We live in a culture that is obsessed with our bodies.  A visit to the checkout line at any store will quickly reveal the obsession our culture has with people who are young, athletic and thin.  There is a message broadcast constantly that:

  • If you are young
  • If you are thin
  • If you are beautiful
  • If you have the right hair or cloths
  • If you are appealing to the opposite sex

…then you are truly alive.  I found an ad for a weight loss company this week that seems to wrap up a message we frequently hear. “If you lose weight, you’ll have the body and the life you deserve…then you’ll be happy”

I read a blog post this week from a young, European woman who felt like she did not fit her culture’s definition of attractiveness.  She had bought into the notion that being attractive is what makes you really feel alive.  In the blog she asked a sad question…she asked, “Is there even a point to living in you’re ugly?”  What was more interesting to me, than her question, were the other people’s response to her question.

  • They wanted to know, “Exactly, how ugly are you?”
  • Some people said platitudes like, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
  • One person commented that “getting married isn’t that important, anyway…”

How would you respond to that young women’s question?  (“Is there even a point to living if you’re ugly?”)  I think I would respond to her this way:  “You might feel miserable right now, but the truth is that many young, attractive and thin people feel miserable too.  If “real living” was accomplished by being young, thin, beautiful and well-dressed, then all the attractive young people in the world would be on Cloud Nine right now.  BUT… They are not.”  Why is that?

God’s Word tells us why.  In our passage today, God’s Word makes it very clear that real, deep, lasting satisfaction in life doesn’t happen through the body but through the Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, not our physical bodies, that gives us hope and fullness and joy.  Today’s passage speaks some truth into how to have a right relationship with our bodies.  Let’s set up a few spiritual principles first.

In Genesis 1, the very first chapter in your Bible, there is a historical account of how God went about creating the known physical world.  After he spent a few days making light and water and plants and animal and mankind, God reviewed his creation.  In Genesis 1:31 it says, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”

On one hand, God made the physical universe and our bodies.  When he formed us, he declared that what he made was good.  We were appointed as stewards of both our bodies and of the resources found in creation at large.  It is right to take care of our bodies and it is right to take care of God’s good creation.

The belief in the ‘goodness of creation’ is in stark contrast to the beliefs of the ancient Greeks.  In ancient Greek thought, the physical, material world was thought to be bad.  They thought that all material things needed to be rejected and hopefully left behind so that we might, one day, live in some sort of ethereal, disembodied, non-physical state.  Only the ‘spiritual’ is good and only the ‘spiritual’ should be embraced.  Many modern New Age religions and many Eastern religions believe something similar.

The Bible refutes this line of reasoning.  The Bible teaches that God’s creation is good.  The body is not to be despised.  We will not eternally exist as a disembodied spirit.  God made our bodies.  He must like them.  He’ll even give us a new one some day!

On the other hand, our sin has seriously messed up our current bodies.  Sin broke our bodies so severely that we are in a constant state of dying.  Writing as both a physician and as a pastor, Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones once said, “the moment we enter into this world and begin to live, we also begin to die.  Your first breath is one of the last you will ever take.  The principle of decay leading to death is in every one of us.”

If we are trying to find real life in a body that’s dying, then we are looking for life in the wrong place.  Our present bodies may be good and useful, but they are not life-sustaining.  They are dying.

You and I can’t be fooled by the confusion of the world.  The world is teaching us that real life is found by being beautiful and fit and stylish in these dying bodies.  The Bible says to be filled with the Spirit… Real life is only found in the Spirit!

RECAP

Last week we talked about how the Holy Spirit dwells in the life (in fact – in the body) of every Christian.  When someone become a Christian, he does not simply change his beliefs.  The transformation that happens is not just something academic.  Salvation is not just a change of thinking.  The change that happens is on a much deeper level.

Every genuine believer is brought into a whole new relationship with God.  They are no longer an enemy of God, but they are in the ‘army of the redeemed’ and they are indwelt by the very Spirit of God Himself.  The believer is lifted from the isolation of ‘life in the flesh’ and brought into a new, personal relationship with God Himself.

That total transformation produces clear evidence in the life of the believer.  The coming of the Spirit could be compared to cream in a cup of coffee:

  • Think of your life as the cup of coffee.
  • The Spirit is represented by the cream
  • As the spirit is poured into your life, He begins to spread out in every direction
  • Sometimes trials come in and really stir things up and push the Holy Spirit into corners of your lives that he may not have affected before
  • As we continue living life with the Spirit, He begins to spread into every area until every aspect of your life is affected by his presence
  • The areas where he is most concentrated, those are the areas in which you are the most alive

Real life comes from the Spirit and not from our bodies.  Verse 10 helps us to understand how to have a right relationship with our body and, more importantly, how to have a right relationship with the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit makes us alive.  Although the body is not to be despised, but it will die because of sin.

#1 Our physical bodies will die because of sin

10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had two people contact me who have pretty serious diseases.  In both cases, the disease is very difficult to treat.

  1. One person wrote me and was at peace, ready to meet the Lord. They said:
    “We know God has a reason for allowing it.  Whatever is ahead, we walk hand in hand with our Heavenly Father.  One day at a time; we know He will lead us.”
  2. The other (with a far less serious disease) was very upset and felt like she had been unfairly given a trial too great to bear. She was extremely irritated with the doctors who couldn’t find a medical cure for her illness.  She told me that her suffering was so bad that she was ready to give up.

Why is there such a difference in the attitude between two people facing a serious disease?  I think it lies, in part, in a right understanding of the reality behind this verse.  If you and I are looking to these present bodies as a source of life, then we will be very disappointed when they begin to break down and die.  (because our source of life is decaying and dying)  That is very depressing.

BUT… If you and I are looking to the Holy Spirit as our source of life and we see our bodies as already dead, then we look forward to the day when we can shed these old bones.  I’m not quite done using this body yet and I’m going to try to take good care of it, but in a sense it is kind of “dead weight.”

The passage clearly states that the body is dead.  It doesn’t say, “the body will die,” or “we are killing the body.”  The passage means exactly in Greek the way it is stated in English: “the body is dead.”  It says that because of sin, the body is a seat of death.  It is mortal.  It decays.  The Fall has created weakness, humiliation and death in our physical bodies.  But it doesn’t end there…

  • Paul describes our body as a battlefield in our struggle against sin. Back one page in your Bible, in Romans 7:23, Paul says, “I see in my members (body parts) another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (body).”   According to that verse, our dead body is a battlefield and therefore it is the main cause of pain for the believer in every sense.
  • The passage implies that the body is dead in a moral sense as well. The body is an arena where sin often plays it’s games.  The body gives sin an opportunity to work out its desires and passions in us… even when our mind is desperately trying to pursue Jesus.  The constant conflict that exists between the mind and the body is why Paul was so distressed and said in Romans 7:24, “ 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Let’s pause for a moment and thank God that He did not leave us in that terrible condition!

  • The fact is that the scripture says our body is dead.
  • But the Christian is not looking to their body at their source of everlasting life.
  • The truth is that the Holy Spirit is our source of eternal life!

#2 Everlasting life is not found in the body but in the Spirit

10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

The word for spirit in the original language is the word pnuema.  Pnuema can be translated to mean Holy Spirit, the spirit of a man (the center of my will and emotions) or wind/breath.  Nobody thinks that this text is referring to wind but the word for “Holy” is not placed before the word “Spirit” and there are no capital letters in the Greek language.  There are conservative, reliable Bible scholars who interpret this passage in two slightly different ways:

  1. Some see “spirit” as referring to our human spirit. (the human spirit is life because of righteousness.) (NASB)) It is written as a comparison between our human body and our human spirit.  The implication is that we are not saved physically by the things our body clings on to, but by what our human spirit pursues.  In that way, when our spirit is conformed to the image of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, it produces eternal life in us.
  2. Some see “Spirit” as referring to the Holy Spirit. (the Holy Spirit is life because of righteousness.)  It is a comparison between the body giving life and the Holy Spirit giving life.  The implication is that the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is transforming us from the inside out and creating a new eternal life within us out of our spiritual death.  I tend towards this view.

BUT, I can see a good argument for either side, and I think both views lead to a similar conclusion:  The Holy Spirit is the force that brings us to life spiritually and begins eternal life in the believer immediately.  If you are a believer, you won’t have eternal life “someday,”  YOU HAVE ETERNAL LIFE NOW!  Your comfort and consolation is not only that the Spirit of God is in you, but that you have already received eternal life.  Jesus said in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

We can have abundant life that begins now and extends far beyond the time these bodies of our finally give up.  Colossians 3:1 says, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”  Real life in not found in our bodies, but in “the things that are above” or (in other words) real living is found in spiritual realities through the person of Jesus Christ, not in the physical realities of this fallen world.

God promises that the believer’s life is eternal.  The believer will be resurrected from the dead and given a new resurrection body by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.  Those who hang on to the promise of a new, resurrected, sinless body, are eagerly waiting for the realization of that promise.  Moving ahead to the next verse it says:

“11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

The same Holy Spirit, who gives us a new spiritual life, will also give life to a resurrected, new body that will last forever.

#3 The Spirit will give us new bodies

A lot of people wonder, “does that mean that God will somehow take the actual cells of my body after I die and put them back together in some kind of fancy, new way?”  If so, what happens if my old body was not exactly kept all together in one place?

This promise does not mean that our corpse will be dug up out of the ground and those molecules will be put back together somehow.  It means that we will have an entirely different kind of body than we do now.

  • A body that will be a new and glorious expression of our personality.
  • It will be free of all frailty, disease, pain, decay and death.
  • We will not be a spirit freed from the body but it will be an entirely new kind of body that has been given life by the Spirit… life that will never be taken away from it.

When you see our current state from that perspective, it begins to make sense when Paul says these staggering words in Philippians 1:20-22, “it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 22 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.”

If we really believe with Paul that a new body waits for us, then every new ache and pain is not a nightmare, but a reminder that this world is not our home.  It reminds us that this body is dead and a new life and a new body is waiting for us.  But as for now, we wait.  We wait and pray that we would be fruitful in our labor for the Lord while we’re here so that by either our lives or by our deaths, Christ would be honored with our bodies.

Life Application

How do we honor Christ with our bodies while we are still here?  The truth is that every believer is engaged in a difficult struggle.  Their spirit is saved, but there is a war being waged in their body.  Sin is waiting for the opportunity to take back any bit of ground it may have lost along the way.  The indwelling Spirit is at war with our body to fight against indwelling sin.  I Corinthians 9:27 is one of my favorite verses about this struggle. Paul says, “27 …I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

When a person is saved, sin can’t drag them back into the world of spiritual death again, but losing a battle to sin can cause a believer a great deal of trouble.  This war waged in our body is ongoing, but it is not hopeless.  A believer can be bold and courageous in his fight against sin because he already possesses the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of eternal life.  The victory is already won, but, for now, the battle still continues.

A day will come soon when a believer’s fight will come to an end.  Either they will die and be resurrected with Christ or Jesus will come back again and take them home.  At that moment, our bodies will be glorified and we will be finally free from this body of death.

1 Corinthians 15:51-53 says, “51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” Though I’m still in this body that is ‘dead because of sin,’ I am alive spiritually through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

With these truths in mind, what can you say to the person who is really upset about the decay of their physical body?  I think these three truths could be helpful to share with that person.  You could say to them:

  1. Even if you get miraculous relief from today’s symptoms, your body will eventually give up. Are you ready for that day?  Consider Lazarus.  Lazarus was raised from the dead, but his body eventually gave up again.  There is no hope of real, lasting life in our own physical bodies, but there is hope in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  Do you know him?
  2. If you are looking for purpose or meaning or hope in your own body, you will be disappointed every time. If you look to Jesus for new life, then He will never let your down – no matter how bad you are physically feeling right now.
  3. A follower of Jesus is promised a new, resurrected body. If you are a follower of Christ’s then the pain and weakness and humiliation your face right now will be the worst thing you will ever experience.  It only gets better when you are finally in the Lord’s presence.

But I know this, if you are looking for something that “works” to relieve all physical pain, you will never find it.  You will be so disappointed if you spend all your time and energy trying to find a cure for a dead body.  You don’t need a fixed up old, dead body.  You need a new one.

Every new sickness or pain or scar is a vivid reminder that your physical health is not your most valuable treasure.  Real life does not come from doctors or medicine or treatments or Pilates or a gym memberships.  Real life can only be found through the Spirit of Christ.  If you really want to feel alive, then ask Jesus to come in and transform your heart and make it like His.

 

Teaching Outline

#1 Our physical bodies will die because of sin – Romans7:23-24, 8:10

#2 Everlasting life is not found in the body but in the Spirit – Romans 8:10, John 10:10, Colossians 3:1

#3 The Spirit will give us new bodies – Romans 8:11, Phil. 1:20-22

Application: Real life can only be found through the Spirit of Christ

 

“27 …I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.” 1 Corinthians 9:27

1 Corinthians 15:51-53 says, “51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”