Tag: Lord

the importance of the body

The other day I tweeted that I have noticed a troubling trend among my theology students: too few understand or even speak of the resurrection of the body. Most will acknowledge it after I point it out, but by default they tend to discuss the afterlife in terms of a body-less existence. Here are a few more thoughts on that.

In neglecting the teaching of the resurrection of the body, I think we show how little we appreciate the importance of the body – the human body – in the Christian faith. Christianity (especially in its north American Protestant-evangelical form) has become too much of a cognitive religion, more about thinking (we call it believing) the right things, less about doing things that demonstrate trust (what the Bible means by believing) in the Lord. This brings us much too close to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. In this form of Christianity, we are less able to account for the fact that most acts of sin are bodily acts (e.g., adultery, lust) or involve physical objects (e.g., stealing, coveting).

We are also unable to account for the fact the Jesus required his followers to engage in acts that were primarily physical in orientation, e.g., feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick or imprisoned, laying hands on the sick and healing them of physical ailments. These are things Jesus did and set his followers to doing. Some of them we still do, but we often fail to understand the spiritual import of such acts precisely because we have severed the connection between the physical and spiritual in our thinking. They were not separate in Jesus’ thinking. Feeding the hungry was not some side project for Jesus, he set it as one of the fundmental criteria on which we will be judged – as in eternally judged.

Visiting those who are sick or in prison is not just a nice thing to do, it is a fundamentally spiritual act. Laying hands on someone who is sick and praying for them is a physical act that invokes real spiritual power to gain a phyiscal result. Does that even make sense to us? Or has the physical been so divorced from the spiritual that we cannot even imagine such a thing happening? Is this perhaps why we don’t see it happening?

Monday meditations Gal. 5.22-23: fruit of the Spirit

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

This is actually less of a meditation and more of a spiritual practice (that will lead to and include meditation). Find at least 15 quiet minutes and sit with this list of Spirit-fruits. Since these are fruits the Spirit produces in us (not self-made fruit), ask the Lord to highlight one of these that needs cultivating at this moment. It might be one you are really lacking in, but it also might be one you particularly excel at already. The Lord may want to shore up a weakness or further develop a strength. Try not to assume you know or go in with preconceived notions. Let the Spirit tell you.
When you hear from the Lord and have zeroed in on one, then meditate on what that fruit means, what it would like for the Spirit to produce that fruit (or more of that fruit) in your life. The Spirit will give you specific direction on tangible things you can do to participate in the production of this fruit. After all, even though the Spirit produces the fruit in us, we are not uninvolved in the process. Note that one of the Spirit-fruits is self-control; that is not a mistake or a logical contradiction. The Spirit produces the fruit, but our will has to be compliant with the Spirit’s work for fruit to be produced.
The Spirit will give you one specific fruit to work on for this moment and specific ways to work on that fruit – if you take time to listen.