Listen To Your Body Podcast Episode

We have, in many ways, lost touch with our bodies and therefore we’ve lost a lot of information that I think is quite helpful. Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent to have you along and Merry Christmas. I’m looking forward to this conversation because I think it really celebrates Christ’s incarnation in a beautiful way.

I think if we were to say, give a word out in the flesh. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What does the Scripture say about the flesh? I think most of us would place it in the negative category like works of the flesh come to mind. And yet Jesus came, and we have it written in the Scriptures, Jesus came in the flesh.

All right, so there is a redeeming quality that we learn at Christmas time by the incarnation of Jesus, and I want to talk about it. Brian you really bring a clinical practice to the show. And I know body is big in the work that you do. I want you to bring that out and Isaac, I know you think a lot in the space of spiritual formation and how people grow in Christ, and I know that has a very bodily element to it, right?

Okay. So, who wants to go first? Maybe just from a clinical standpoint, one of the things I think that’s really fascinating about the human mind is that we tend to group things, and we like to think make things really simple and it makes sense to some degree. But it also then makes connections that aren’t actually connections so when we read in the Scriptures that the predominant message about the flesh is in correction or it’s not positive, then what we tend to think of is, oh, the flesh is the body. And that may not be, those aren’t the same things. And I don’t think that’s the draw that the Scriptures are making. But in our minds, we make those categories and we’re off to the races and maybe haven’t started in the right place.

I think that’s excellent. And Isaac, what happens, what’s at stake if we have a misconstrued perception of the flesh? Scripture does use that term in different ways, and so being able to identify that’s important. And if we get it wrong, it’s really easy to come to an understanding that maybe the flesh, meaning the body, is an evil thing and something that is going to be a real problem for us in our spiritual life.

And we start to make that differentiation between our spiritual life and our bodily existence. And that causes a lot of problems. You know, when you say that, Isaac, I get a sense that when the flesh is speaking, very often in my own experience, that’s a negative thing. But you really cast this concept of the body, that the body isn’t necessarily always speaking ill. It’s not always speaking vice, right Brian? Talk a little bit about what the body is telling us. Exactly, and I think that’s a really important key here to recognize that our body, in many ways, is really a neutral thing. But it also is a very helpful thing that gives us really important cues that we need to listen to. Our bodies say they’re hungry.

Now, we don’t see that as the thing that should rule always. Paul tells us to make sure that our belly isn’t the ultimate ruler, so I think that’s important to keep in mind, but we are designed that we need to eat. We are designed that we have to rest, and our bodies are usually the first things that give us indication that we maybe need to consider these things.

Press a little bit deeper, Brian, because I know that you help individuals listen more to their body and their body says more than what we can imagine at first, right? We have, in many ways, lost touch with our bodies. And therefore, we’ve lost a lot of information that I think is quite helpful.

Or we’ve come to this place to condemn the body. When actually it’s a very helpful resource. And so, it’s amazing even in the counseling setting, when you think about just using the body and it’s showing you what the emotions are that are going on internally. And just by shifting somebody’s body posture or the way they’re presenting changes the thoughts inside. It starts to change the emotion and you start to see this connection between, oh, maybe the body is actually quite helpful in shifting us towards a spiritual mindset or thinking about how to do things that are honoring to the Lord, that the body is a very helpful resource and that if we pay attention to it and can know how to use it in a helpful way.

Isaac, take us back maybe to the early chapters of Genesis, how should we understand, in the body. Yeah, that’s exactly where my mind went as Brian was talking was the good creation that God made. And he said, this is where I want to dwell with my creation, and I’m going to give them flesh, and I’m going to give them bodies, and that’s going to be perfectly good and fine for them to live life with me forever.

And so, we started there, and sin came into the picture, and it started to do some really terrible things to our flesh. Paul talks about the sin in our members, in the parts of your body. And beyond that, there’s this coming resurrection, right? And Jesus showed us that even in the resurrection, he has a body. He currently has a body, and we are promised also a body, a resurrection body. And so, all the way along from the very beginning of our life with God as he created it in perfection and in goodness, we were given a body to experience that life and throughout eternity we will continue to have a body.

I really like that and Isaac, I get a sense that there’s a lot more that you could say on that and the point I really was blessed by was you talked about God wanting to live with us in our bodies. And that’s a tremendous incarnation of sorts, isn’t it? Yes, Jesus came to the earth, but he has not only come to the earth, but God’s Spirit intends to dwell in us.

Imagine how shocking and bizarre that teaching from Paul would have been to his listeners. Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, God’s dwelling? And I think the answer was probably, no, I didn’t know that. Because that’s hard to imagine, but that literally is the case that God has chosen human flesh to dwell in and he shows that perfectly in Jesus.

And it does seem like Paul is trying to get them to wrap their minds around the idea that the body isn’t a bad or a negative thing but that it certainly can be used wrongly. And certainly, there’s corruption in our bodies, but also that would be true of our spirits, right? Like our spirit isn’t wholly pure either.

We’re hoping that it is refined and that it becomes aligned with the Spirit. And I think it’s true of both the spirit within us, as well as the flesh or the body. We carry both and they need to be refined and brought into submission to the Lord. I want you to speak more about how our culture views the body. How do they see it? I would say the predominant message, whether overtly or more subtle is that the body doesn’t matter, that you can do whatever you want to in the body. And it’s yours, and it doesn’t really have any meaning, or it doesn’t really have any impact.

So, do with it what you like, and there aren’t really any consequences. And I think we can see the evidence that’s not actually accurate, but I think that’s the predominant overriding message, and it has an impact on our culture as well as on the church. What’s an example of that? Well, I think one example would be that we like to think that we can be superhuman. And one of the ways I think that manifests itself is if you look over time, they used to look to the sun to basically help dictate sleep, and once the sun goes down, you go to sleep. And when it comes back up, you get back up. Now, God’s design has given us a lot of insights on how to make light when it’s dark and therefore we think, well, I don’t need to sleep.

So, you see the amount of sleep has decreased. But with that, anxiety numbers come up, depression numbers come up, all of these negative impacts of not listening to the body and thinking that, oh, I don’t have to sleep. I really like the concept that the body is speaking to us. And often the body is speaking the truth to us, and we should listen to it. There are a lot of voices in our lives. There is the voice of emotion. There are the voices of my peers. There’s the voice of the culture. There’s the voice of my environment. There’s also the voice of my body. And really, you’re raising awareness and tuning our ears to listen to that voice.

Right. Another example, Matt, would just be the reality that in a day and age where we so value science, we have come to the conclusion that biology doesn’t matter when it comes to sexual gender. And again, we want to be sensitive to this, we want to recognize that there are challenges, but our world has basically said that what your body is biologically does not matter.

You are what your mind or emotions say, and we would say, that’s not true. Biology says what your gender is, and that really matters. Even if that’s a struggle, that’s a really important thing to be attuned to and respond to accordingly. Yeah. Listening to your body is not divided from God’s will or his intention for your life, but that is very much in line with his will for your identity.

And in that, I think certainly we recognize that this earth is not our home, that this body we’ve been given isn’t our final body that we’ll have. But I think sometimes that can lead us to say, well, it doesn’t matter. Or our hope is just to get away from it. But I think you bring up a really important point that this has been the dwelling that the Lord has given to us and for us to honor it, to listen to it, to take care of it, and to see that this is part of playing by God’s rules.

The rules that he’s created and really embracing that and even enjoying that, I think would be a really delightful thing, even in this Christmas season, as again, we reflect on the reality that Christ came, and he came in the flesh. What a beautiful thing.

Isaac, question for you. Spiritual growth. Growing as a believer, growing in our communion with God, does the body have anything to do with that, or can I do that separate the body? So, I’m going to come at this from the angle of just being a disciple of Jesus, which we’re all called to be. And if we’re going to do that, then we look at his life as the ultimate example of what we’re modeling, patterning ours after.

And if Jesus lived life in the flesh, and he lived it perfectly, then, if I’m going to learn to be like Jesus, following him as a disciple, I’m going to be looking at the things he did in his life. So, that I can grow to be more like that too, or grow spiritually, as you said. And so, a lot of times I think that’s going to look like we’re really good at giving people advice like, you ought to believe these things, and these are really good teachings and things that you ought to be paying attention to.

But there’s also a how-to component of our spiritual growth. It’s like, okay, so what do I actually do with my life, with my body, perhaps with my schedule that’s going to propel me forward in my growth towards Christlikeness. And so, this is where you end up getting things that in church history came to be known as spiritual disciplines.

What’s interesting about that term, spiritual disciplines, is that none of them are absent from the body, but each of them is a bodily activity that we would do. And so, I’m thinking of things like prayer, fasting, fellowship, celebration, study, and the like. And all of those are things that, yes, we do with our body because they are perfectly designed to give us the life that Jesus delivered to us in his own flesh, through his own body.

I think if we start to, divide our bodies from our spirits, then we end up having a really impractical faith, a really impractical spiritual walk that doesn’t actually result in any real deep change, but just stays at a cognitive mental level of giving mental assent to the ideas that I believe certain things.

Exactly. Rather than I have become a certain type of person in Christ, and that very much will involve your body. And so, if we can adopt an understanding of our life with God that includes both spirit and body together, I think that’s very helpful. And I think too, in my mind, part of what can be unfortunate is that we see some activities as honoring God or spiritual in nature and some as not, and accidentally, again, it starts to create this divide that when I’m reading my Bible, I’m doing something that’s spiritual or I’m doing something that honors God.

But when I am doing my work, you know, let’s say you’re building a house, like that’s not spiritual work. That is my job. And I think to be able to say, no I think all of those are deeply spiritual and to see that connection, I think is really important. I love that.

And going back to Jesus, would we ever divide Jesus’s life up into parts? Oh, that’s when Jesus was acting carnal and that’s when he was acting as God. No, he was fully man and God all the time. Isaac, give us some examples of the bodily things Jesus did that we could follow in. Yeah. One of the things that Jesus is often found doing throughout the Scriptures is being in community, engaging, oftentimes even celebrating meals and festivals and things like that with people and practicing joy.

That’s something he did with his body and with other people, but we also see him then oscillating between that and other times of joy. Of being alone and withdrawing and being still and quiet before his Father and fasting from food, right? Yeah, it reminds me of a quote. It was something to the effect of, we don’t know how to feast because we don’t know how to fast. And so, there’s a balance between all of these things that we find, too. But yeah, so Jesus was very much going and living a bodily life that enabled him to be able to do the things that he did. I was going to say spiritually, but that would have been confusing. But that makes sense, we understand that spiritually, but I think both of you have articulated well that these things mingle together and it’s not to our advantage to always separate them.

Yeah, I think I’ll just add this too, that the body is a really interesting thing. And there is a reason, I think, why people see it in a negative light, particularly if you’re a Christian, you’re saying, well, Scripture says this and that about it. It makes sense to me why there would be this negative light sometimes cast on the flesh because the flesh left to itself, to natural powers alone does become a real problem for us because if it’s run solely by desire, we’ve seen that we’ve turned in on ourselves and we’re just going to be self-gratifying and that’s not a godly thing. That’s not a good thing.

But we can picture our bodies as an engine of sorts that runs on spiritual resources and runs on the Spirit of God, on his grace, and his involvement with us. If that’s the fuel then everything that we do bodily, Brian to your point earlier, becomes spiritual because it is an action by a spiritual resource. And as long as we can learn to do that and continue practicing things that enable us to do that more frequently then that’s going to put us on a trajectory of spiritual growth. I think that’s important.

And that’s where I think we see the body, in my opinion, as a resource to help grow living according to the spirit of God. To the Lord rather than the spirit of the flesh. So, an example of that would be when we kneel and pray, that’s a very physical thing to do. But when our bodies take on that posture, it is like a physical manifestation of, okay, I’m not in charge.

And, you know, I’m coming before who is in charge and doing that physically does something internally to our spirit. And those working together are really powerful and can build some really powerful momentum. Whereas if we see them as separate and we don’t use them together then I think we’ve lost a great deal.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Isaac, and as we reflect on this Christmas season, as we celebrate, maybe this conversation has elevated and given us more to celebrate, and that being Christ with us taking on our bodies to show there is dignity, purpose, value, and truth in our bodies if we should learn to live in them like he did.