59: Is Your Body a Machine or a Temple?

In part three of the Body Theology series, Dr. Brook Sheehan takes us back to Leviticus to look at something most of us have never studied closely: the internal organs God asked the Israelites to set apart in their offerings. Not the visible parts. Not the parts anyone could evaluate from the outside. The kidneys, the liver, the hidden fat and connective tissue. This detail alone says something about how your body has always been regarded, inside and out, as sacred rather than incidental.

This episode draws out the difference between two vocabularies we live inside of. Wellness culture speaks in machine language: optimize, upgrade, hack, fix. Scripture speaks in temple language: honor, steward, dwell. A machine gets managed and replaced. A temple gets cared for and revered. Dr. Sheehan traces this thread through Psalm 139, where God is described as forming your kidneys, your innermost self, while you were still in the womb, and through Jeremiah, where God is described as testing the kidneys and the heart. Across three different books of the Bible, the same pattern shows up. God has always cared about what is hidden, not just what is visible.

There's also a cultural contrast worth sitting with. Surrounding nations used the liver for divination, searching it for hidden omens. Israel's instruction was different: offer that same organ back to God instead of trying to extract secret meaning from it. That distinction matters for how we relate to our own bodies today. Your body was never meant to be decoded like it's hiding a message you have to dig for. It was meant to be listened to, the way you listen to something you already trust.

This episode also names the real villain in all of this, and it isn't wellness culture itself. It's fear. Fear of the body failing. Fear of not doing enough. Fear that shows up looking responsible, disciplined, even healthy, while quietly driving every decision. The invitation here isn't to stop caring about your health. It's to notice whether that care is coming from a place of wisdom or a place of fear.

Dr. Sheehan walks through how this shows up practically using the bodyOS framework: pause and notice where you've been treating your body like a machine part instead of sacred territory, connect by offering gratitude to the organs doing quiet, constant work on your behalf, ask across the physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental pillars what your body might be communicating, and adjust by replacing machine language with temple language in how you talk to and about yourself.

This is also the theological soil that the Talk to Me, Body card deck grew out of, a resource built to help you experience your body in a new way, anchored in scripture rather than fear. One episode remains in this series, and next week's conversation turns to something even harder to practice than gratitude: rest.

✨ Your body has been trying to tell you something.

Find out what it's saying with the free 30-second Body Signal Decoder Assessment. Pick your signal, get your personalized guide straight to your inbox, and finally start making sense of what's going on inside.

Get it here: os.drbrooksheehan.com/decoder

🎧 And if you caught the mention of the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck during the episode, here's where to grab yours. 63 scripture-anchored cards to help you trust the body God designed for you.

Get yours here: drbrooksheehan.com/talk-to-me-body/

📱 Come say hi on Instagram: @drbrooksheehan

⭐ If this episode spoke to you, would you take a second to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify? It helps more women find this show. And more women learning to listen to their bodies is exactly why I do this.

Transcript

Dr. Brook Sheehan (00:00)

People live in fear of their body. Fear either of it failing them and it not going well, or fear that they will never optimize to the level and they need to continue to keep doing more, more, more, more, more. See, it's not wellness culture that is our villain in this story. It is fear that is driving every decision that we make.

Are you doing everything right for your health but you still feel off? Does the wellness world have you overwhelmed, second-guessing your body, or chasing yet another fix? You’re not alone. I’m Dr. Brook Sheehan, and welcome to Beyond Wellness Culture, a space where we step out of the noise and rebuild trust with our body. This is where we stop overoptimizing, find clarity instead of confusion, and approach our health in a calmer, more grounded way. Take a deep breath, and let’s dive in.

Hello, friend. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I am really excited as we are going to be going into part three of a four-part series titled Body Theology and talking about the body from a scriptural standpoint.

But whether you understand the Bible or not, I believe you are going to get a lot out of this episode, as we're gonna learn about different organs and the reverence and why it's important to really look at our body as a masterpiece and not a machine because hello, we live in a culture that does look at it like a machine, and we're not gonna be talking about that today.

So we need to take this all the way back to the book of Leviticus because when God asked for offerings from the Israelites, from the Levites, He didn't ask for the visible parts of the body. He actually asked for the internal parts, the ones that no one could see. And that detail alone says something about how seriously your body inside and out is regarded as sacred, not incidental.

See, we've spent this series, so far, talking about design and then the second part about idolatry. But today we are going to go back into the Old Testament, where Leviticus lives, to look at something that most people have never studied closely. And that is those exact parts of the sacrifice that God asked to be set apart for Himself. Let's start with the phrase itself.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, something we talked about last week. But notice the two very different vocabularies that are at play here. Wellness culture speaks in machine language. We've got to optimize, we've got to upgrade, we've got to hack, we've got to fix. Every headline promises a better version of you, as if you're a device waiting for the next software update.

But scripture speaks in temple language instead. Honor, steward, dwell. A temple isn't something you troubleshoot, it's something you approach with reverence. A temple is cared for and revered. A machine is managed and replaced. Which language have you been living in? I'd invite you to actually notice this over the next week.

The words that you use in your own head about your body. Are you saying things like upgrade and fix, or things like honor and care for? With this contrast in mind, I want us to walk through the Levitical peace and guilt offerings because this is where it gets specific. The kidneys, the fat surrounding the entrails, and the fatty portion near the liver were set apart specifically for God. Those were never eaten by people. Scholars actually debate the exact structure of that last piece. Some say it's part of the liver, the fat surrounding the entrails.

Others say it's the diaphragm, that muscle that helps our respiratory. Others describe it as connecting membrane, the fascia tissue in there. What is undisputed in all of this is that it was a deep internal structure. Nothing visible on the surface. You couldn't see it. You could not see this when you looked at a bull or a lamb. None of that. You could not see that. These were considered the richest part of those animals.

Giving them to God rather than keeping them for consumption was a statement about what belongs to Him first. Think about the logic here for a moment. In a culture where food was not guaranteed and fat was a valuable calorie-densed resource, still is today, giving away the richest parts wasn't a small, tiny little gesture. It was costly.

And costly offerings are the ones that carry the most meaning. This wasn't an arbitrary rule either. Every single detail of that sacrificial system was designed to teach people something about God's character and their own relationship to Him.

The specific choice to set apart the internal organs rather than say the meat everyone can see and evaluate, tells us something was being communicated about the parts of ourself that stay hidden. Because when we're operating from a place of utter surrender and obedience, God can bless those acts of service.

This is where it gets especially interesting because the Psalms pick up that same organ to describe something deeply personal. In Psalm 139, it says that God formed your inward parts and knit you together in your mother's womb.

In the original Hebrew, the word translated inward parts is kilyah. And I'm not sure I pronounced that right, but it's K-I-L-Y-A-H. And it literally translates to kidneys. God formed your kidneys.

Now, with English translation, we completely miss that. We just say inward parts, and we're like, okay, cool, all the organs in our body. But that specific organ, what does it mean? I want us to read that verse again with this translation in mind. God formed your kidneys, your innermost self, while you were still in the womb. You were knitted together, kidneys and all, by a creator who was present for every

Part of your formation, including the parts no one else could see. The prophet Jeremiah also picks up this same language later in a different way. He describes God as the one who tests the kidneys and the heart, the hidden motives, the visible thoughts, together. In Hebrew thought, the kidneys were tied to emotions, the deep, often unspoken parts of who you are, while the heart carried more of the reasoning and the decision making. That is in Jeremiah 11:20.

And if you read it in the Jewish Tanakh, it literally says thoughts and your heart. But when you look at that and you peel it back and you read the commentary in there, that Hebrew word actually means kidneys. So it's not just your thoughts, it's your kidneys, because your kidneys make up that innermost part of you. So let's follow the thread here.

The same organ set apart in the sacrificial system is the organ scripture says that God forms, that He knows, and that He tests. This was never incidental. It's a consistent pattern across the entire Torah, the Psalms, and the prophets. Three completely different books written across centuries, all circling back to the same idea, that God cares about what is hidden inside of you, not just what's visible on the outside.

I need to take a little bit of a rabbit trail here because we live in a culture that is so driven by what the outward appearance looks like. You can not even turn to your left or to your right without seeing an ad for weight loss management, for peptides, for GLP-1s, for anti-aging creams, for this thing and for that thing, and all of the things that focus on the outward.

You stand in line at a grocery store, you see a magazine, it's outward appearance. We're so focused on what the body looks like outwardly. We demonize and we vilify ourselves because we don't look a certain way. I hope that this first part of this episode that I've shown you is how much God cares about the inner workings of you. More important than the outward.

Yes, He loves the outward, but He loves the health of the inward parts of you, because the health of the inward parts of you is what makes the vibrant, beautiful outward expression of you. And that might mean your body doesn't look exactly like you want it to look. It might not be the shape you want it to look. But as long as the inward health is healthy, you should actually feel very, very proud of that.

You should feel very proud of the fact that your body is working so beautifully for you in the background to help you sustain health and well-being so that you can live all the years that God has allotted for you in the most healthy and most full expressive way possible.

So coming off of that rabbit trail, there is another layer that is worth naming. And that is in the cultures that surrounded Israel in the Middle East, they used the liver in particular for divination. It was examined for omens, consulted the way some people today might even read tea leaves or check horoscopes. Ancient priests in neighboring nations would literally study the shape of the liver to predict the future.

Israel's instruction was very different. Offer that same organ to God rather than consult it. That redirected reverence for the body's internal organs away from superstition, and towards worship of the Creator. This was a direct pointed contrast to the practices happening all around them. Your body was never meant to be searched for hidden meaning through manipulation. It was meant to be honored as something that God already knows completely. You don't need to decode your body like it's hiding a secret message.

You need to listen to the way that you listen to something that you already trust. I've said it before so many times over that your body is so wise, it carries so much wisdom inside of it. And if we begin to embody the information that it is trying to get out to us, we begin living a life full of vibrant health without constantly running and searching and pulling and grabbing and doing all these crazy things that we do to try to obtain a level of health and vitality.

We don't want to slip into an area of idolatry like we talked about in episode two, nor do we want to be completely disconnected with it and not stewarding our health well. We have to find balance in the middle. Learning to listen to our body, learning to hear the voice that it speaks. No different than when you are learning as a believer how to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit.

On that note, I want us to put all three of these pieces together. The kidneys, they were formed intentionally by God, according to the Psalms. The kidneys were tested and known by God, according to Jeremiah. And the kidneys were the very thing set apart in offerings given back to God rather than kept for personal use or misused for superstition.

This is not a coincidence stretched across three books of the Bible. That's a pattern. And the pattern says your innermost parts, the ones you cannot see, the ones you may not even fully understand yourself, have always mattered to God. He's not wanting you to present him with only your best, most visible moments.

He already knows and values what's underneath. So in your prayer life, even this can be applied. He does not want you to sugarcoat your prayers. He doesn't want these pre-populated prayers. He wants your heart cry. He wants to know what is underneath it all because he can see it all anyways.

So when I say your body is communicating, it is not the obvious signals, the headache, the fatigue, the racing heart. It's the deep hidden parts too. The ones that scripture says God formed and tests and knows completely. The body has always been in conversation with its creator long before you learn to pay attention to it. And I think that is the coolest thing because all creation cries out. Holy, holy, holy to the Lord God Almighty. All creation.

So the first thing, I want you to do is pause and consider what you've been treating like a machine part instead of sacred territory. The next thing, I want you to connect to the parts of yourself that stay hidden, the ones that only you and God fully know. And by connecting, that can just be also offering gratitude to your kidneys, not even talking the emotional part that we just spoke about today, but thanking your kidneys for all of the amazing filtration that they do. Thanking your liver for detoxing and breaking down fats and helping with hormones and taking care of all of the things that it does because it has a major, major job in the body.

And whether that fat entrails that surround the liver and the kidneys is fascia or membrane or the diaphragm muscle. All of that is important because it connects every single piece together. So thank it for holding your structure. Thank it for taking care of you and keeping you well. Because gratitude and connecting with yourself is so, so important.

The third thing is to ask. Ask across all four pillars. Is it physical? Is it spiritual? Is it emotional? Mental? What would it mean to offer the unseen parts of you back to him? A lot of times, we are just looking at physical issues in the body. We don't like feeling discomfort when we have a headache, when there's something going on in our belly, when we're not taking deep breaths, when we're having a hard time keeping awake or having energy because we're so fatigued.

Oftentimes, we'll drive into that lane, the physical lane, without understanding that there could be other components that are going on in your body spiritually, emotionally, or mentally. So give yourself a moment just to ask if there's certain things going on in your body, if they are tied to a different pillar besides the physical.

And the fourth step I'd love you to do is adjust by replacing that machine language, optimize, hack, upgrade, all of that kind of stuff with temple language. And I want you to replace that in how you talk to your body. So thank you, body. Like I was mentioning the gratitude before, it just comes through so much. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. How do you build a relationship with your body first and foremost by having a lot of gratitude for what it does? We're so disconnected.

Even those of us who have been in the realm, and maybe some of you are still there of just trying to optimize, optimize, optimize. That is another layer of disconnection. May not be disconnection where you're taking pharmaceutical drugs and over-the-counters for every ache and ill, but now you're doing all this other stuff that's so disconnected. You're not actually listening to your body, you're listening to the people outside of you. That said, gratitude is the first step to come back home to yourself.

And when you adjust that language, when you talk about your body, not as a machine, but as a masterpiece with so much brilliant wisdom that you have the ability to tap into. This is not something unique to me. This is not unique to me. This is a message and a mantle that God has asked me to carry to show people how to do this.

And that is exactly what I'm doing through Beyond Wellness Culture, through all of my offerings, through everything. But if you just hear this right now, all I want you to do is offer your body gratitude for what it does for you. And understand that God did not just care about what is visible. I've said it multiple times over this. He asked for your innermost hidden parts, the same parts that He tests and He knows completely. And your body was never meant to be managed like a machine. It was formed, known, and set apart as a dwelling place.

So, one episode left in this series. Next time we're gonna be talking about the practice that proves whether you actually believe any of this, and that is rest. Ooh, my friend, rest is something I even struggle with, and I'm gonna be talking about that too. Because rest is not something we earn, it's something that is necessary in order to complete the work that we have been called to do.

I pray this episode blessed you. I pray that it just opened up your awareness to know that things are not as we first originally see them. There's so much underneath the surface. There's so much that we are not even aware of. And now when we get to open up scripture and look at it in such a different way, it is amazing to see how God just did what He did.

And quite honestly, it is what brought the Talk to Me, Body card deck to life. When I was reading scripture and I was seeing all of these things coming up and popping up off the surface, and God was placing it on my heart over and over and over again that people live in fear of their body.

They live in fear, fear either of it failing them and it not going well, or fear that they will never optimize to the level and they need to continue to keep doing more, more, more, more, more. See, it's not wellness culture that is our villain in this story. It is fear, fear that is driving every decision that we make. And the Talk to Me, Body card deck has been designed to combat, come against that fear with statements, beautiful statements from your body that are not just generic.

They are God-breathed statements about your body, about different parts of your body, about different chemical messengers of your body, like cortisol that gets so vilified in everything that we do. It's cortisol, it's cortisol. Cortisol is necessary, my friend. Cortisol is so necessary. Yes, we want to keep it in balance. Yes, we want that nervous system regulated. Yes, yes, yes. But it is also a necessary component to health and vitality.

And so that Talk to Me, Body card deck, you get to experience your body in a brand new way. You get to anchor it in scripture. You get to do a reflex point, an exercise point that helps you really heal those aspects and parts of you. On that note, I pray you have a beautiful week and I will see you for episode four next week. And I will talk to you then.

Friend, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I know your body is grateful that you listened to this episode as well. If this conversation supported you in any way, please share it with someone who feels overwhelmed by their health, or quite possibly stuck in that wellness spiral. And leave a review on Apple Podcast as it means a lot to know this space is supporting you, and helps this message reach the people who need it most. Alrighty, let’s close those tabs, exit the apps, and let your body do what it already knows how to do. I’ll meet you back here every single week. Bye for now.