The Spiritual Impact of How We Treat Our Bodies

Body and Soul

We all know, in various ways, that life in the body (or as Paul talked about it, “the outer man”) connects with the inner person (the inner man). One really easy example is go a night or longer without sleep and see if your heart appreciates appropriately, if your mind thinks clearly, or if your will is appropriately calibrated to choose good.

So our bodily lives do affect our spiritual lives, and the opposite is the case. You can have such a deep, rich experience or spiritual feeding on God that you’re able to push through some tiredness or other aspects of life. So there’s this enigmatic connection between the soul and bodily life.

And while we can’t spell all that out, how we treat and use and steward our bodies can have significant effects on our souls. Sometimes it may only be a small boost that the natural joy and energy that would come through exercising these bodies would have some kind of spiritual effect. I think at other times it can have a significant effect.

Merely exercising the human body doesn’t give spiritual joy. It doesn’t necessarily give joy that honors God. But it can be a help. And as a Christian who wants to be happy in God and in that joy meet the needs of others, I want my body to be a help, not a hindrance, in fulfilling the callings God has given me and the purposes for which I’m living. And so I want to use the training and exercising of the body in its proper place as a supplement in the pursuit of spiritual joy and God’s callings on my life.

David Mathis is the author of A Little Theology of Exercise: Enjoying Christ in Body and Soul.

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