Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. – 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

We are not our own masters, but belong to God. I know that statement goes against every ounce of American pride boiling within us. It smacks us in the face because it overturns everything we were taught to believe about who we forge ourselves to be when we pull ourselves up from our bootstraps.

Yes, that means we do not live for ourselves or self pleasures, and are really subject to people. Perhaps our greatest dissatisfaction comes from realizing that no matter how much you “do you” it’s not enough for you. Life is not about “doing you” per se, it never was and never will be and as soon as we realize that our dreams and aspirations must be curbed because of the people around us, the faster we will realize that our lives should have broader effects and concerns than what our own selfishness lends itself toward. I know this is where a lot of you will stop reading today’s quiet time. But I want to encourage you to read on because self-denial in the Spirit of God may be more beneficial than the compounded results of our hyper-individualism in the flesh.

When we believe “we are our own,” we live in a selfishly motivated world whose center is “I.” In this world there are no problems when they are not my own problems. There is no injustice when I inflict the injustice. There is no accountability since I am not accountable to anyone but me. When we have nothing to tie us to our neighbors, our decisions have no weight.

Our successes are not shared. Our lives narrowly small. Our sight hazily limited, keeping us from seeing life from another light, our perspective ruined and broken. What does this look like? It looks like a two year old child who bites other people when upset, cries when upset, and throws tantrums when his or her will not be done. The two year old has the world revolving around himself or herself and when we are our own, that’s what we believe life to be. I bet you remember a time in your life, when you weren’t two and over eighteen when you did something like that.

You could probably think of multiple occasions in the last seven days alone. Also, when we are our own, we play the game of self-comparison and wonder whether we are smarter, richer, prettier, happier, and overall better than the next person. When we are our own, we are motivated to compare to define happiness and contentment, but we are never happy and won’t be satisfied. Then disappointments weigh us down as we go on weeklong drinking binges to drown our so-called sorrows. That is if only we don’t have other vices to keep us steadily intoxicated with the idea that we are to be compared and better than the next person.

We then realize in our own-ness that we are unhappy and held back by not being of our own so we ditch people and leave them behind. We tell ourselves not to stop pursuing and to be lonely and of our own to be the smartest, richest, cutest, happiest and the best-est. It doesn’t matter what the cost, it doesn’t matter how, and the consequences are largely ignored; after all, we are our own and life is about “doing me.” So on our own, we become our own and do things alone. But you are not your own.

Paul writes, “you were bought at a price.” You did not come to be on your own by yourself, you didn’t will yourself to where you are and as a result you are accountable to more than your own. Because you’re not your own, there is no comparison. When we are not our own, no comparison matters and our own accomplishments mean little. You are belong to the incomparable. You belong to God, you belong to the people who can’t be on their own. You live, breathe and die as they live, breathe and die.

You are in God as He dwells in you because you are His. When we live “not as our own” we move with the Spirit of God to witness the power of others becoming something other than their own. We begin to love others like they are our own. Likewise, we become their own and they love us as their own selves. Being our own didn’t work before and won’t work in the future.

Isn’t it time we honor God by becoming one of His own? He did pay the price for our lives. He gave us uniqueness that cannot be compared. So it’s time to stop living selfishly for ourselves– “being of our own.” It’s time to wake up and realize that we are not our own and are accountable to Jesus, who purchased us with his blood, and to all the people who surround us that add their own lives to our own.