Help for weekends

We've all been there (or most of us have); the party with the booze and drugs, the guys gathering around FHM, the girls' night in where the main subjects are gossip and bitching. And we all know how tough it is to behave as God wants us to at those points, how easy it is to just have a couple of drinks, to just have a quick look (it won't hurt!), to nod along with the bitching.

Philippians 3:17-4:1 helps us in those situations. Paul speaks of those who 'live as enemies of the cross of Christ,' and describes them in a very strange way. 'Their god is their stomach, and their glory is their shame.' Have you ever thought of it like that? When people get drunk, or look at porn, or bitch about others, they're feeding themselves and their desires, they're making a god out of what they want. Who are they worshipping? Their stomachs, their own greed, and of course a stomach is never permanently satisfied, it always needs feeding, and ultimately (to put it bluntly) it's useless; whatever you put into it comes out again, and you have to keep filling it up. That's what drunkenness, looking at porn, bitching, obsessing about our looks or our shape is; having our stomach for our god. And the problem? 'Their destiny is destruction'.

Christians do not have their stomach, their own desires, for a god; Christians hold the Lord Jesus Christ to be their God. A God who far from taking all the time gives, as our Saviour. A God whom we worship not as someone who cannot do anything for us, but as one who one day will return from heaven to take us to eternal life.

But there's more, and this is what I think is really helpful when we're tempted to serve our bodies as our gods through drinking or porn or sexual immorality or obsessing over looks...one day Jesus will, 'by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.'

What a different picture that is to the one of people who serve their stomachs as gods by getting drunk, filling their minds with porn, using their tongues to gossip. There's no glory in a body like that, only shame, and the benefit for your body from serving that god is minimal and fleeting; but the Christian knows that their body will be transformed by their God into a glorious, perfect body. The benefit to the body of serving the Lord Jesus Christ is infinite and eternal.

Remembering that can help us to withstand the pressure to serve our stomachs, our own desires, as our god. Remember the result for us and our bodies of serving that god is destruction, and remember that the result for our body of serving the Saviour God, Jesus, is eternal glory with him. While all around us seek desperately to serve their stomachs as their gods, we get on with serving Jesus as ours, and 'eagerly awaiting a Saviour from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ.'