1 Corinthians 6:17,19-20 NASB95
But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. [19] Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? [20] For you have been bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body.
I have heard it told and have said it myself many times that the price God paid for us establishes our worth and value. The truth is the price God paid for us reflects our value and worth. There is a huge difference in those two statements, for if the death of Christ establishes our worth and value, then we are saying that His death elevated our value and worth to a place of significance, but if God viewed us even in our lostness with such value and worth then the incredible price He paid to possess us reveals our value and worth in His eyes.
“… O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it?” Romans 9:20.
Even in our fallen condition and the weakness of our fallen humanity, God sees the uniqueness of each one of us created in the laboratory of His heart and genius. Your unique personality traits and physical traits, though touched by the fall, still represent how “fearfully and wonderfully” He made you. Among all the human beings that have ever been born, no one’s DNA is the same. We don’t even share the same simple fingerprints. God created each of us to live in union with Him, sharing in all that He is and all that He has, uniquely as individuals fellowshipping with Him as we each individually display His image.
We were created to be joined to Him, and He to us. In Christ, God became one of us to redeem us and restore us to that mutual indwelling. God so valued each of us that He paid what He thought we were worth. He stepped out of eternity into time and clothed Himself with our fallen and broken humanity so that we might experience Him as our inheritance, and He experience us as His. Wow! For Him to have traveled so far and to have paid such a price, there must have been something remarkably extraordinary about you and me. Never assume that God feels about you the way you feel about yourself unless you love yourself freely and intensely. The incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ is God’s embrace of our humanity. It’s time to lay aside the lies about our forsakenness and embrace the embrace of God in Christ. In light of all this, well, of course, we are going to use our bodies to bring glory to God. What could be more joyfully exhilarating than that?