05.22.14

Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are. - 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 NKJV. 

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. - 1 Corinthians 2:12 NKJV. 

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. - Galatians 5:22-25 NKJV. 

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed - always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. - 2 Corinthians 4:7-10. 

Heather Andrews and a childhood friend, Jillian Pozzi, have been giving to each other for a few years, statues of garden gnomes. The gifting of the gnomes is an ongoing joke between the two of them. Heather accidentally dropped one of the gnomes when she was unloading the three from her car. As she was picking up the pieces of the one that had fallen she noticed that there was something inside of the broken gnome. Inside the gnome, was another statue of what appears to be an armless angel with intricate detail inscribed or carved onto the statue. The gnome was made in China and one of the commenters on the article said it was common to find other statues inside of statues made there. Heather says about the beautiful figure of white she found, “People have told me that gnomes represent guardians of treasure, and that may be his treasure just inside him.” (yahoo news; The Tennessean; AL.com 05.21.14)  

It is always a sickening feeling that we have when we break something that is valuable to us. Heather had the pleasant surprise of having her sadness replaced by joy with the finding of a treasure inside of her broken gnome. We live in bodies that are in a state of continuing degradation. Yes, the body repairs itself, but there is always more repairs to be done than it can do. The result is an aging, and the breakdown of our bodies. However, inside of the fragile human bodies of believers in Jesus Christ there is a great treasure. That treasure is God Himself in the form of the Holy Spirit. W. A Criswell, a great Bible scholar, writing about 1 Corinthians 4:7 says, “Reflecting on the strange, incongruous phenomenon of the indwelling Holy spirit of God, Paul surmises that God indwells ‘earthen vessels,’ giving His power to men, so that the excellency of His power might be magnified in otherwise weak, human vessels.” 

In 1 Corinthians 2:12, we are told we have been given the Holy Spirit, “that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.” Some of those things given to us by God are the fruits of the Spirit as listed in Galatians 5, “…love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” Galatians 5:25 says, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” If we want truly to discover the awesome value of the treasure inside of us, we must not only exist as believers with the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us, but we must “walk in the Spirit.” The apostle Paul says that we do that by, “crucifying (crucified) the flesh with its passions and desires.” You are the guardian of the treasure inside of you, will you allow the “excellency of His power” to be magnified in your life?