Investing Your Body for God

You’ve all had it happen to you. You’re driving along the parkway and you want to change lanes. You put your turn signal on. You look in your rearview mirror, you check your side mirror, you may even glance over your shoulder. All clear! So you begin to edge into the next lane, only to be blasted by the horn of a car you would have sworn wasn’t there a second ago.

But he was there a second ago. He was there all along. You didn’t see him because he was in your blindspot. There are areas on either side of a car that cannot be seen in the rearview mirror or even the side mirrors. Those are your blindspots, and many accidents occur because drivers fail to take them into account.

Today I want to talk to you about a spiritual blindspot that most of us have. It’s an area of the Christian life that we don’t give much thought to, or have much concern for. Yet it’s an area which can have an enormous impact on our effectiveness for God.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about “resource management”; how to manage the resources that God has given to us. We looked at some Biblical principles relating to our use of time and money. But this week, I want to look at a resource that we all seem to take for granted: our physical body.

Turn to 1 Corinthians 6:19-20…

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.

As Christians, we have a tendency to think that God is more concerned about our soul than our body. After all, this body is temporary; it’s going to wear out. One day, we’re going to leave it behind. So we tend to pay a lot more attention to the spiritual aspects of the Christian faith, and we fail to see that there are very important physical implications to being a Christian, too.

The Bible says that our bodies don’t belong to us. They are God’s property. He loaned them to us to nurture them, to care for them, and to use them in his service. He commands us to “honor God with your body.”

How can we honor God with our bodies? Well, I would suggest to you that there are three ways we can honor God:

1. we need to be physically fit

2. we need to be sexually faithful

3. we need to be verbally fruitful

1. Physical fitness

As Christians, we are outraged by certain sins against the body: sexual immorality, abortion, euthanasia, child abuse, the wanton violence that seems to be all around us in society. Yet we are blind to a far more common sin against the body. Most American Christians are systematically destroying their own bodies by improper diet and lack of exercise.

Suppose someone were to come up to you and hand you the keys to a Ferrari, a car worth $80,000. It’s yours to keep and use and enjoy. But the man who hands you the keys says “Let me just tell you one thing. This car has a very sophisticated, highly tuned engine. It won’t run on regular gas - you have to use super unleaded fuel. If you run it on regular, you’ll ruin the engine.” Well, I’m sure that you would be very careful to put only super unleaded fuel into gas tank of your new Ferrari.

When God gave you your body, he gave you the most amazing engineering marvel in all the world. You cannot even imagine the intricacy and excellence of the design work that went into your body. The human body is a masterpiece. It is a magnificent machine.

So what kind of fuel are you putting into it? Are you using an inferior grade of fuel? Let me ask you a question: what’s the number one cause of death in the United States each year? Is it cancer? Is it AIDS? Is it traffic accidents? No, it’s none of these things. It’s heart disease.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that almost I million people in the United States will die this year of cardiovascular disease. That’s almost as many fatalities as from all other causes of death combined. Cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, blood disorders, hypertension, in almost all cases have a direct cause and effect relationship with what you eat and how you live.

The fuel we’re putting into our bodies is killing us. Many types of cancer, especially cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate, have been found to have a correlation to improper diet. Substances like caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco have long been known to have harmful effects, but the real culprits are things that seem to be an innocent part of the average American’s diet.

There are three cheap grades of fuel that Americans put into their bodies in excess. They are sugar, fat, and salt. These substances contribute greatly to the premature breakdown of the human body. But the problem is, we don’t know how much of them we’re eating. Let’s look at sugar.

Take your average high schooler. He has a bowl of cereal, a piece of toast and jam, and a glass of orange juice for breakfast. At mid-morning break, he scarfs down a half-pint of chocolate milk. For lunch, he has a bowl of cream of chicken soup, Jello for dessert, and a glass of lemonade to wash it down. On the way home from school, he stops by the candy store and picks up a package of cupcakes and a can of soda for a snack. For supper, he throws a frozen beef dinner into the microwave, complete with French fries and ketchup. He has a dish of ice cream for dessert.

Not an unusual day in an average American teenager’s life. Want to know how much sugar he’s eaten? 82 teaspoons of sugar. It’s no wonder that there’s more and more cases of diabetes each year, and that many Americans are overweight but undernourished.

What about fat? The human body wasn’t designed to digest fat, so the fat molecules settle in your arteries and clog them up. That causes high blood pressure and makes your heart work twice as hard as it is supposed to. Where does the fat come from? From dairy products, eggs, red meat, and things with oil, like salad dressings, and fried foods. An average American man, eating an average American diet, could take in anywhere from 40 to 50 teaspoons of fat per day without even realizing it.

How about salt? Everyone knows that too much salt can contribute to high blood pressure, fluid retention, digestive disorders, and other complications. In fact, the recommended salt intake per day is 1 teaspoon. But that doesn’t mean just the salt you sprinkle out of the salt shaker. It’s the invisible salt that kills us.

Pre-packaged, prepared foods are full of salt. Fast foods are loaded with salt. Every time you walk into McDonald’s, you’re going to exceed your entire daily recommended allowance of salt in one sitting!

Americans love their snack foods. Last week’s newspaper had a list of how many tons of potato chips, nachos, pretzels, and cheese puffs were going to be devoured on Super Bowl Sunday. If you snack through a football game, you’re going to take in about 3 or 4 times your daily allowance of salt.

Inferior fuels like salt, sugar, and fat will ruin the engine. We need to lower our intake of these substances. Christians know the dangers of alcohol and tobacco, but we need to recognize what these other things are doing to us.

There’s something else that will ruin the body, too. Lack of exercise. Many Americans live sedentary lives. Many of us have jobs that require us to sit for long periods behind a desk. Then many of us come home at night and sit in front of the TV. We are in desperate need of exercise, because that kind of lifestyle, coupled with the kind of diet I’ve been talking about, will kill you.

There are a lot of benefits to exercise. Exercise strengthens your cardio-vascular system and decreases the risk of heart disease. Your heart becomes larger and more efficient; able to pump more blood in a single beat. So it won’t have to beat as many times and it won’t wear out as fast.

In 1987, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a long-term study of 12,000 men that showed that those who exercised moderately on a regular basis had a 30% lower risk of cardiac death than men with a sedentary lifestyle.

Exercise helps your bone structure; your skeletal system. Years ago, scientists thought that exercise was harmful to the bones. Now, they know just the opposite. When living human bone is placed under a load, it gets denser and stronger; it builds itself up to sustain that load. No load; no strength. This is why astronauts can barely walk when they come back from space - there’s no loads up there. If you don’t exercise, you lose bone mass; your bones become brittle and fragile.

Exercise helps your lungs to become more efficient, so that they can take in and process more oxygen. A study done in England showed that oxygen actually has an anti-depressant effect. An increase of 15% in the amount of oxygen taken in by the body can actually relieve symptoms of depression.

This leads us to the hidden bonus of exercise. It not only helps your body to work better, it helps you to feel better. It affects your attitude; your sense of well-being. It increases your capacity for work, it raises your energy level. If you feel generally depressed, under the pile, stressed out, if your mental and emotional level isn’t what it should be, go out for a brisk walk and you’ll start to feel better immediately.

When you exercise, your pituitary gland releases a powerful hormone called endorphin into your bloodstream. This hormone is the body’s natural painkiller. It produces a natural high - runners call it “runner’s high”. You feel more alive, more alert, more capable. You’re ready to plunge ahead into life with gusto.

God designed our bodies to work this way. He knew that we would need a mechanism for relieving stress, and physical exercise is that mechanism. So exercise regularly and eat the proper foods. Take good care of the body that God has given you, and you will be honoring God.

2. Sexual Faithfulness

1 Corinthians 6:18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.

We are living in a culture in which sexual impurity has become the accepted norm. And that, unfortunately, has affected the church’s view of morality. As the standards of our society have sunk, the standards of the church have sunk too.

More and more Christians, and even Christian leaders, are falling prey to the overwhelming pressure to find sexual fulfilment outside of the boundaries placed around it by the Word of God.

Surveys by various youth ministries have shown that evangelical Christian teenagers tend to be just about as sexually active as non-Christian teens. There’s really not much difference. The culture is setting the standards for these kids, not the church.

The culture screams at our kids that virginity is a kind of a curse; a burden to get rid of as soon as you can. The culture says that if you are sexually pure, you are hopelessly out of touch; you are utterly square, you are a social misfit.

But it isn’t just our kids that are swallowing this propaganda. Christian adults are too. How many movies, how many TV shows, how many soap operas, how many magazine articles, how many books do you have to see which glorify sexual unfaithfulness before you start believing it?

There are six steps that lead a Christian into sexual sin:

1. Desensitization:

When you see enough of something, you become used to it. You are no longer shocked by it. It no longer jars you as being wrong. You start thinking that maybe it isn’t so bad after all. You even start calling sin by a different name. The Bible calls it adultery; we call it having an affair. This is where we are at in our culture today. Sin has become acceptable.

2. Delusion:

The next step on the road to sexual sin is to believe that it cannot happen to you. The Bible says that pride goes before a fall. When you start thinking you’re ok, that’s when you more vulnerable than ever. The best candidate to fall into sexual sin is the man or woman who says “It can never happen to me.”

3. Dissatisfaction:

When you start focusing on yourself, and you start thinking “Why doesn’t my wife meet my needs?” or “Why doesn’t my husband understand me?” or “How can I remain sexually pure when there’s all these opportunities around?” —that’s when you’ve taken your eyes off God and His Word and started to become dissatisfied with His principles for living and with his provision for you.

4. Fixation:

That’s when Satan brings into your life a nice, attractive person who thinks you are wonderful… someone who enjoys being with you; someone who laughs at your jokes and listens to you attentively. And you begin to fixate on that person. You begin to find ways to be with him or her. When you reach this step, you’re almost too far gone.

5. Rationalization:

Deep down inside, while all this is happening, you hear a little voice telling you that what you are doing is wrong, but you smother that voice with rationalization. Rationalization is the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie. Never underestimate your ability to lie to yourself. People think up the darndest excuses for why they should sin.

6. Consummation:

When you’ve reached step 5, it’s only a matter of time before you do the deed.

If we’re going to honor God with our bodies, not only are we going to have to work on being physically fit, we’re going to have to devote ourselves to being sexually faithful.

3. Verbally Faultless

There’s one more area we need to look at as we think about honoring God with our physical body. Turn to James 3…

James 3:2 We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.

When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.

Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

You can be physically fit, you can be sexually faithful, but if your tongue is not under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, then you will bring great dishonor to God and to yourself. Why is the tongue singled out for special consideration among all the parts of the body? Because it is the member that most accurately reveals what’s going on in your heart.

In Matthew 15, Jesus said, “ What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’”

The Bible says, in 1 Peter 3:10 “Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech.”

Your tongue is like a spiritual barometer. It reveals what’s going on in your heart. The way you talk to people, the way you talk about people, and what you talk about is a reliable indicator of how much of your heart Jesus owns.

The physical body is a marvel. A great painter trains his eyes to see beauty and portray it on canvas or some other medium. A great pianist trains his hands and his ears to the rhythms and harmonies of music. A great athlete trains his muscles to perform amazing feats of grace and skill. A great thinker trains his mind and his imagination to soar through the universe. But there is one part of the body that eludes our control. James 3:8 says “no man can tame the tongue.”

No man can tame it. But the Spirit of God can. If you are totally yielded to the Spirit’s control, it’s going to show in the way you speak. Then, in the words of Eph. 4:29, you will “not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

We’ve looked at three areas of resource management having to do with our physical bodies:

1. Physical fitness

2. Sexual faithfulness

2. Verbal faultlessness

Managing our bodies well is a responsibility we owe to God. In fact, Paul calls it an act of worship.

Romans 12:1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

If we’re supposed to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God, shouldn’t we offer them in the purest condition possible? In the OT, when the Israelites offered a lamb as a sacrifice, they were to pick one that was unblemished; that had no spots or defects.

Shouldn’t we aim to offer God a body that is without defects? Shouldn’t we try our very best to keep our bodies healthy and useful and fit just as long as we possibly can? Shouldn’t we try to offer him a body that has been unstained by sexual sin? Shouldn’t we offer him a body whose tongue is under his control? It’s simply good resource management!