You Are Not Your Own
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
“Belonging necessitates limits.”* If you belong to yourself then you can set your own limits. Today when children dream of what they want to be when they grow up we often encourage them saying “you can do whatever you want” or “you can be whoever you set your heart on being.” However, if we belong to God then it means living within the created limits God intended for humans.
Interestingly, accepting God’s limits does NOT mean accepting we belong to God. It is possible to obey God’s laws and still refuse to follow Jesus – or belong to Him. For example, it is possible to be a generous person, giving your money and resources to the poor and do so while still believing that you belong to yourself. You can conceivably give your money away to charity as an expression of your autonomy and it is coincidence that this lines up with God’s values. This is how it can easily happen that a person belong to a church and follow Christian expectations for generosity and still refuse to live into the reality that they belong to Christ.
“Christian ethics, like any morality, can be treated as a lifestyle option.”* A person may choose to adopt Christian values on greed and honesty when they are part of a Christian community. They may choose to follow Christian morals after a disaster teaches them it is safer to do so. And it is very common for new parents to join church because they want their children to be taught ‘good values.’
There will be a point, however, where a person’s desire for personal preference bumps up hard against an ethical law, or Scriptural command. When that happens a choice has to be made. Will the person abandon Christianity? Will the person choose to find a more inclusive brand of Christianity that removes the ethical quandary? Or the person “can accept that Christianity was never meant to be a lifestyle and with the aid of the Holy Spirit deny your desire.”* If “you are not your own” as Paul says in Corinthians, then it matters what we do with our bodies.
That phrase “you are not your own” makes us uncomfortable. That is because our culture treats autonomy as sacred.* Our culture celebrates this in part because we humans are totally incapable of desiring good of someone else. Our natural selfishness puts us at odds with what is good for someone else. So we have a dilemma. We can’t trust ourselves to do what is best for ourself. We can’t trust other people to do what is best for us. So what hope is there? Well, the Heidelberg Catechism thinks the fact that we don’t belong to ourselves (or anyone else) is a comfort because it means we belong to the one and only one we can trust. Specifically there is one person who is never in conflict over what is good for us and what is good for Him. “We need to belong to Christ.”*
*thoughts, paraphrases and quotes gleaned from Alan Noble’s book about the Heidelberg Catechism called You Are Not Your Own.