God designs a daily, physical lifestyle of good works for each of his children. Not only has God prepared them in advance for us, but he also prepares us to do them.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, last week we began a whole new section in this, the last of the four major sections, the action section, and we defined godly action as habitual obedience. Now today we’re going to look at the body and its works. We’re going to zero in on the body that God made us as a vehicle for service to God, but also as a battleground that we have to watch over constantly. As we think about the body, the movement of the body, we’re thinking about electrical signals, I guess, that are given from the brain through the nervous system to muscles, that actually move the body to do certain things.
That’s what actions are, specifically the idea of movement or motion. There’s so much of the Christian life in which there is no movement at all. So those would be thoughts of the mind, intentions of the heart, attitudes, all of those things. And we’ve covered those things in the knowledge, faith, character section. But now we’re talking about actual movement, things we do, things we’re called to do, and the body is the vehicle for action in this world. Now as we study the body, we need to understand that there’s a backdrop of philosophical dualism that we are opposing. There are religions that are dualistic, and there are philosophies that are dualistic, that are hostile to the body in favor of the spirit. So Greek philosophical systems, some of them would be very negative toward the physical body with all of its, as they would consider it, disgusting actions and habits and physical needs.
to be saved from this evil world would be to be saved from physical drives and desires and yearnings
And they thought of a pure philosophical world of the mind where we would be free from all of the constraints of the corrupted body. So, to be saved from this evil world would be to be saved from physical drives and desires and yearnings. Frankly, Buddhism is much the same way. A desire to be free from all of the drives of the body, to be set free into a pure spiritual world, free from the body. Now, this dualistic philosophy was behind a lot of the trouble in the Colossian church, when Paul the apostle wrote his epistle. There were false teachers there in Colossi that were mingling elements of dualistic Greek philosophy with Jewish legalism and with asceticism to produce a hybrid religion that was not Christianity at all. Now, these false teachers denied the incarnation of Christ, and they sought to escape bodily lust by stern ascetic rules and regulations, such as “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch,” Colossians 2:21. So also many eastern religions of our day, pseudo-Christian cults have the same dualistic approach or disdain for the body. For example, when my wife and I were living in Kentucky, we went to a village that was in the 19th century, a Shaker village. The Shakers were a cult, pseudo-Christian cults, that believed that the human body was evil. And they thus forbade any kind of physical interactions between the sexes. So, marriage was effectively outlawed, which Paul says in the New Testament is a doctrine of demons. But they would have various ritualistic dances in which the men and women both participated, but they never touched each other. I remember joking that they better be good at evangelism, because they’re not going to have a next generation of Shakers that comes along. There won’t be any little children that are born in the Shaker faith. But that’s an example of the dualism that has even crept into the Christian world as well.
Well, the Bible completely rejects this dualistic, body is evil kind of teaching. And there are five proofs in the Bible that the Bible esteems the body as a good gift from God. There’s an esteem for the body. First of all, the Bible teaches that the body is created by God and was created good at original creation. Therefore, if the body were intrinsically evil, then how could God call everything that he had made good in Genesis 1, including Adam and Eve in physical bodies? Secondly, when God sent his Son into the world, it was by an incarnation, that is the enfleshment of the Son of God by the Virgin Mary. “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). And the word flesh is very striking in that sense. It just means physical like having muscles, having bones and arteries and all that, having a physical body. This therefore shows that the human body is a good gift from God despite our sin.
Thirdly, Christ’s resurrection stands forever as proof that God has a saving purpose toward the human body. If the body were evil, and God simply desired to deliver us from the physical body, why would he raise his Son after Jesus’s death on the cross back in a physical body again? But Jesus was very much at pains to teach and to prove to his disciples, that he had been raised from the dead physically. He said, “A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have,” in Luke 24:39. He actually took a piece of broiled fish and chewed it and swallowed it. He was physical.
He said in John 20:25 to doubting Thomas (so-called) who said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hand, put my hand into his side, I will not believe that he has been raised from the dead.” Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to Thomas, “Reach out your hand, touch my wounds, stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27, paraphrase). So very clearly physical, the bodily resurrection of Jesus shows that the Bible does not reject the body as inherently evil.
Fourthly, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our physical body shows again that God does not reject the body as evil. He says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” 1 Corinthians 6:19. Christ is dwelling in our physical bodies by the Holy Spirit. And that shows that the body itself is not intrinsically evil. He says, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Some of the Corinthians were actually having sex with temple prostitutes, and he had to write directly to them saying, “What you do with your bodies is vital.” He said, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never,” 1 Corinthians 6:15.
And fifthly, the human body is elevated to eternal significance by the doctrine of the general resurrection, the bodily resurrection. The fact that we will receive resurrection bodies and spend eternity in physical bodies. We will not be immaterial or ghosts or spirits for all eternity, but we actually will be raised from the dead. As Daniel 12:2 says, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life and others to shame and everlasting contempt.” And Jesus taught in John 5:28-29, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out. Those who have done good will rise to live and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.”
So for us as Christians, God will craft and prepare a resurrection body for us that will be physical, and will dwell in the physical new heaven, new earth for all eternity. So those are five clear biblical proofs that the Bible does not consider the body is intrinsically evil. The body is also our only vehicle for earthly obedience. The only way we can actually obey the commands of God to do good works is with our bodies. Our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made, and they’re vehicles of service to God.
But that’s not all we need to know. The body is also a cursed battlefield with sin. The physical body that we dwell in now is under a curse. We are in Adam destined to die. If we’re not part of that final generation, the mysterious generation when Christ returns, we will die. And not only will we die, we basically are dying all the time, even at the cellular level. Death is at work in us all the time. And so, we have corrupted, decaying, dying bodies, what Paul calls, “The body of sin” (Romans 6:6). The body of sin, because our bodies are affected by our unregenerate state before we were converted. And once we have been converted, then we still have to deal with the habits of sin built up in our bodies. Romans 6:6 says, “For we know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be done away with so that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”
So, our sinful identity in Adam died when we came to faith in Christ, positionally. That person we were in Adam died, positionally, but we still have the body which has been tainted or corrupted by sin all those many years. And by sinning we built up habits and tendencies that would continue to pull at us, even after we’ve come to salvation in Christ.
Think for example of someone who comes to faith in Christ at age 55, something like that, and since they were 16, they smoked cigarettes, and so they’re addicted. They’re addicted to the nicotine, they’re addicted to cigarettes. They come to a genuine faith in Christ. They’re forgiven of all of their sins. They’re immediately indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and they’re still addicted to cigarettes. And if they’re going to beat that addiction, they have to go through the very painful process of withdrawal and learning new habits. Those habits are still there. That’s just one symbol of all the many habits of sin that we built up in our years before we were converted. So, the Bible describes the body of sin in other terms as well. For example, Romans 6:12 calls it a mortal body or a dying body. Romans 7:24 calls it, “The body of death.”
Genesis 3:19 declares the body is of the dust and earthy. So, it says there, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat of your food until you return to the ground, since from it you are taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.” So, 1 Corinthians 15:47 says, “The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.” 2 Corinthians 4:7 says our bodies are jars of clay. Philippians 3:21 describes our bodies to be lowly. They are lowly. It’s tied to our humiliation. Other passages refer to the earthly body as an earthly tent. Peter says in 2 Peter 1:13, “I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body.” Paul uses the same language in 2 Corinthians 5:4. He says, “While we are in this tent, we groan in our burden, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed.”
So that gives a sense of a temporary dwelling. We’re not going to be in these physical bodies forever. So, there is in all of this a present ambivalence toward the body, because the body is actually a battlefield against sin. There’s a battle going on constantly in our bodies. Romans 7:22-23, Paul speaks of this, “For in my inner being, I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” So, this gives the idea that our body is in mutiny against the city of truth being established in our character. It’s in mutiny. It’s fighting against it. Because of this, the body is also viewed as constantly dangerous. It needs to be constantly subjected to harsh discipline.
we need to constantly care for the body’s needs, but we are not to give into the body’s lusts
Paul uses very harsh language in 1 Corinthians 9:27 when he says, “I beat my body and make it my slave, lest after I preach to others, I myself might be disqualified for the prize.” Like Paul says, I just don’t trust my bodily drives and desires. They’re going to lead me astray if I don’t keep them under firm check. He has to beat his body and make it his slave. He has to frustrate the drives of his flesh. If the body yearns for something, wants something, drives for it, it’s almost certainly not good. It’s pushing us towards sin. Therefore, we need to constantly care for the body’s needs, but we are not to give into the body’s lusts, which take normal bodily drives and desires and push them beyond boundaries that God has set up. This is certainly a delicate balance.
Ephesians 5:28-29 addresses husbands in relation to their wives. Says, “In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it just as Christ does the church.” So, you should comb your hair, you should shave, you should shower, you should feed yourself when hungry, using good, nourishing, healthy food. You should scratch your skin when it itches and alleviate that temporary pain. You should get medical care if you need medical care, to get well. You should take care of your body. When it says in the second great commandment, is to love your neighbor as yourself, it’s just to go on loving yourself in that way, and then just extend it to your neighbor the same way you would care for your own body, you should care for your neighbor.
So, Christians should and do care well for the body. We’re not looking at extreme asceticism where you could think about some monks that were in prayer cells, and they go days and days fasting. They look like living skeletons. They might put on hair shirts that were physically unpleasant to wear, or they might even flagellate themselves, beating themselves for their sense of internal sin. This is not sanctification, it’s not healthy. However, as we’re feeding the body, caring for it and all that, at the same point it says in Romans 6:12, “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.” Or its lust. Now at the end of this constant battle with the body is glory for the Christian. Philippians 3:21 says, “Christ by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies and make them like his glorious body.” So that’s a theology of the body as we look at it in the Bible to understand it completely, as intrinsically and originally created as good, but then fallen in Adam, a battlefield with sin and a vehicle for good works.
Now let’s talk about those good works. There is set before us a pathway of good works in the commands and the laws of God. Psalm 119:4 says God has laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed. God therefore doesn’t leave it to chance or to our own imaginations to figure out specific paths that we should walk that would be pleasing to him. There’s one path and one path only, and that is obedience. He wants us to obey what he has commanded. And he’s gone ahead of us to ordain good works that we should walk in them. One of my favorite verses is Ephesians 2:10, “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance that we should walk in them.” And so, we are his workmanship. He shapes us, he molds us.
We are a masterpiece of his working, and God has providentially gone ahead of us to prepare good works that we are to do with our bodies. And so, as God goes ahead of us, he orchestrates circumstances in life that he knows are going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but he knows what’s going to happen. And he sets up good works in advance, and he wants us to walk in them. That’s an interesting Greek verb, just walking has to do with a daily life. So, there’s a practical, physical lifestyle of good works that he wants us to do every single day. And what’s so amazing is that God has prepared these works in advance for us to walk in, but he also prepares us to walk in them. He works both sides of the equation. He prepares the works in advance, and he prepares us in advance, and then matches them up.
And that makes life so exciting at every moment. God has ordained a pathway of good works by his commands and by providence, by things that happen. We think about the time in the Book of Esther when there was a very dire threat to the Jewish people. That a plot that had been uncovered by Mordecai who was a Jewish man. And he was the cousin of Queen Esther, but he acted really like a father to her. And he was exhorting her to move out and to act on behalf of her Jewish people. And he said, “If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). So, I like to think of that in conjunction with Ephesians 2:10.
We have been raised up to do specific good works. We have been positioned for such a time as this. That we have been prepared and everything has been orchestrated so that we can use our bodies to actually do good works that will be pleasing to God. A mature Christian, therefore, awakes every day, knowing that God has orchestrated a series of good works, so it will carry him or her through the whole day. And occasionally God may call us to a radically new direction of good works. But think of all of the things that God can do, a whole pathway of good works.
Perhaps a godly woman in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, wakes up, has a morning quiet time and then goes for a prayer walk through the rubble-filled streets of her city after the earthquake that happened a number of years ago. I think about this, and she just looks for opportunities that she can serve God, she looks for works to do. She’s connected with an orphanage, and so she’s going to teach English. She’s going to maybe bandage a scraped knee with some of the kids, or hug a crying girl, or encourage a weary Haitian pastor. There are all kinds of good works that she is in position to do.
Or think about a Christian legislator in Washington D.C., who steps out in faith to argue boldly for a law restricting funding of abortions. And he knows he’s going to get hammered by the mainstream media, but he knows that God’s prepared him and positioned him for such a time as this. Or think about a believing couple who own a chain of small businesses. And they choose to take their vacations every year in India teaching missionaries there how they can use small business practices to start micro businesses for the people that they’re working with and generate income for them.
Or maybe a senior in college decides to forgo plans for medical school, and to trust the Lord for funds to enable him to go on a short-term mission trip to a college campus in the Persian Gulf. So, there’s just a whole array of good works that God goes ahead of us to prepare. A single mom in downtown Detroit, maybe she’s recently converted through the prayers and witness of a godly aunt. And she learns how to live by the Spirit in her daily grueling life with a non-Christian husband and to raise her children in her new faith. Her good works are going to be very different than another woman’s will as well. So, as we conclude today, we should think of it this way, that God has gone ahead of us to prepare good works, and that he will be using everything that you experience this week to sanctify you and to bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, last week we began a whole new section in this, the last of the four major sections, the action section, and we defined godly action as habitual obedience. Now today we’re going to look at the body and its works. We’re going to zero in on the body that God made us as a vehicle for service to God, but also as a battleground that we have to watch over constantly. As we think about the body, the movement of the body, we’re thinking about electrical signals, I guess, that are given from the brain through the nervous system to muscles, that actually move the body to do certain things.
That’s what actions are, specifically the idea of movement or motion. There’s so much of the Christian life in which there is no movement at all. So those would be thoughts of the mind, intentions of the heart, attitudes, all of those things. And we’ve covered those things in the knowledge, faith, character section. But now we’re talking about actual movement, things we do, things we’re called to do, and the body is the vehicle for action in this world. Now as we study the body, we need to understand that there’s a backdrop of philosophical dualism that we are opposing. There are religions that are dualistic, and there are philosophies that are dualistic, that are hostile to the body in favor of the spirit. So Greek philosophical systems, some of them would be very negative toward the physical body with all of its, as they would consider it, disgusting actions and habits and physical needs.
to be saved from this evil world would be to be saved from physical drives and desires and yearnings
And they thought of a pure philosophical world of the mind where we would be free from all of the constraints of the corrupted body. So, to be saved from this evil world would be to be saved from physical drives and desires and yearnings. Frankly, Buddhism is much the same way. A desire to be free from all of the drives of the body, to be set free into a pure spiritual world, free from the body. Now, this dualistic philosophy was behind a lot of the trouble in the Colossian church, when Paul the apostle wrote his epistle. There were false teachers there in Colossi that were mingling elements of dualistic Greek philosophy with Jewish legalism and with asceticism to produce a hybrid religion that was not Christianity at all. Now, these false teachers denied the incarnation of Christ, and they sought to escape bodily lust by stern ascetic rules and regulations, such as “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch,” Colossians 2:21. So also many eastern religions of our day, pseudo-Christian cults have the same dualistic approach or disdain for the body. For example, when my wife and I were living in Kentucky, we went to a village that was in the 19th century, a Shaker village. The Shakers were a cult, pseudo-Christian cults, that believed that the human body was evil. And they thus forbade any kind of physical interactions between the sexes. So, marriage was effectively outlawed, which Paul says in the New Testament is a doctrine of demons. But they would have various ritualistic dances in which the men and women both participated, but they never touched each other. I remember joking that they better be good at evangelism, because they’re not going to have a next generation of Shakers that comes along. There won’t be any little children that are born in the Shaker faith. But that’s an example of the dualism that has even crept into the Christian world as well.
Well, the Bible completely rejects this dualistic, body is evil kind of teaching. And there are five proofs in the Bible that the Bible esteems the body as a good gift from God. There’s an esteem for the body. First of all, the Bible teaches that the body is created by God and was created good at original creation. Therefore, if the body were intrinsically evil, then how could God call everything that he had made good in Genesis 1, including Adam and Eve in physical bodies? Secondly, when God sent his Son into the world, it was by an incarnation, that is the enfleshment of the Son of God by the Virgin Mary. “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). And the word flesh is very striking in that sense. It just means physical like having muscles, having bones and arteries and all that, having a physical body. This therefore shows that the human body is a good gift from God despite our sin.
Thirdly, Christ’s resurrection stands forever as proof that God has a saving purpose toward the human body. If the body were evil, and God simply desired to deliver us from the physical body, why would he raise his Son after Jesus’s death on the cross back in a physical body again? But Jesus was very much at pains to teach and to prove to his disciples, that he had been raised from the dead physically. He said, “A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have,” in Luke 24:39. He actually took a piece of broiled fish and chewed it and swallowed it. He was physical.
He said in John 20:25 to doubting Thomas (so-called) who said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hand, put my hand into his side, I will not believe that he has been raised from the dead.” Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to Thomas, “Reach out your hand, touch my wounds, stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27, paraphrase). So very clearly physical, the bodily resurrection of Jesus shows that the Bible does not reject the body as inherently evil.
Fourthly, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our physical body shows again that God does not reject the body as evil. He says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” 1 Corinthians 6:19. Christ is dwelling in our physical bodies by the Holy Spirit. And that shows that the body itself is not intrinsically evil. He says, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Some of the Corinthians were actually having sex with temple prostitutes, and he had to write directly to them saying, “What you do with your bodies is vital.” He said, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never,” 1 Corinthians 6:15.
And fifthly, the human body is elevated to eternal significance by the doctrine of the general resurrection, the bodily resurrection. The fact that we will receive resurrection bodies and spend eternity in physical bodies. We will not be immaterial or ghosts or spirits for all eternity, but we actually will be raised from the dead. As Daniel 12:2 says, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life and others to shame and everlasting contempt.” And Jesus taught in John 5:28-29, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out. Those who have done good will rise to live and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.”
So for us as Christians, God will craft and prepare a resurrection body for us that will be physical, and will dwell in the physical new heaven, new earth for all eternity. So those are five clear biblical proofs that the Bible does not consider the body is intrinsically evil. The body is also our only vehicle for earthly obedience. The only way we can actually obey the commands of God to do good works is with our bodies. Our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made, and they’re vehicles of service to God.
But that’s not all we need to know. The body is also a cursed battlefield with sin. The physical body that we dwell in now is under a curse. We are in Adam destined to die. If we’re not part of that final generation, the mysterious generation when Christ returns, we will die. And not only will we die, we basically are dying all the time, even at the cellular level. Death is at work in us all the time. And so, we have corrupted, decaying, dying bodies, what Paul calls, “The body of sin” (Romans 6:6). The body of sin, because our bodies are affected by our unregenerate state before we were converted. And once we have been converted, then we still have to deal with the habits of sin built up in our bodies. Romans 6:6 says, “For we know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be done away with so that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”
So, our sinful identity in Adam died when we came to faith in Christ, positionally. That person we were in Adam died, positionally, but we still have the body which has been tainted or corrupted by sin all those many years. And by sinning we built up habits and tendencies that would continue to pull at us, even after we’ve come to salvation in Christ.
Think for example of someone who comes to faith in Christ at age 55, something like that, and since they were 16, they smoked cigarettes, and so they’re addicted. They’re addicted to the nicotine, they’re addicted to cigarettes. They come to a genuine faith in Christ. They’re forgiven of all of their sins. They’re immediately indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and they’re still addicted to cigarettes. And if they’re going to beat that addiction, they have to go through the very painful process of withdrawal and learning new habits. Those habits are still there. That’s just one symbol of all the many habits of sin that we built up in our years before we were converted. So, the Bible describes the body of sin in other terms as well. For example, Romans 6:12 calls it a mortal body or a dying body. Romans 7:24 calls it, “The body of death.”
Genesis 3:19 declares the body is of the dust and earthy. So, it says there, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat of your food until you return to the ground, since from it you are taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.” So, 1 Corinthians 15:47 says, “The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.” 2 Corinthians 4:7 says our bodies are jars of clay. Philippians 3:21 describes our bodies to be lowly. They are lowly. It’s tied to our humiliation. Other passages refer to the earthly body as an earthly tent. Peter says in 2 Peter 1:13, “I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body.” Paul uses the same language in 2 Corinthians 5:4. He says, “While we are in this tent, we groan in our burden, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed.”
So that gives a sense of a temporary dwelling. We’re not going to be in these physical bodies forever. So, there is in all of this a present ambivalence toward the body, because the body is actually a battlefield against sin. There’s a battle going on constantly in our bodies. Romans 7:22-23, Paul speaks of this, “For in my inner being, I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” So, this gives the idea that our body is in mutiny against the city of truth being established in our character. It’s in mutiny. It’s fighting against it. Because of this, the body is also viewed as constantly dangerous. It needs to be constantly subjected to harsh discipline.
we need to constantly care for the body’s needs, but we are not to give into the body’s lusts
Paul uses very harsh language in 1 Corinthians 9:27 when he says, “I beat my body and make it my slave, lest after I preach to others, I myself might be disqualified for the prize.” Like Paul says, I just don’t trust my bodily drives and desires. They’re going to lead me astray if I don’t keep them under firm check. He has to beat his body and make it his slave. He has to frustrate the drives of his flesh. If the body yearns for something, wants something, drives for it, it’s almost certainly not good. It’s pushing us towards sin. Therefore, we need to constantly care for the body’s needs, but we are not to give into the body’s lusts, which take normal bodily drives and desires and push them beyond boundaries that God has set up. This is certainly a delicate balance.
Ephesians 5:28-29 addresses husbands in relation to their wives. Says, “In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it just as Christ does the church.” So, you should comb your hair, you should shave, you should shower, you should feed yourself when hungry, using good, nourishing, healthy food. You should scratch your skin when it itches and alleviate that temporary pain. You should get medical care if you need medical care, to get well. You should take care of your body. When it says in the second great commandment, is to love your neighbor as yourself, it’s just to go on loving yourself in that way, and then just extend it to your neighbor the same way you would care for your own body, you should care for your neighbor.
So, Christians should and do care well for the body. We’re not looking at extreme asceticism where you could think about some monks that were in prayer cells, and they go days and days fasting. They look like living skeletons. They might put on hair shirts that were physically unpleasant to wear, or they might even flagellate themselves, beating themselves for their sense of internal sin. This is not sanctification, it’s not healthy. However, as we’re feeding the body, caring for it and all that, at the same point it says in Romans 6:12, “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.” Or its lust. Now at the end of this constant battle with the body is glory for the Christian. Philippians 3:21 says, “Christ by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies and make them like his glorious body.” So that’s a theology of the body as we look at it in the Bible to understand it completely, as intrinsically and originally created as good, but then fallen in Adam, a battlefield with sin and a vehicle for good works.
Now let’s talk about those good works. There is set before us a pathway of good works in the commands and the laws of God. Psalm 119:4 says God has laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed. God therefore doesn’t leave it to chance or to our own imaginations to figure out specific paths that we should walk that would be pleasing to him. There’s one path and one path only, and that is obedience. He wants us to obey what he has commanded. And he’s gone ahead of us to ordain good works that we should walk in them. One of my favorite verses is Ephesians 2:10, “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance that we should walk in them.” And so, we are his workmanship. He shapes us, he molds us.
We are a masterpiece of his working, and God has providentially gone ahead of us to prepare good works that we are to do with our bodies. And so, as God goes ahead of us, he orchestrates circumstances in life that he knows are going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but he knows what’s going to happen. And he sets up good works in advance, and he wants us to walk in them. That’s an interesting Greek verb, just walking has to do with a daily life. So, there’s a practical, physical lifestyle of good works that he wants us to do every single day. And what’s so amazing is that God has prepared these works in advance for us to walk in, but he also prepares us to walk in them. He works both sides of the equation. He prepares the works in advance, and he prepares us in advance, and then matches them up.
And that makes life so exciting at every moment. God has ordained a pathway of good works by his commands and by providence, by things that happen. We think about the time in the Book of Esther when there was a very dire threat to the Jewish people. That a plot that had been uncovered by Mordecai who was a Jewish man. And he was the cousin of Queen Esther, but he acted really like a father to her. And he was exhorting her to move out and to act on behalf of her Jewish people. And he said, “If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). So, I like to think of that in conjunction with Ephesians 2:10.
We have been raised up to do specific good works. We have been positioned for such a time as this. That we have been prepared and everything has been orchestrated so that we can use our bodies to actually do good works that will be pleasing to God. A mature Christian, therefore, awakes every day, knowing that God has orchestrated a series of good works, so it will carry him or her through the whole day. And occasionally God may call us to a radically new direction of good works. But think of all of the things that God can do, a whole pathway of good works.
Perhaps a godly woman in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, wakes up, has a morning quiet time and then goes for a prayer walk through the rubble-filled streets of her city after the earthquake that happened a number of years ago. I think about this, and she just looks for opportunities that she can serve God, she looks for works to do. She’s connected with an orphanage, and so she’s going to teach English. She’s going to maybe bandage a scraped knee with some of the kids, or hug a crying girl, or encourage a weary Haitian pastor. There are all kinds of good works that she is in position to do.
Or think about a Christian legislator in Washington D.C., who steps out in faith to argue boldly for a law restricting funding of abortions. And he knows he’s going to get hammered by the mainstream media, but he knows that God’s prepared him and positioned him for such a time as this. Or think about a believing couple who own a chain of small businesses. And they choose to take their vacations every year in India teaching missionaries there how they can use small business practices to start micro businesses for the people that they’re working with and generate income for them.
Or maybe a senior in college decides to forgo plans for medical school, and to trust the Lord for funds to enable him to go on a short-term mission trip to a college campus in the Persian Gulf. So, there’s just a whole array of good works that God goes ahead of us to prepare. A single mom in downtown Detroit, maybe she’s recently converted through the prayers and witness of a godly aunt. And she learns how to live by the Spirit in her daily grueling life with a non-Christian husband and to raise her children in her new faith. Her good works are going to be very different than another woman’s will as well. So, as we conclude today, we should think of it this way, that God has gone ahead of us to prepare good works, and that he will be using everything that you experience this week to sanctify you and to bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
