eyes of God. That's your opinion about your body.
What we're talking about, what is the divine viewpoint? What's the viewpoint of the living God? Your creator, your possessor, your owner, what's His viewpoint? His viewpoint is simply this: "You're very special. I created you, made you a temple, indwell you. I have a purpose for you, a will for you, and I have something to do on this earth through you". That makes you special, makes you somebody. Nobody, no matter what somebody else thinks about you, how they look at you, how they view you, how you view yourself, you cannot change the viewpoint of Almighty God, amen? You can't change His viewpoint.
Now, with that in mind, let's think about it. He says you're His temple. You're owned by Him, possessed by Him. He says you've been purchased by Him. But likewise, His viewpoint is this. And that's simply this: that because you're His temple, because He owns you, because He possesses you, He has purposed to bring glory and honor to Himself through you. You say, "Well, now wait a minute. You haven't seen me". I don't have to. You see we're not talking about what we think, we're talking about what God thinks.
You say, "Well, how in the world could I bring glory to God"? Well, let's think about what Paul said a moment. Listen, he says you have been bought with a price; therefore, he says, it's our responsibility, glorify God in your body. Now, which simply means this: God Himself in the presence of the Holy Spirit is living in us. Well, why did He make us temples? So He could live in us on earth. Now, think about this: You know the Bible talks about the body of Christ. Well, now that's not talking about, usually it's not talking about His physical body, though sometimes it refers to that. But He's talking about primarily the body of Christ is the Church.
That is, now we're not talking about just Baptists, Methodists or Presbyterians or Catholics or Lutherans or Episcopalians, we're talking about all the Christians. All Christians make up the body of Christ. Why did He say, call us His body? Here's the reason: Because when He left physically from this earth, He left a handful of followers. And He said to them, "As you go, make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Teach them to observe all the things that I've commanded you. I'll be with you every step of the way". So, He had something for them to do.
Now, every single one of us is a temple. God is living in us and through us. He has something to do through you and through me. So that, since Jesus Christ is now seated at the Father's right hand, who are His eyes, His feet, His hands, His ears, His voices? We are. We are, listen, we are Christ's living representatives. We are the temples of the living God. So that it is through you and through me that, listen, that we express the compassion of Jesus through others, that we sense their needs, that we help supply their needs, that we talk to them about Jesus, that we explain to them who God is, that we help them in times of trouble. We pray for them, we serve them, we lift them up, we encourage them.
How does God do that? You say, "Well, I don't think God needs me to do that". That's not the issue. The issue's not what God needs. The issue is what has God chosen? God has chosen, having left this earth to sit at the Father's right hand, the Lord Jesus Christ now indwells us in the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit. What does He do? Listen, He works His works, carries out His will, fulfills His plan through you and me, the temples of the living God. That makes you very important in the eyes of God. He didn't have to do it that-a-way. He chose to do it that way.
So that every single person is important. Every single person is a temple of the living God. Those of us who are believers, these temples are indwelt by God. Those out there created by God just as surely as we are, and they have shut God out of their life. If you're one of those persons who's shut God out of your life, remember this: This isn't your body. Your soul, your spirit, your personality, He owns it all. You may rebel against Him. You may be prideful, you may be arrogant, egotistical, saying, "I'll do my own thing". You are doing it in the body that belongs to the living God. And He says every single one of us one day, He said it is required of us that we give an account for our life.
So that no matter what your spirit and what your soul and what your plans and what your ideas and what your philosophy and what your goals in life are, you're gonna have to carry them out in the temple of the living God. You shut Him out, you have violated a basic principle of scripture: that God created you and me in order to do His work, carry out His plan, fulfill His will through us. That's the way He's going to carry it out. So, the thing that I want you to understand is this: You belong to Him, body, soul and spirit.
This body belongs to Him and because it belongs to Him and because He has purposed to live through it and to accomplish something significant in your life, we owe Him, listen, we owe Him the best we can do with these bodies, which leads me to the next point, and that's simply this. And that is, the wisdom that will lead us to good health will reveal in our lives when we have ignored or abused these bodies. Wisdom will tell us you're abusing your body. Think about this. These bodies are the temple of the living God. That means they should be cared for: that our health should indeed be an issue for our lives, the way we treat our bodies.
So, I want to say to you, alcohol in the human body is a desecration of the temple. It affects the liver and the mind and the emotions and many other parts of the body. Smoking, taking that into your lungs is a desecration of the temple of the living God. Because anything that damages the human body is a sin against God because to whom this body belongs and whom it's to glorify. Drugs, whether you buy 'em on the street or across the counter, in order to cover up something, in order to help you to be able to face life, you put enough of them in your body or the wrong drugs in your body, you desecrate the temple of the living God.
Hospitals are filled with people because of drugs, either mixing them or overdosing them or the kind they shouldn't have had anyway. Whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it is smoking, we could name many, many other things, one of which is overeating. Now, remember what this is. This is the temple of the living God. Now, are you saying that you should never go to a fast-food place? I did not say that. Every once in a while, I go. Now, I want you to listen. I'm going to repeat this several times. You listening? Say amen.
I know you was listening. It's not what you do sometime, it's what you do all the time. It's a bad habit. Everybody's gonna eat some things they shouldn't eat sometime. The problem is that too many Americans eat the wrong thing most of the time. We are fueling the temple of the Holy Spirit with the wrong thing. Now, think about it. These temples we say are the temples of the living God. And therefore, we should treat them carefully. People take drugs, they get depressed, they mess up their mind, messes up their emotions. Husbands and wives can't relate together as they ought to because one of them is on drugs or both of them.
And so, what happens is this: We look for the easy way. If we've got pain, if some little pain hits, we run to get something to take care of it. What we're doing is we are masking the root cause. It's like the one thing we can't stand is pain. "One won't hurt me, two won't hurt me, three won't, today won't, tomorrow won't, next week". And then it's next week, next month, next year. And we have hundreds of thousands of people who will look at a glass of liquid and destroy their whole life over something you could pour out and it wouldn't even be missed. There's something wrong that we don't care enough about these human bodies that we are particular about what we put in them, particular about how we treat them, particularly about what we do with them, particularly about how we handle them. And the things that go on that we know in our own hearts that do not fit who we are as the children of God.
So, I want you to think about this for a moment. And I'm not one to give a lot of statistics and I'm not gonna give you much. I just want to take one or two areas because there are lots and lots of diseases. And I want to say again, there are some diseases medical science, they don't know where they come from, what causes them, and so I'm not c not talking about that. I'm talking about the things that you and I know we can do something about. I'm talking about the things, the way we treat these physical bodies of ours, that we know it's not the right thing, we know it's not the best thing. Everybody has done it and we all do it at times probably.
But the issue is this: When I stop to think that this body is the temple of the living God, all of a sudden, I have to stop to think some things that we think, "Well, God doesn't care about what you eat". Oh yes, He does. Remember, you say, "Well, now God's not interested in my diet". Let me ask you a question: What fuels the temple? The diet. Therefore, what fuels this temple is going to affect how long this temple or at least the quality of life in this temple. Now watch this. When you become ill and you can't function properly, you can't serve God the way He wants you to.
And so, I want to help you if it'll help you, I will start my own confession. There was a time in the ministry, a long time ago that I believed, and I picked it up somewhere in seminary, that is, to bring God glory you work hard day and night, morning, noon and night and you burn out for Jesus. Well, that sounded real noble. And so, I thought, "God, I'm gonna give You everything I have. Lock, stock, barrel, I mean body, soul and spirit, here I am God". Worked day and night, stay up late studying, get up early studying. That all sounded real good. Then when I got a case of the flu or a sinus infection, oh, God heal me in Jesus's name. Want to be healed.
Well, somewhere along the way I was too ignorant to stop and think, "Did I bring this on myself"? No, I just want to get healed so I could keep doing, what? The same thing I was doing, which is violating the temple of the living God. Somewhere back there, God wised me up to realize "you can't keep violating My principles and then you get ill because of abuse, misuse of the body. And you're doing it in My name. That sounds real good, but I'm not impressed with that. And therefore, you're gonna keep doing that, keep getting sick. Then you can't preach, then you can't teach, then you can't minister, then you can't pastor the way you ought to and then you want to give Me this fast prayer and you want Me to, want Me to heal you so you can get back and repeat the same mistake. I caught on after a while".
That's not the way God operates. So that we are responsible. And once I began to realize I had a spiritual responsibility for this flesh, I changed my lifestyle. You can change your lifestyle no matter who you are. Now, with that in mind, let me just say this: that the kind of wisdom that brings us to good health requires discipline. And nobody likes it. Nobody likes discipline. Discipline says that I'm bringing this issue in my life under control.
And so, the whole issue with our health is a matter of discipline. You know better than anybody else how your body works. You know how much rest you need. You know the kind of food that gives you energy and the kind of food that makes you just sort of feel wiped out. You know how much exercise you need. Somebody says, "Don't mention that word". You know probably what makes you feel good. Well, let me ask you this: If God's purpose for you is to glorify and honor Him, shouldn't you try to feel the best you can all the time? Should you not take, listen, should you not investigate what's going on inside your physical body that causes you not to feel up and you do feel down, and you'd have those gray days and you don't feel like doing anything? We are responsible.
So, what we have to ask is this. How do I discipline myself, listen, so that this temple of the living God is able to receive the best that God has? And the quality of my life will be such that I will bring honor and glory to the living God. So that people who meet me will be able to see the Lord Jesus Christ in me, which is His purpose for leaving me here.
Now, I say all of that to say this: because your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit, because He created you and therefore owns you, because He thinks that you're so valuable that He sent His only begotten Son to die for you, and because He said, "You are My body on this earth to fulfill My purpose now and My plan," I say to you that you and I have a responsibility to keep as healthy and as strong as we can, as obedient and as yielded as we can for the highest quality of life we can possibly live for the simple reason He deserves it.
And the truth is we want the good results that come from it. And if you're willing to see your body as being owned by Him, and for His purpose, something may happen to your physical body, your soul, your spirit that will absolutely transform you in your health as well as in your psyche, as well in your relationship to Him in your spirit. And it's simply a matter of pure discipline. "Do I want the best that I can get out of life or do I not"? Wise men and women want God's best. And eventually they get around to disciplining themselves to pay that price, and I hope you'll do that.
And Father, we thank You for loving us. You've put up with a lot in all of us. You forgive us, You cleanse us, You finally get through to us and help us to understand who we really are, what You're really up to in our lives, and how You want to bless us. It's my prayer that the Holy Spirit will take this message to open and challenge the hearts and minds of many and that all of us will have a fresh new awareness "I belong to the living God. I represent the living God on earth. I want to be a good representative". For we ask it in Christ's name, amen.