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[ Music ] (upbeat music) (upbeat jazz music) ♪ I never had a lover

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♪ Never as good as you ♪ Any joy from a heart ♪ Is better than I ♪ The blood that Jesus shed for me ♪

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♪ Way back on Calvary ♪ ♪ The blood that He's been shed ♪ ♪ From day to day ♪ ♪ He will never lose ♪

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♪ His power ♪ ♪ He soothes my doubt ♪ ♪ And calms my fear ♪ ♪ And it dries all my tears ♪

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♪ The blood that gives me strength ♪ ♪ From day to day ♪ ♪ It will never lose its power ♪ ♪ It reaches to the highest mountain ♪

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♪ It falls to the lowest valley ♪ ♪ The poor wreckage we strand ♪ ♪ From day to day ♪ ♪ We will never lose ♪

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♪ This power ♪ ♪ It reaches to the highest mountain ♪ ♪ And it flows ♪ ♪ It flows ♪

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♪ Oh, the blood of Jesus ♪ ♪ That gives me strength ♪ ♪ From day to day ♪ ♪ Today ♪

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♪ It will never, never, never lose ♪ ♪ Oh, help me say it one more time ♪ ♪ And it reaches ♪ ♪ To the end of the world ♪

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♪ To the highest, to the highest mountain ♪ ♪ And it flows to the lowest, to the lowest valley ♪ ♪ Lord, the blood of Jesus ♪ ♪ It gives me strength from day to day ♪

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♪ Day to day, oh ♪ ♪ And it will never, never, never lose ♪ ♪ Its power ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪

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♪ It will never, never, never lose ♪ ♪ Its power ♪ ♪ Oh, no, it won't charge, I'm here to tell you ♪ ♪ It will never, never, never lose ♪

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♪ To lose its power ♪ - Amen. - Amen. Here this word

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recorded in first Corinthians, the sixth chapter, the ninth through the 20th verses. This is Paul's answer to a report he has received concerning the church in Corinth.

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There is trouble in the church, and we have Paul's response to the report. One of the problems is that of the view of the body, the view and abuse of the body. Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate,

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nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. All things are lawful unto me, but

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all things are not expedient. All things are lawful unto me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Meats for the belly and the belly for meats. But God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication but for the Lord and the Lord for the body.

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And God has both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us by his own power. I know ye not that your bodies, know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? But I then take the members of Christ and make them the members of a harlot, God forbid. What?

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Know ye not that he which is joined to a harlot is one body, for two saith he shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication, every sin that a man doeth is without the body.

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But he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body. Know ye that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have of God and ye are not your own. This is the climaxing statement dealing with the issue.

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For ye are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. So the subject of the message, glorify God in the body. Glorify God in the body.

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Most of us are familiar with the nursery rhyme we learned as children. Can a body meet a body coming through the rye? Can a body kiss a body, need a body cry? Every laddie has a lassie or needs a lassie.

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Name they say have I, but all the lassies smile at me when coming through the rye. We're taking up where we left off in considering the general theme of this epistle, Trouble in the church and one of the problems as I aforementioned confronting the church is the relation of the sexes.

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We're not content to sing about coming through the rye and just leave it there. We want to know who's coming through the rye and with whom. The answer to these questions come forth from Paul's letter, for he gives us a theology of the body.

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Those who were in the church were in certain groups, there were certain cliques, certain people were gathered around one preacher that had led them and another and another. And then this issue of the sexes was also paramount. There were those in the church who were called libertines, and the libertines felt that they

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were at liberty to do whatever they wanted to do with their body. It's my body and I'll do whatever I want to do. No one has any right to say anything about it. Then there were those who were aesthetics.

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They did not believe there should be any mingling of the sexes. They were to live their own lives, to withdraw from society, and so they had their following. Paul addresses these two worlds that deal with the flesh and the spirit because every one of us lives in both of these worlds, the flesh and the spirit.

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And we find that there are those who often try to divorce the two, but the flesh is related to the spirit and the spirit is related to the flesh. so often someone says, "Well, I didn't make the meeting, Reverend. My spirit was there, but my body was not." Well, we really don't want you to send the spirits without the bodies.

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We need both of them together to have the kind of wholeness and the kind of relationship which is desired. There are sins that are rooted in the body. Here someone said, "Well, he may be a drunkard, but the only sin he commits, or the main sin

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he commits, is his injury just to himself." And they seek to excuse it on that basis. But the sin begins within. The sin begins within.

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Adam and Eve sinned when they decided that they were going to disobey God. It had begun. It is that within that moves outward. moves from within to without.

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So that after having made the decision to sin, they partake, they touch it. And in doing so, they commit the sin of appetite. You know, something has to be made attractive to you

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for you to do it. So the sin of appetite, the desire to have it, and the next thing is we find ourselves consuming it. So,

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sometimes we excuse many of our actions, sometimes we do it in the family. We say, well, this is my child, but he or she may do whatever they want to do.

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If it's all right with them, it's all right with me. We're free, we let them run wild, so to speak. Do as they wish. We can't develop anything in the way

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that it should be developed without having some design. God has a divine design for his people. He has a divine design for the family. We have some who say, "Well, they can come to Sunday school if they wish."

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And some withdraw their parental obligation, so to speak, from the situation and let them run as they will. It's my body, many teenagers may say. This is my body.

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So I can mutilate it if I want to. I can put holes in my nose, diamonds on my tongue, tattoos over any section of my body. It's mine and ain't nobody's business if I do these things. That's the attitude that many take.

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But there is a theology, I say, of the body. God made the body. The body must be fed and it should be fed properly. And when it's not fed properly, it lets us know when we stuff our guts.

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find ourselves overweight. So much so that not only do we get criticized, and I think even in the secular world we're beginning to realize that if we don't take proper care of the body, it will destroy us. So Paul is saying that food is for the stomach, and the Stomach is for food, but we must relate those two in the rightful manner.

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The body is separate from the spirit, yet the body is related to the spirit and it matters. It does matter what we do. It does matter how you treat the body. we are made up of body, mind, and spirit. That makes the person. The Greeks had a

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different attitude toward the body than the Jews. The famous Greek teachers spoke of the insignificance of the body compared with the immortality of the soul. The Jews taught that man is psychosomatic. He's a psychosomatic being and he does not have a body.

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He is a body. a person's outward expression of his self in this instance is the body. He has a stomach and he has a body. In the church we see bodies in relationship to other bodies and how adults are related,

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How parents and children are related, all of these things have to do with the body. How siblings relate to each other, all have to do with the body. And the church is Christ's body. We are members of Christ's body.

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Many members, one body, performing many functions. We are part of him. We belong to Christ. We belong to each other.

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At the communion table we meet, we do that today. We are the body of his disciples gathered around him, committing ourselves anew to his service and dedicating our bodies to be used in a way that promotes his kingdom. That's our task.

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We are not free just to have this body any way we choose. God didn't give us bodies for that, but the body that he gave his people, that body is to be used in his service. That is what Paul is saying to the Corinthians and that is what he says to the church today.

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Then he goes on to say that the body is God's temple. Listen to that. The body is God's temple. We are all a part of the temple of God.

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We are part of his building. We are part of the house that he makes for himself. We are part of it. And that temple is to be cleansed and it is to be used as his dwelling place.

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We think of other things in other ways of being. We don't think of God as being a part of our lives in the sense that we are his temple, but we should. That's what Paul is saying.

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We are his temple. We are part of him and we are a part of each other. We belong to Christ and we belong to each other. and we express this unity as we gather around

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the table of the Lord. This, he says as he speaks to us through this sacrament, this is my body. We have his body and my body broken for you.

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So by this, we have Paul's body. theology of the body. By the grace of God, his temple becomes the abiding place of the holy. Contrary to pagan temples, the Christian community constitutes the body of God. We We were in Palestine, Israel, and we wanted to go into the temple, the dome that the Muslims

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have. It's a very beautiful structure and we wanted to visit it. But we couldn't visit it because it was a day that police were everywhere because there had been certain threats made by the two groups, one against the other.

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But the times we did go into a Muslim temple, we were expected to pull off our shoes. We just didn't walk in there. They required that you pull off your shoes, put them in a designated place, then you could

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go in and look. But that was the respect which many ancients had for the house of God. This is my body. Every person here who is a member of the body of Christ, every person is related and Christ

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speaks to us. He speaks to us in this service saying, "This is my body." So the apostolic admonition is this, "Glorify God in your body." by God in your body.

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I don't have to tell you. It's all over TV how the body is misused. If a company wants to sell a car and have running advertisement, a beautiful body is placed on top of the car.

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So one has to decide whether he wants the car or the body. But that's the kind of culture we live in. And we have become submerged in this culture, so much so that we are like the ancient Greeks in many ways.

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And the theology of the body regarding what Paul has to say to the Corinthians applies to us in our society today. This is my body. Be careful how you handle my body.

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Be careful. Use it to my glory so that one is not to be parading in a certain way if it's not to the glory of God. When we were in Africa, we were somewhat amazed because we went to a performance, a dance,

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a native dance program. they had presented their women who were thinly clad but the top of their bodies was fully exposed and we wondered why. We were shocked because that's not our custom.

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They said, "Well, they glorified a body." When we see half of a person's body, we'd have certain thoughts. But in that situation, they had other thoughts. In other words, look at the beauty of this body that God has made and let it be presented

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in a way that glorifies him. So Paul says to this pagan culture, surrounded by people who engage in all kinds of sins, fornication, prostitution, all of that. And Paul introduces this thought, "You are Christ's body, and use it to his glory."

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So not only the body, but the spirit, because the spirit has to do with how we use our bodies. within and he says glorify God in your body. Glorify Him. God is to be praised. God is to be honored and just as we honor Him in this worship service we We should honor him in our bodies.

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We live in a culture where Freud says that the main purpose of the culture is sex. And we are to extol the spirit. This is my body. Honor me.

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Glorify me. me. That's what we do, not just with the hymns, not just with the organ, not just when we go around the communion table, but when we worship God with our lives. Every day glorify me with him. I suspect we wouldn't need to have laws passed

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about overeating. If we really took this text seriously, glorify God in spirit. Because God is spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. So glorify God. Glorify God in the body. Use your hands, clap your hands and glorify Him with your body. Use your ears to hear His Word. Glorify Him in

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the body. Use your eyes to see good things in people. Glorify Him in the body. Use your feet on errands of mercy, of helpfulness. Glorify God in the body. So listen to what has to say, let him guide you with his spirit, glorify him with your body. But you can't, we can't glorify God in the body unless we begin with the spirit of God.

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begins on the inside and moves to the outside. That's the way it works. Body and spirit inside out. Glorify God in the body. Eyes, hands, ears, feet, tongue, all use it, use it to the glory of God, all the members of the body, and we'd be able to say, "Bless the Lord, bless the Lord, oh my soul, bless His holy name."

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Glorifying God in the body. We bless Him because He has redeemed us. And notice the psalmist goes on to say that he has redeemed us from diseases. In other words, the blessing of the Lord, the praise of the Lord is based on our relationship to him because he has not only blessed us with the Spirit, he has blessed

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our bodies. And that's why we say he put food on my table, gave me a house to live in, give me a wonderful family, children and all, all to the glory of God, glorify him in the body. That's a good theology of the body, to relate the body to God and to use it to his glory so that we can say praise God, praise God in the

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body. Praise God as I walk, praise God as I talk, praise God, praise God all creatures here below, praise Him, ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and and Holy Ghost. Praise God in the body. Let his spirit

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rule what we do. So as we come now to this moment let everybody stay where you are and not move because it's a significant moment. A moment of dedication.

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It's a moment of commitment. Maybe we wandered here and there, but this is a time to commit yourself anew to the Spirit of God,

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to let the Spirit move in you, and to guide all of the members of your being. As we sing the hymn of invitation, we ask you to come give your life to Jesus Christ

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body and soul flesh and spirit have thine own way Lord The door of the church is open for those who would worship God,

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would give themselves to him, body and soul. We invite you to come by letter, by Christian experience, on professional faith, come. Have thine own way, Lord.

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♪ Have thine own way, Lord ♪ ♪ And that way ♪ ♪ Now and forever ♪ ♪ I am the place ♪

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♪ Of the angry ♪ ♪ And the will ♪ ♪ Of the crazy ♪ ♪ Still and still ♪

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♪ Heaven away, Lord ♪ ♪ Heaven away ♪ ♪ Search me and try me ♪ ♪ Master today ♪

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♪ I hear this song, Lord ♪ ♪ Watch me just now ♪ ♪ As in the past ♪ ♪ Come me I bow ♪

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♪ And I obey, Lord ♪ ♪ And I know where ♪ ♪ So with envy in me ♪ ♪ Help me, I pray ♪

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♪ Father of love's touch ♪ ♪ Share these words ♪ ♪ Touch me and heal me ♪ ♪ Savior divine ♪

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♪ Heal my own pain, Lord ♪ ♪ Heal my own pain ♪ ♪ Hold on to me ♪ ♪ Perhaps time will stay ♪

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♪ Fill with my spirit ♪ ♪ Fill all to see ♪ ♪ That you'll be always ♪ ♪ There in heavenly ♪

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