Theology of the Body
From the Series—Body Language
May 20, 2004This evotional begins a two-part series titled Body Language. You might be wondering why in the world I’m even broaching the subject. It doesn’t sound very spiritual. But you’d be surprised to know how much the Bible has to say about your body. It was God’s idea after all.
Disclaimers
A couple disclaimers before we jump into a theology of the body. Let me tell you what this evotional is not.
The goal is not for you to go on a diet or develop an exercise regiment. You may feel like that is a healthy and holy response to this evotional and that is fine, but that isn’t the goal.
The goal is not for you to have a certain body shape. I think it’s important to acknowledge at the outset that all of us have a unique genetic makeup which means some of us are shorter and some of us are taller, some of us are thinner and some of us are thicker. There is no right or wrong body type. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that esteems certain body types over others. And it wreaks havoc physically and emotionally on millions of Americans.
Finally, the goal is not for you to focus more on how you look. I know that I run a risk writing on a topic like this, but let me remind you of something: if you’re self-image is tied to how you look you’re headed for disaster. Here’s why. You’re going to get wrinkles. You’re going to lose muscle tone. You’re going to lose bone mass. And your body is going to sag for lack of a better word.
Let me just say it like it is: if you live long enough you’re not going to like what you see in the mirror. You’ve got a good chance of getting ugly. It’s called the aging process! If you put too much stock in how you look you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
So this evotional focuses on the body, but I sure hope you don’t walk away more focused on mere outward appearances. I Peter 3:3 says, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”
The Temple
I Corinthians 6:12 says, “Everything is permissible—but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible—but I will not be mastered by anything. You know the old saying, ‘First you eat to live, and then you live to eat’? Well, it may be true that the body is only a temporary thing, but that’s no excuse for stuffing your body with food or indulging it with sex. Since the Master honors you with a body, honor Him with your body! Flee from sexual immorality. There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place. Do you not know that your body is a temple 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 body.”
A few weeks ago I was singing to my son, Parker, before bed. There is an old chorus that says, “Spirit move in your Temple.” I asked Parker if he knew what the temple was. He said, “Church.” I said, “No. The Bible says that we’re the temple. When we put our faith in Christ the Holy Spirit moves in and lives inside us.” Parker said, “Cool. So my skin is like fake marble!”
I think a theology of the body begins with an understanding that we are walking temples. This was a paradigm-shift for the Corinthians. Let me try to put it into context.
Paul is writing to the 1st century Corinthians. And you’d be amazed at the cultural similarities between 1st century Corinth and 21st century America. Corinth was a sex-saturated culture. It was very sensual and very sexual. And the philosophy driving it was Gnosticism.
Gnostics had a negative view of the body. They believed the body was bad and destined for destruction. Consequently, some Corinthians thought they could do whatever they wanted to do with their bodies and it had no impact on them spiritually. That false-dichotomy led to over-indulging of their appetites for food and sex. They were basically living on the level of animal instinct.
But Paul doesn’t just say stop it. He doesn’t just deal with the way they are treating their bodies. He goes deeper and here is why: you treat your body the way you see your body. Paul doesn’t just say your body isn’t bad. He goes to the opposite extreme and says it is sacred—a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Fearfully Made
I think some Christians are closet Gnostics. They believe—consciously or subconsciously—that the body is bad. But the Bible celebrates the body! Psalm 139:14. It says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
I think the greatest class in theology that I’ve taken never even mentioned God. It was at a pretty godless school with a pretty godless professor. It was a class in immunology at the University of Chicago. That entire class was an exposition of Psalm 139:14—we are fearfully and wonderfully made. I remember walking out of every class in absolute awe of the way God had created us.
Right now a hundred things are happening in your body that you pay no attention to—breathing, digesting, growing new cells, repairing damaged cells, purifying toxins, preserving hormonal balance, converting stored energy from fat to blood sugar, maintaining body temperature.
Approximately six trillion reactions are taking place in every cell every second. In the next twenty-four hours, your heart will beat a 100,000 times and you won’t think twice about it. You’ll take approximately 23,000 breaths and I’d suggest that each one is a mini-miracle—you owe God 23,000 thank yous each day!
Let me ask you a question: when was the last time your thanked God for your body? Sure, all of us have something about ourselves that we’d like to change about our physical appearance. We get sick. We get hurt. But we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
When was the last time you prayed, “Lord, thanks for maintaining my body temperature right around 98.6 and thanks for purifying the toxins and thanks for helping my body convert that food into blood sugar, and thanks for hemoglobin.” We don’t pray like that, but I’m not sure we shouldn’t. I just think we take way too much for granted.
We don’t appreciate what we’ve got till we lose it. So we tend to pray for help when our bodies need. And that is fine. But I think we ought to thank God when everything is working fine!
One of the most amazing and complex parts of the human body is the eye. The retina itself contains about ten million light sensitive cells. These cells have such a high rate of metabolism that they are destroyed and completely replaced about once a week. What’s so astounding about the retina is that it conducts close to ten billion calculations every second—and that is before an image even gets to the brain. I read an article in Byte magazine a few years ago that describes the eye this way, “To simulate ten milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require about 500 simultaneous non-linear differential equations and would take at least several minutes of processing on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are more than 10 million cells interacting with each other in complex ways it would take a minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye every second.”
I don’t understand all the jargon, but I don’t have to. We’re walking miracles! For what it’s worth, listen to what Charles Darwin said about the eye in On the Origin of the Species. “To suppose the eye with its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
The New Living Translation of Psalm 139:14 says, “Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! It is amazing to think about. Your workmanship is marvelous.”
Body Stewardship
I think everything in life comes back to stewardship! How I manage my time and energy and gifts and mind and spirit is how I’m doing spiritually. The body is no exception. It’s a stewardship issue!
When it comes to the body, I think most us tend toward one of two extremes: neglect or obsession. The extremes are self-explanatory, but neglectors tend to neglect their bodies while obssesors are tend to obsess about their bodies. I don’t think either extreme is healthy or holy.
Obsessors
Every once in a while I have these weird thoughts. What if an alien race, without a prior knowledge of the human race, were to study us based on what we watch. What kind of conclusions would they come to? If they were to see Survivor or the Bachelor or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or American Idol or Friends , what kind of conclusions would they draw about us as a human race? One thing is for sure: for better or for worse, you are affected by what you watch.
There is a new genre of Reality TV shows that is an interesting expose on America. In December of 2002, ABC introduced a show called Extreme Makeover. In March, MTV launched a show called I Want a Famous Face about people who have radical plastic surgery to resemble a celebrity. And The Swan premiered on Fox in April. The basic storyline is that women who don’t like the way they look go through months of plastic surgery as well as intense diet and exercise regiments and they aren’t allowed to look in a mirror. After several months, the curtain is pulled back and they see themselves in the mirror for the first time. Some of them can hardly recognize themselves.
What do these shows say about us as a culture? I think it’s pretty obvious. We’re obsessed with how we look. Last year, doctors performed 8.8 million plastic surgery procedures—a 33% spike according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Americans spent a staggering $8.3 on cosmetic surgery.
This evotional is not anti-plastic surgery. The Bible doesn’t have a whole lot to say about plastic surgery. But it has a whole lot to say with how we see ourselves. Let me share a story and then I want to share a verse that I think will help Obsessors.
An NCCer recently shared their struggle with me and gave me permission to share it with you. “Around the time I started college, in the name of “being in shape” I let myself become completely obsessed and controlled by my self-image. I wanted the perfect body. I constantly looked in the mirror and picked out everything about myself that I wanted to change. My thoughts were completely consumed by the way my body looked. This determined what I ate, how much I exercised and how much wasted energy I spent planning and agonizing over making myself look better.
Somewhere I knew inside that God had created me to be the way that I was and that I was supposed to be finding my self-worth in Him, but that didn’t matter to me through this time.”
“I made rules for myself about what I could eat and how much I needed to exercise. I would run for close to an hour six days a week. And crunches, I would literally do 800 crunches per day. I had my eating routine as well – nothing with fat – I didn’t touch butter or ice cream or red meat or cheese or chocolate for years. Some may hear this and think, “Wow, that’s discipline”. But I can honestly say that I was not in control - this area of my life had total control over me. If I messed up on my routine I would be covered in guilt. There was no room in my head to hear the voice of the Lord telling me he loved me just the way that I was.”
“After a year or so of this I realized I had a problem. I didn’t feel as close to Christ as I had once felt. I didn’t have peace in my life and I soon realized that my obsession with my body was the reason. I began to pray for help. I felt like I needed to talk to counselor or someone that could help me see things clearly – but there is no clinical name for what I was going through. I was not caught up in anorexia or bulimia; this type of disorder doesn’t have a name. In fact, it was rewarded with praise from others. Most of my family and friends thought that my obsession was great discipline – that I had health and fitness all figured out. On the outside it looked that way, but in my head I knew things weren’t right.”
“I committed to praying for a mental release from this obsession. I didn’t want to stop exercising or eating healthily, but I wanted it to stop consuming me. I prayed for balance, for freedom and for a healthy self-image. It took a few years of praying and fasting for deliverance, but the Lord completely healed me. He restored my thought life and my self image. I appreciate the body he has given me and I also appreciate the freedom I now have in Him to eat chocolate once in a while!”
I Corinthians 6:12 is Paul’s personal declaration of independence. He says, “Everything is permissible, but I will not be mastered by anything.”
I think Obsessors struggle with going too far. Something healthy becomes something unhealthy because it becomes a compulsive thing or an addictive thing. There is a fine line between being in control and being controlled. When you cross that line it becomes an unhealthy thing. You no longer control your habits—good or bad habits. Your habits control you. I think Paul describes that subtle shift in verse 13. “First you eat to live and then you live to eat.”
Neglectors
Jesus said, “Love God with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength.” How do you love God with all of your strength? I think it means using our energy for godly purposes. One of the greatest feelings in the world is being totally exhausted and totally exhilarated at the same time because you’ve given God everything you’ve got.
I think loving God with all of your strength is a proper diet of food and sleep and exercise so that you have the energy to serve Him. You’ve got to manage your metabolism.
Let me just make an observation. I’ve found an amazing connection between how I’m doing physically and how I’m doing spiritually. I just don’t think you can artificially separate the physical and emotional and intellectual and spiritual into air-tight compartments. How you’re doing physically affects how you’re doing spiritually and vice versa.
I’ve found that when I’m physically disciplined I have a much easier time with the spiritual disciplines. And the opposite is true. Neglect breeds neglect and discipline breeds discipline.
Let me take it one step further. I think some spiritual problems have physical solutions! That is my take on Elijah in I Kings 19.
Elijah goes from “conquer the world” to “kill me” in about 72 hours! How? I think his physical exhaustion got the best of him emotionally and spiritually. Let me be totally honest. If I had just killed 450 prophets of Baal, climbed a mountain, run 96 miles, and made a day’s journey into the desert I’d be depressed too. Elijah did not have a spiritual problem. He was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome! The solution is physical. God does not psychoanalyze Elijah. His prescription is physical. An angel says, “Get up and eat and drink.”
Sometimes we push ourselves too hard for too long and we wonder what is wrong with us—why our prayer life is boring or our temper is shorter. I think God might say, “Get some sleep.”
I Corinthians 6:12 is for neglectors. “Everything is permissible for me—but not everything is beneficial.”
Let me give you a definition of stewardship. Stewardship is the difference between doing what is permissible and what is beneficial.
Too many people live their lives asking the wrong questions. Since we’re talking about the body let me give you one of those wrong questions that is asked in youth groups across the country: how far is too far? That is the wrong question. You’re basically asking: what is permissible? What can I get by with?
I’m not trying to slam the question because it will be asked from now until Christ returns. But it presupposes that you’re going to go as far as you can go—get by with as much as you can get by with—without having sexual intercourse. I just don’t think it’s the best question.
Don’t live down to the level of what is permissible. Live up to the level of what is beneficial.
Ownership Issue
I Corinthians 6:20 says, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with you body.”
Stewardship begins when you realize that you don’t belong to you.
I was jogging on the Mall a few weeks ago and passed some women who were part of a march. They were wearing T-shirts that said, “My body is not public property.” I think the abortion issue comes back in large part to the way we view our body. By wearing a shirt that says, “My body is not public property” you’re intimating “My body is private property.” But it’s neither. Your body is God’s property.
That’s why taking someone’s life is such a grave sin. You’re trespassing on God’s property.
Final Thought
The goal of this evotional isn’t to send obssesors and neglectors on a one-way guilt trip. The goal is to make mid-course corrections.
Quit neglecting. Quit obsessing. And start treating your body the way it should be treated—like a temple of the Holy Spirit.