InteGRITy (Part 2)
Written by Ed Allen
Sunday, 26 April 2009 09:00
Sermon Notes
If we’re going to have it, we will need the right integration of our whole person moving healthily toward a right connection with God and with others. That whole person includes our bodies. Physical development would require GRIT. The first part of that is “giving your body to God.”
Give your body to God
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Idolize your body no more
Train your body in order to do good
Passage: Matthew 6 and 1 Corinthians 9
Idolize your body no more.
Principle from 2 Corinthians 7:10: we can have the right emotion, but it can be wrongly directed, wrongly inspired! In which case it feels legitimate, but actually does us damage!
10Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
In the case Paul cites here, the emotion of sorrow mimics exactly the right emotion. You can feel legitimately sorry; your experience feels real and right. But it is skewed so that it produces death and not release and life We can do the same thing in regard to our bodies! We can have great concern for our body – which, in theory is a good thing. We can want to care for our body. But if it is skewed, it will lead to spiritual death and not life and release.
Matthew 6 – a good picture/right perspective on our body
- Don’t worry about stuff related to our body/our life.
- Instead, seek God!
- Passage starts back at 2:24. This is about worshipping God and not worshipping your self, including your body.
- So while we want to take care of our bodies, we cannot worship them. It’s not about our body. It’s about serving God and loving others. A healthy body helps us do that more effectively.
- What is the result of seeking God? Everything needed is “given” to us!
- Does that mean we sit around and do nothing? That’s never the right answer spiritually. God always asks us to participate.
- But this truth does mean that if we seek God as first priority in our lives, the rest of our lives takes shape appropriately and rightly.
- Even as we get in shape physically – if we do it as a way of pursuing God, if we do it so that we might honor Him more effectively, if we do it out of His power working through us, then our health, and how we look, and how we feel will be given to us in exactly appropriate measure.
- If we get in shape as a way of worshipping ourselves, we will not be able to sustain our efforts and the worship will not be satisfying anyway.
Sister Buder Testimony
- “exercise is the one thing that can truly harmonize ...”
- This reminds me of Dallas Willard who calls the body “our primary ally in Christlikeness.”
- “By your power that I’m able to do this in the first place.”
Train your body in order to do good.
- 1 Corinthians 9:24f
- 9:1f – I do everything so that I might fulfill what God has called me to do and to be. I do everything – including discipline my body.
- Can I state the obvious?
- I believe the first step in physical training is rest.
- For some of us, our exercise and training is another expression of our drivenness and not of our seeking God.
- A second step is eating right.
- Then the third important step in physical training is appropriate physical exertion.
Conclusion:
You’re thinking that our whole series could be about these three steps (rest, eat right, physical exercise). But understand we are not trying to overcome fat and fatigue. We are trying to overcoming personal disintegrity and sin. As such our primary enemies are: hatred of our body (because it will not allow us to get the attention or the dominance or the sexual gratification that we desire), fear of our bodies (what it will become and what it will do to us), and the centrality of our bodies to how we think of ourselves.
Our aim is to honor God with our whole selves – including our bodies. We train our bodies, not to build attractiveness but to reflect God and to more effectively do His will.
Jesus is our example – who offered his body up, not to be admired or feared or revered, but to be an instrument of God’s will.