How can you know what God wants? What does it mean to say that God wants something for your life? It’s here. Are you ready? This is what God wants, for you to be made holy. That means to be holy, which means to set aside for God. Paul explains in the next few lines that he is talking about having control over our bodies and not giving in to lust.
It was just as sexually wicked and promiscuous in Paul’s time as it is now. People who turned to Christ had to stay away from the neighborhood temples and change how they behaved. They could feel temptation everywhere. There were times when new Christians wanted to use other people for their own pleasure, even in church. John 4:5–6 says Paul warns those who do this that the Lord will punish them.
In this text, Paul was talking about sexual purity. But being holy also means changing the way we think, speak, spend our time, and everything else in our lives. God’s will is for us to think about and do everything for His glory (1 Corinthians 10:31). He wants all of us to be like this, even though we don’t always do it. As we go through this process, chances to serve Him appear. Most of the time, how well we take advantage of those chances depends on how far we’ve come in letting God’s work of sanctification happen in our inner and outer selves.
Think about this: We shouldn’t be asking why God doesn’t use us more as His agents in the world. Instead, we should be asking why we haven’t given Him more of our thoughts and deeds.
