1 Corinthians 3:10-23

Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? (1 Cor 3:16, CEB)

I don’t normally do this, but… if you read the Greek of this verse it isn’t quite what we think it is…

Okay, now that those words are out of the way… Sometimes, I hear this verse used as a way to reprimand and encourage individual people to lead holy lives. I hear in this verse, when proclaimed this way, a moral code. And, that might be a good reading of this verse.

But it is more than that, so much more. The Greeks had a way with words, and one of those can still be heard today, especially the further south you travel. And this changes the way we read this verse.

Let’s read the verse again, with a Greekish Southern charm:

Don’t y’all know that y’all are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in y’all? (1 Cor 3:16, CEB, my Southern changes)

Yes, we can read this verse solely about how we live our lives as temples of the Lord. But, it means so much more… indeed, the entire passage means so much more, when it is no longer about me, or you, or him or her, or ‘that one guy way over there’ but about all of us.

How much differently would we live if we all truly believed that we all, together, were God’s temple and that we all, together, shared God’s spirit?

Lord, remind us that this life of faith is not one of “me, he, she, you, them” but a life of “us”! Amen!

– The Editors