Dare to live!

[AI translation] "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you, which you have received from God, and that you are not your own? For you have sinned at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's." (1 Cor 6:19-20)On the basis of these two well-known verses that we hear so often, I would like to talk in the first service of 1962 about daring to live! For these words, which we so often recite to ourselves or quote to others, are an encouragement to us to dare to take on life, to dare to take on our burdens, to fulfil our tasks, to fight our battles - to dare to live on the unknown paths of the new year that is still before us. "Fear not... you are mine" - oh, how we need this encouragement! For life itself is a great undertaking! Augustine once said, "It may be easier to die for a cause than to live for a cause." And indeed: it is perhaps easier to give up one's life for a good cause in a moment of enthusiasm than to take on the burden of life day after day, year after year, every morning, and live, live, live. All over the country, there are memorial columns engraved with the names of the heroic dead. Well, God wants us to live heroic lives, and most of the time, not even heroic lives. Maybe you don't have your name carved in marble, maybe you are a forgotten little man, living an uneventful life unnoticed, but - you must live!
Perhaps that means you must set out at the crack of dawn to fight for a grey existence. You put on your work clothes again, still stained with yesterday's oil. You rejoin the treadmill, where your life is slowly being eaten away. You start again with the endless arguments with the same people you've been having for years. The day dawns again when you may have to take on the role of widow alone, abandoned in a lonely little room, or mother in a large family on a small salary. Or maybe someone will wake up in the morning to the day of the operation they've been preparing for so long. It also means, waking up on such a morning, that you have to live! Yes, life can sometimes be a very heavy burden. Many people are afraid of it, they bow down under it, they crumble under it. Oh, but we need encouragement: 'Don't be afraid,... you are mine!" Dare to live!
To think that we have to live today, in this world! Today, that means life is full of unimaginable possibilities! Never before have such terrible powers been in the hands of men as they are today. This is a world of automation, nuclear fission, space flight, but also, unfortunately, the atomic bomb! And that says it all. The world is full of nuclear bombs ready to explode! What happens to it? Will it be dismantled or will it be exploded? And if it is exploded, what will be left of life? This is the world we have to live in! To give what our body's instinctual desires demand. This is one extreme. But there is another extreme. According to this end, the body is despicable, a harmful prison of the poor soul, a hotbed of sin: the indulgence of the sexual instincts of the body is the sin of sin! There was a time in the history of the Church when people, out of religious conviction, allowed their bodies to be defiled in order to express their contempt for the body. There have been exaggerated people who never washed their feet and were repulsed by the very idea of bathing. By neglecting the body, even torturing it, and by completely denying all bodily desires, they tried to make their spiritual life as "pleasing to God" as possible, to force it! This is the other extreme. The sexual desires of the body must be set free because they are natural, says one. The sexual desires of the body must be killed because they are sinful, says the other. Cult of the body on one side, and condemnation of all carnality on the other! Which is right, which is true? Which is the rule for the believer?
For a long time it was believed, and many still believe, that the Bible is right for those who despise the flesh as an inferior thing and put the flesh on the back burner for the sake of the soul. Well, let me say emphatically that this is a big mistake! God's statement in the Bible does not despise the flesh. The idea that man is made up of an immortal soul and a mortal body is not from Jesus and not from God, but from Plato, among others. The anti-body attitude of which Christianity is generally accused has been introduced into the Christian church's thinking not from the Bible but from Greek philosophy.
The Bible makes no distinction between body and soul, for the benefit or at the expense of one or the other. The Bible always sees man in his physical and spiritual reality. A body without a soul is not a man, but a corpse. A soul without a body is not a man, but a phantom. According to the Bible, the physical and spiritual realities in man are distinct but inseparable. It is not as if there is an immortal soul locked in the prison of the body, eager to be released. In fact, it is impossible to draw a line between the body and the soul. The two are so intertwined that they simply cannot be untangled.
The mysterious depth of the intertwining of the soul and the body in man is shown, for example, by modern hormone theory. Hormones, these quantitatively tiny, chemically complex substances, affect our spiritual and even mental lives as much as our purely physical ones. According to the Bible, man in his physicality is a living person. Someone created by God for eternity. Man is a spiritual animal with spiritual functions. Therefore a person, "I"! That the Bible does not regard the body as inferior to the soul is demonstrated by the fact that God, the absolute spiritual being, has clothed a part of his spiritual reality in Jesus. Yes, in a body like the one we have, and after his death he was raised in a body. Even if that resurrected body had a mysterious and elusive quality, it was a body!
That is, God created and redeemed man's body as well as his soul. God did not redeem souls to eternal life, but men. Persons who are human in their physical and spiritual reality! Our bodies have an eternal vocation just as much as our souls. This is how the Bible speaks of eternal life as a certain kind of "carnal" life. If not physical bodily life in the physical sense, then pneumatic bodily life, but bodily life. That is why we believe that with salvation comes the resurrection of our bodies. If not the resurrection of the substance of our body, then the resurrection of the essence of our body. We will one day be conformed bodily to the glorious body of Christ. That is how materialistic the Bible is about the body.
This is how we can understand the thought of God expressed by the apostle Paul: "your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you" (1 Cor 6:19). Think about it: this body is a temple! A sanctuary in which God wants to dwell! I carry God in my body! My hands, my feet, my eyes, my tongue, my eyes, my heart, my whole bodily being is a banner through which the Spirit of Jesus wants to radiate into my surroundings! What a dignity, what a gift, what a duty of the body! To those who worship the body and to those who despise the body, Paul cries out: what are you doing with your body? Do you not know that you are a church? Temple! "You are not your own... God's." Your body belongs to God, not to you! You can't do what you want with it! You can't destroy it by pampering it or torturing it! "Because you have sinned at a price! Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's." (1 Cor 6:20)
If this is so, then every fornication, or as our KJV details, every unclean act, unchaste behavior, word, thought, desire is in fact temple blasphemy! Wouldn't it be terrible if, for example, horses were tied up in this temple or pigs were fattened? Or how disgusting it would be if, after the service, we were to turn the house of God into a bar, and drink cocktails from the communion vessels, while the organ played sensuous jazz music and mood lighting! Even people who never go to church would never do that to God's house! And we, who love this temple, which is made of stone and is dead in itself, do the same to another temple, which is more beautiful than this one, which has an eternal purpose: our bodies, or the bodies of other people!
We commit temple blasphemy whenever we use or regard our own or another's body as a means of unclean acts or thoughts. If boys and girls, men and women, would take the divine dignity of the body a little more seriously, they might shrink back when their blood boils, when the tempter whispers hot voices to corrupt this great temple of God by unclean acts! Perhaps by impure gestures, words, thoughts, they would not so easily poison their souls and imaginations! For this is also profanation, and it is like blasphemy in the house of God. Then perhaps young people would also respect each other's bodies more in their dealings with each other. Perhaps they would not play with fire, with the fire of passions, with immodest, provocative dress, with the showing off of their charms! "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you?"(1 Cor 6:19) Or if you do know, and yet you do it, is this not like what Jesus once said about sinning against the Holy Spirit? Is not conscious fornication a sin against the Holy Spirit? Yes, it is! It is written. "If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will defile it. For the temple of God is holy; these are you" (1 Cor 3:17).
That is why our KJV says in the words of the Word: God has cursed all uncleanness! What does this mean? Perhaps we will understand better if I say: the curse of God is the lack of God's blessing! A deed that is unclean before God, a happiness that is not obtained in a righteous way, not in a straight way, does not have the blessing of God on it! And that is then a very bitter happiness! For example, if a man takes his body out of God's control, and thinks he can do with it what he will, because the instincts must have free satisfaction, he is lost, because it will never be freedom, but slavery. Instincts taken out of the dominion of God become a tyrannical dominion over man, and drive him into sexual chaos which he did not originally want.
This is always the tragedy of man who wants to be independent of God. He thinks he has freed himself from the bondage of divine law, but he is in bondage to a much more tyrannical bondage: the bondage of his instincts and desires! This is the curse of God! This is the lack of God's blessing! One could point here to the multitude of degenerate, imbecilic children who are constant, silent, painful accusations against their parents. Who, in their youth, have not kept the sanctity of the temple of their flesh. Or to the immense torrent of suffering that engulfs so many marriages. Or of young girls and boys whose lives were shattered before they had a chance to blossom. Or to the sad symptom that those who infect their bodies and souls with impurity slowly become desensitised to the sacred, to what is truly beautiful and pure. And especially to the Word which says: "Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers... shall inherit the kingdom of God." (1 Cor 6:10-11) How can an unclean life feel at home in the heavenly sphere of purity and holiness? Yes, God has cursed all uncleanness!
But that is not the real motive for avoiding uncleanness. It is not fear of God's judgment. But rather what Joseph said at the time, "How then can I commit this great evil and sin against God?" (Gen 39:9) Since God hates uncleanness, so does a godly man hate it! The deepest motive for a holy and pure life is that my body and soul are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Jesus paid a great price for my body and soul! Not mine! It is His! I cannot treat it according to my desires, my instincts. I am responsible for it! There may be hard battles to fight sometimes for purity, but the victory is greater! Let no one think that the struggle is in vain, even if he stumbles in it sometimes! What does Jesus say? "This is my body, which for your sake shall be broken" (1 Cor 11:24) He gives His pure, holy body and blood as food for men, and in so doing offers them complete physical victory over all uncleanness. "Live by Him," He says. So let us live with him! Let us live with the victory of Jesus! For Christ can be even in our flesh, even in our blood! "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you?"
Let no one think that this is now some sad, resigned, lust-killing way of life! It is not! On the contrary, it is the way to the true pleasures of the flesh. After all, the gospel is the gospel in Hungarian! God is not a sad God, but a rejoicing God! Jesus wants to make those who believe in Him joyful! The gospel is also good news for the flesh! The Gospel says that eating and drinking is not only for the purpose of keeping the body healthy, but also for the natural enjoyment of the body! The purpose of clothing is not only to cover and keep the body warm, but also to adorn it. A holiday is not only a training ground for new work, but also an opportunity for the body to enjoy the rest and playful pleasure it deserves. The sexual instinct was given by God not only as a means of procreation, but also to make joyful the love of two people for each other in marriage. The believer must choose not between the pleasures of sex or abstinence, but between the pleasures of sex sanctified by God or mere arousal!
God is the source of all joy! It is not right, therefore, to force one's life to be joyless, but to concentrate all one's energy on the source of joy: God! It is exactly as we read in the Psalm: "Hear joy and gladness with me, that my bones which you have broken may rejoice. Hide thy face from my iniquities, and blot out all my deceit. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a strong spirit. Cast me not away from thy face, and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a spirit of obedience." (Psalm 51:10-14) These are the truly happy ones in their physical lives!
And one more thing: it is true that God has cursed all uncleanness, but He forgives uncleanness repented of and confessed from the heart. Jesus sat at the table with tax collectors, fornicators and sinners. He does the same today. And he says to them, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love; just as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy may remain in you, and your joy may be full." (John 15:10-11) Continue therefore in my love, that my joy may remain in you, and your joy may be full.
Amen
Date: 1 January 1962.