In our world, there's a hot topic: body autonomy.
And if you were to ask probably much of the world who owns your body, they would say, I do.
I own my body.
What I do with my body is my business.
Maybe even some of you have thought that when someone's made a comment about your health or about your body, well, it's my body, I'll do with it what I want.
I'm sure that I thought that when I was in seventh grade and I went to the local mall and I got my ear pierced.
I had a nice turquoise earring.
Well, guess what?
My parents weren't too fond of that.
And they told me I had to take it out.
And I probably thought it, I know I thought it.
I probably said it.
My body's my own.
I should be able to do with it what I want as a seventh grader.
It's my body.
And in one sense, we all do own our own bodies.
And what we do with them is our choice.
That's the gift that God gives to all of us is a God of freedom and a God of choice.
He gives us the freedom to choose things for our body.
God gives us that.
And to the to quote my Southern Baptist friends, to the unregenerate mind individual, this makes perfect sense.
My body is mine.
I've had it my whole life.
I decide what goes into it.
I decide how hard to push it.
I decide how much I will give it rest, what I'll eat, what when I'll eat, what I'll eat, when I'll sleep, how long I'll sleep.
It's mine.
But then a person becomes a disciple of Jesus.
And let's define disciple because disciple is a word we use a lot in the church, but kind of can be one of these ambiguous words.
Even recently, someone asked me, what do you mean by disciple?
One of the best uh definitions I've heard was by a gentleman named Dallas Willard.
He wrote a book that I love called The Divine Conspiracy, Great Omission, several other wonderful books.
But Dallas Willard said this a disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.
Disciples, he said, are simply people who are constantly revising their affairs to carry through on their decision to follow Jesus.
Maybe a little simpler definition to put in your mind.
A disciple is someone who is with Jesus, learning to live like Jesus, and rearranging every aspect of their lives so that they can look like Jesus.
So I become a disciple of Jesus.
You become a disciple of Jesus.
And that means that I want everything in my life to be arranged around the principles of the best book ever written, the Bible.
I look at the Bible, and as I read the Bible, I begin to see these various principles and ideas come forth, and I begin to rearrange my life around those principles.
And I come to the book, the part of that book called First Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 19.
And I read these words that were inspired for Paul to write down.
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?
You are not your own.
The world says, Hey, the body's mine.
I'm my own person, I can do what I want.
Mom, Dad, I don't know why you have such a problem with me, person my ear.
I'll do what I want.
It's my own body.
I'll do what I want.
But Paul, the writer of 1 Corinthians, inspired by the Holy Spirit to speak on behalf of Jesus, says, you are not your own.
Not a set uh suggestion, a declaration.
As a follower of Jesus, you are not your own.
And if that's true, if we really are not our own, then the way we treat these bodies, the way we treat these physical specimens, matter a lot more than a diet plan or a gym membership or making sure we have doctor's appointments.
There's there's something deeper to how we care for our bodies.
There's a greater purpose than just having a diet plan or just having a gym membership or just making our doctor's appointments.
There's a holiness that is involved in living holy for God.
In scripture, you cannot separate this concept of God calling us to live to be holy people and living holy for God.
This morning, I want to talk about the connection between your physical life and your spiritual life.
Because in scripture, they are not separate.
Even though sometimes we we we struggle, we slip up, we fall back, and we live as if they were separate, they are not separate.
If you've not already done so, you can open your Bibles to the book of 1 Corinthians, chapter 6.
We're gonna look at verses 19 and 20 to begin with.
And if you're pulling out your phone to look at your Bible, that's perfectly fine.
Just make sure you skip the uh notifications that you have.
Just get on right to the Bible.
Don't be distracted by those notifications.
1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, and I'm reading from the English Standard Version.
And Paul wrote this, what I already read, or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?
You are not your own.
And then this phrase, you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body.
In verse 19, Paul is not speaking metaphorically about the temple.
He is making a direct, concrete claim that the same spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, the same spirit who filled the tabernacle in the desert, the same spirit who came down and spoke over Jesus when he was baptized in the river, that same spirit lives in your body and speaks to you and communicates to you.
The body is not a cage where the soul is trapped in.
The bodies, the body is not a temporary vehicle you're borrowing until you get to heaven.
The body, according to Paul, is a dwelling place of God.
This should change everything about how we see ourselves when we look in the beer, when we make decisions about how we treat our bodies.
Now, I want to be honest about the context of this text because if you're one that kind of reads around the fringes as the pastor's preaching the context of the text, Paul is not writing this passage because someone ate too many cheeseburgers or didn't go on a long enough walk.
Paul is actually writing to a church that was struggling with sexual immorality.
And so Paul is saying, yes, in a society that says my sexuality and who I sleep with is my own to decide and to define, Paul would say, no, no, not if you're a follower of Jesus.
That's Paul's context in writing these words.
But his principle is bigger than just the presenting problem.
The argument he makes that your body belongs to God because God bought it with the price applies to every dimension of your life if you are a disciple of Jesus.
It applies to every dimension of your life.
You and me, we were bought with a price.
The cross is about the forgiveness of your sins.
You have been forgiven because Jesus chose to take the punishment that you deserve, that I deserve.
But the cross is also God saying to each and every one of us, I want you back.
I want you back.
And not just part of you, I want all of you back in my care, in my love.
The incarnation, God taking on flesh was the beginning of God's rescue plan.
Jesus becoming one with us.
The resurrection was actually proof that the flesh matters.
Paul says, without the resurrection, we'd be the most pitiful of people.
We'd have no hope in this world.
But but the resurrection also shows us and illustrates to us that God intends to redeem even the material, even the physical.
So what we do with our bodies is not just about a spiritual idea, but it's actually encompasses the fullness of us.
And so when we live with our bodies, bodies honoring God in everything that we do, we are actually testifying what we believe about the cross and what we believe about the resurrection.
We are to be holy beings by being holy and completely God's God to God.
1 Peter chapter 1 and verse 16, Peter wrote, It is written, You shall be holy, for I am holy.
Later on, Peter writes in chapter 2 and verse 9, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.
It's not that just your beliefs are the possession of God.
It's not just that your spiritual thoughts or your spiritual leanings are a possession of God, but your entire being, your whole body is to be God's possession.
A picture of wholeness is the vocabulary that God uses throughout the Bible.
This idea of wholeness is the vocabulary that God has communicates from Genesis all the way through Revelation.
In the third book of John, of the epistles of John, the third book and verse 2.
There's only one chapter in that book.
Here is what John wrote.
This window, this verse, though, is a window into how God thinks about human beings and how God connects our spiritual to our physical.
John here connects the well-being of the body to the well-being of the soul, the well-being of your spiritual life.
He doesn't separate them, he prays for both good health because it goes well with your soul, with a spiritual life.
The Greek word translated good health, I won't even try to say it's a it's a hard Greek word to pronounce.
Has one of those weird little things, and you don't care, anyways.
But but from this Greek word, this translated good health is the root that we get our word hygiene.
John is talking about your physical nature.
He's not saying I just hope you're in good health, like, hey, pray you're in good health, kind of a casual thing.
No, he's talking about the physical body, and why does he say that?
He says, because when you're in good health, it is well for your soul, your spiritual life.
Wholeness is in the connection between good health and our spiritual selves.
And God wants each one of us to be whole.
You're forgiven, you're called, you're loved, and God says, now I want to give you the abundant life, and that comes in wholeness in Him.
A spiritually alive body is strengthened by a spiritually healthy body, by a spiritually healthy body.
This is consistent with our understanding and what we believe the Bible teaches about the creation narrative.
God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed life into it.
And the Bible says, and it became a nefesh, it became a living being.
Both the the spirit of God and the physical body made a human, made a life.
He didn't make the soul, make a soul and temporarily temporarily attach it to some inconvenient flesh.
He made a human being, both body and breath, together, inseparable.
And he looked at what he made, your physical manifestation, and he said, It is very good.
Think about that phrase we read in scripture and we think about in scripture.
For you are fearfully and wonderfully made.
This is not just talking about your mental state, it's talking about your whole physical being.
And our enemy, the devil, wants us to believe that the physical and spiritual are at the least indifferent to each other, but even more so we see in the world that oftentimes people teach that that the physical and the spiritual are in competition.
There's been times, if you read through various uh heresies of Christian history, where there's been the the teaching that the the body and caring for the body is somehow worldly, and that real spirituality is only about the inner life, and the body is just a distraction that is that is that is to be ignored, but really it's just about the inner being.
We still hear in our modern context the body is nothing because only the soul goes to heaven.
But a real understanding of scripture will not let us take this view, will not let us go there.
You became a whole being by the breath of God coupled with the body that was shaped in your mother's womb.
That made you holy to God.
And Peter connects our spiritual well-being with our physical well-being.
Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health as it goes well with your soul.
I hope you see that connection.
Now go back to, or go back in the Bible to Mark chapter 12 and verse 30.
We read it as part of our scripture reading.
Thank you, Sheena.
Sheena is actually our health ministries chair here, and we're appreciative of her ministry and her work.
Mark chapter 12 and verse 30.
This is Jesus quoting the Shema, the great prayer of the of the Jewish nation, the great commandment.
And Jesus says, And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your what?
Strength.
If you read through commentaries and uh commentators and translators of this text, they wrestle with those four words and and their meaning and their their direction.
Heart, soul, mind, strength.
I want us to focus on the last one, strength.
It's the Greek word ischis.
And here's what it actually means physical force, bodily vigor, and physical capacity.
Strength, though, is kind of the one that we it's like the add-on to the verse.
But what this text is saying is that that loving the Lord your God is not just emotional devotion or intellectual assent or feeling good about something, but that loving the Lord your God includes loving God with your body, with your physical energy, with your physical capacity.
You'll hear sermons preached, and and you'll hear people talk about loving God with our hearts and with our affections and our desires.
We talk about loving God with our minds, the things we put in our minds.
We talk about loving God with with the fullness of our of our spirit as we worship, as the choir was singing there.
I just had my eyes closed for a moment, and just my emotions were drawn up, and it was a blessing to me.
But Jesus said, You shall love the Lord your God with your heart, your mind, your soul, and we translate it strength.
But what Jesus is saying, you shall love the Lord your God with your physical capacity as well, your physical vigor as well.
So what if then, if that's true, what if then fatigue and neglect of sleep and poor health and poor diet are not just personal inconveniences, they are ways that quietly and subtly over time diminish our capacity to serve and love God and others the way He's called us to.
Now, whenever you talk about health stuff, there's that feeling, whether it's intentional or not, I know that I feel it.
Even as I wrote this sermon, I feel it.
A little bit of guilt comes on.
I want to say this to some of you because there's also that aspect of where some of you are saying, but but what do I do with my health?
I I have an illness that's beyond my control.
Some of you are dealing with illnesses that you did not choose and that you did not contribute to.
Some of you are struggling in ways that that you were never intended by the way God designed you to struggle with.
God understands this and he meets us there in his mercy.
Always remember this.
There's the ideal, but but last I checked, I've never lived up to the ideal.
And so I always need God's mercy in every situation of my life.
But for many of us, and I'm preaching to myself here, the issue is not illness that's beyond my control.
The issue is that that sometimes I don't take seriously the fact that these bodies are part, that my body is part of how I love God and how I give myself to others in service to them.
Here's what the Bible teaches from Genesis to Revelation.
There is no clean delineation between your physical and your spiritual life.
That's what the Bible teaches from beginning to end, from the very beginning, I breathed life into a shaped human body and it became a living person.
It is all together.
They are constantly shaping each other.
Our physical and our spiritual bodies are shaping each other.
When you are chronically sleep-deprived, think about it from this standpoint when you think about spiritually.
When you're chronically sleep deprived, when I'm chronically sleep-deprived, you know what's what happens in my home?
My patience evaporates.
Less sleep, less patience.
I read this text, the fruit of the spirit, our love, joy, peace, patience.
Oh no, that's something to do with my sleep.
When you're consistently eating in ways that destabilize your body, modern science tells us this now that foods literally affect our moods.
We already knew this before modern science.
We had studies and understanding of this.
But food impacts our moods and our emotions.
And do you know what every single relationship is built on?
How you respond to others.
And if if my eating impacts the way that I'm feeling in a moment, then I'm gonna respond to someone and be challenged in that relationship.
Now, I'm not saying that God only works when you're perfectly rested and when you eat perfect.
Let's acknowledge that God moves in broken, depleted, hungry, struggling, fragile people, even now and throughout all history.
But what I am saying is that God designed the physical and the spiritual to work together.
And when we neglect one, we feel the loss in both.
I actually believe that when you neglect your spiritual.
Life, your body suffers too.
And when you neglect your physical life, your spiritual suffers.
I believe that.
And I've been walking this journey long enough to say that I've experienced that.
As I mentioned in my welcome, I have a bit of a cold right now.
And you know, two things happen to me when I when I get sick.
One is I become very clingy.
My wife says I get very much like, Christina, hold on to her.
But I also find myself, and I'm just gonna be very honest with you, I find that when I'm physically down, I find myself more spiritually open to things that I wouldn't normally be open to.
And when I say spiritually, in a bad way, not in a good way.
I can just feel it.
I've been on this journey long enough to recognize it and to see it.
We neglect one, it impacts the other.
Both ways, going both ways.
Ellen White, in the context of our church's distinctive health message, put it plainly.
The condition of the body affects the mind and the spirit.
She said it very plainly.
The light she was given on health was not peripheral.
It was not this outside thing.
It was actually missional.
So that we could serve God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all of our physical strength.
So when she says to live whole lives, she's not just talking about rules and laws.
She's saying so that you can be missional, so that you can be living on purpose for God.
She connected it directly to the great task of proclaiming the gospel.
A people prepared to meet God would need to be whole people, clear-minded, vigorous, alert, not dulled by the habits that diminish life.
I want you to key on that word for a second, habits, and we'll come back to it, but just hold it in your brain.
Anything, she continues, that lessens the physical power, enfeebles the minds, and makes it less clear to discriminate between good and evil, between right and wrong.
Again, hold on to that word habits, because I think this is important.
I want to come back to this again.
I'm not talking about the effects of sin that we all suffer and that this world all suffers.
In this world there is sin and in this world there is trouble.
And sometimes those things attack us without rhyme or reason and they limit us.
Many of you know that at this very time, a year ago, we were in the hospital with our oldest son, who out of the blue, we discovered had a disease.
That we don't know where it came from, why it happened.
It's just there.
What some of you don't know is that later that fall, Christina got a virus, a virus that many people in this world get.
They get it, they get through it.
But that virus that all of not all of you, but probably many of you have had before, maybe even unbeknownst to you, served as a little trigger that triggered something in her that was lying dormant.
And now she has an autoimmune disease living in her for the rest of her life that she has to deal with.
No rhyme or reason, just the effects of sin.
And some of you are dealing with those things in your life.
And that makes it so that you're not physically able to do some of the things that you'd like to do.
This is not what we are talking about.
We are talking about those things that are habits which lower the standard of physical health, they enfeeble the mental and moral strengths.
They're the things that we choose in our own sinfulness to embrace rather than embracing God's principles.
Now, I want us to be careful here because it's easy to take everything we've said and turn it into a very rigid law.
And I'm not going to give you any rigidity in this sermon at all.
I'm not going to give you any absolutes of you have to do this type of walk and you have to do this type of food or anything like that.
That's not the gospel.
What I want us to think about is Paul's logic in 1 Corinthians chapter 6.
His logic is that there's someone that loved you so much and saw so much value in you that he died for you.
And he then says, Now come follow me.
Come follow me, be my disciple.
And as we realize the love of Jesus, what does the Bible say?
We love because he first loved us, right?
And when we realize the love of Jesus, we say, Man, I want my whole life to be reoriented around the principles of Jesus because I want to think like Jesus, I want to live like Jesus, I want to look like Jesus, I want to tell people about Jesus.
And part of that includes, according to Jesus Himself, serving God, serving others is with our mind, our body, our minds, our spirits, and our physical strength.
And so we begin to reorder our life around that.
In other words, we're ordering our lives around the purchase that already happened, not in order to be purchased.
So this is not a set of fundamentals.
If you do this, you do this, you do this, then Jesus will love you more.
No, no, no.
This is because Jesus loves you so much.
You're saying, I want to live to the fullness for him in response to already being loved.
And caring for your health is an act of discipleship.
Jesus chose you, he chose me.
And the connection between your physical and your spiritual life is not theoretical.
And so here's the challenge I want to give to you, and I'll close in just a few moments after sharing just a couple more things, but you can test it this week, starting this week, starting today, even.
What if you brought your body into your spiritual life, not as an afterthought, but as part of your daily worship?
I close my Bible, I worship the Lord, my Bible's on my lap, this is what we talked about last week, having a quiet time with the Lord.
I close my Bible, I've had this spiritual moment with God, and then I keep worshiping with my body and the way I live throughout the day.
Our church has a heritage here that I don't want us to miss.
Long before the world was talking about holistic wellness, Aventists were already saying God cares about the whole person.
And I praise God for that message.
Roger Kuhn, one of our scholars in Aventist history, drawing directly from Ellen White's writings, he distilled that hair, that health message heritage into two simple principles that I think are so valuable for us to think on.
And I also think they're they they are written with grace.
The first principle is this the Christian in every act of life seeks to promote and maintain life and good health.
Ellen White said in one of her, in one, uh Ellen White put it very plainly.
Preserve the best health you can.
That's not perfectionism, that's that's a gracious statement.
Preserve the best health that you can.
Eat what is nourishing, make choices that build life rather than erode it.
And the second, equally simple statement, and I find this principle beautifully in the Avenus Health message that God has given to us do the very best possible under every circumstance in which we find ourselves.
You know why I love that?
Because that says to the mom who has a newborn baby, you can't find eight hours to sleep.
How dare you! No, it says to the mom, do the best you can in the circumstance that you're in.
Maybe you have a middle child like me who didn't sleep well as a baby, who didn't sleep well as a toddler, who doesn't sleep well as a teenager, and it was only about a year ago where I finally got him to come stop coming in and telling me that he was still awake.
I was like, it's okay, but you're old enough to hold that to yourself.
If you're still that parent getting woken up through all those stages of life, God's not saying, hey, you didn't get your eight hours, how dare you?
If you're someone that through some physical ailment, you can't get up and go for that walk after your meal, 10 minutes, whatever it is, to help your glucose out.
God's not saying to you, how dare you.
The message, the Aventus Health message is promote life and do the best you can in the circumstances you are in.
That's our message.
And it's based on eight principles.
That merciful message is based on eight basic health principles.
Nutrition, think about what you eat.
Exercise to the best of the ability in the situation that you're in.
Water, hydrate.
Hydration is not optional.
That's one hopefully all of us can do.
Hopefully, we can all do that well.
Sunlight.
Oh man, today is the sun still out.
I can't tell in here, but it was out earlier.
Enjoy that sunlight.
Temperance, air, rest, and trust in God.
Eight principles.
None of them complicated, none of them where I'm giving you any absolutes.
All I'm saying is think about those eight principles.
God designed your body to thrive when it lives inside of these principles and these rhythms.
The question is not whether they work, the question is whether we take them seriously as disciples who want to arrange all of our lives around the things of God.
Promote life.
Do the best you can in the circumstances you're in, and watch how God works.
One prayer, one word, and one act.
The prayer I hope that you'll pray this week is Lord, help me to see my body the way that you do, as a gift worth caring for, as a dwelling place of the Spirit.
And teach me, Lord, what it means to love you with my strength.
One word is actually two words, God's temple.
This week, when you face one of those moments where you're tempted to move outside of one of these rhythms, one of these principles, maybe just have it written down somewhere where you can look at it.
God's temple.
And remind yourself that you are God's temple.
And then one act.
Consider one of those eight principles nutrition, exercise, water, sunlight, temperance.
I forgot A already.
Air, fresh air.
Thank you, Dr.
Landless.
Appreciate it.
Dr.
Landless knows them very well, so we talked to him afterwards.
Rest and trust in God.
Which one of those is God convicting you to work on today?
Start there.
We've been taught so often that's an all or nothing game.
And God wants us to get all there.
But you know what?
Start where you can in your circumstances and watch how God will begin to work and grow you.
Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for your mercy, for your grace.
We thank you that you love all of us, not just our spiritual minds, but you love our bodies.
That you didn't just die for some spirit soul to go up to heaven, but you you died to save us completely and totally, Lord.
Lord, we thank you that you've given us these principles.
And they are to guide us that we may serve you to the best of our ability in this world and to serve others to the best of our ability in this world.
But they're also, Lord, because you want us to have a full and abundant life.
Lord, I pray that each one of us will make a decision in whatever situation we're in to promote life in our own being and for others, and to do the best we can in the circumstances we are in.
And Lord, we pray that you'll take those offerings and you'll use them to your honor and your glory.
Bless us, Lord, as we seek to be a holy people, living wholly and completely for you.
Amen.