A Devotion from H.P. Liddon

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?

—1 Corinthians 3:16

Christians are the temple of God; the Spirit of God dwells in them.  The Day of Pentecost was not to be deemed a day apart; it was merely the first day of the Christian centuries. The tongues of fire might no longer be visible, but the gift that they symbolized would remain. The Spirit, being the Spirit of Christ, had made the life of Christ to be forever in Christendom nothing less than a reality of the present. Christians know themselves to be temples of the indwelling Presence. From the moral pressure of this conviction there is no escape except by a point-blank denial of it.

We need motives, strong motives, one and all of us. We need them for purposes of action and for purposes of dogged resistance. We need them to counteract all that gives way and depresses from within and to oppose all that would crush our wills into culpable acquiescence from without. A few primal truths, to us clear, indisputable, cogent, again and again examined and proved and burnished like well-prized weapons—these are assuredly part of the inner furniture of every Christian. And among these none is better than that of the text—the motive that appeals to the sanctity, the responsibility, the powers, the capabilities implied in that inward presence of the eternal Spirit, which is the great gift of the new covenant. In moments of moral surprise, in moments of unusual depression, in moments of a felt sense of isolation that threatens to take the heart out of us, in moments of spasmodic daring, when ordinary sanctions have, as it seems, lost their hold on us, it is well to fall back on the reassuring, tranquilizing, invigorating resources of such an appeal, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” Let us emblazon these words, if not on the walls of our churches, yet at least within the sanctuary of that inner temple where the All-Seeing notes our opportunities for acquiring a clear vision and a firm grasp of truth and, still more, the use that we really make of it.