This Body Is His Too

The sentence came out of Elaine's mouth in a car park and she heard it as if somebody else had said it.

Rewind four minutes. She is forty seven. She has been up since twenty to five, which is not unusual, and she has eaten one thing today, standing at a worktop, and she cannot now remember what it was. She has driven two hundred miles this week for other people. She has a meeting at seven and it is quarter past six and she is putting a bag in the boot.

Her friend, who has known her for twenty years and has earned the right, says: Elaine. When did you last sit down?

And Elaine says, cheerfully, waving it off, already halfway to the driver's door:

Oh, I will be fine. It is only the body.

And then she stops with her hand on the door handle, because she has heard it.

It is only the body.

She would never say that about her son. She would go through a wall for that boy's sleep. She would never say it about her mother, or about the woman in her group who has been unwell for two years and whom Elaine drives to appointments, gently, and waits for, and brings a flask for. She has an enormous, tender, practical reverence for every single body in her life except one.

She has been talking about her own like it is a hire van.

That is the arrangement, when she finally looks at it in a car park at quarter past six. Somewhere along the line she decided that the real Elaine is the part that thinks and prays and gets things done, and the body is the vehicle it travels in, and a vehicle is a thing you run until it stops.

And underneath that, an older and worse idea, one she has never said out loud to anybody. That looking after herself would be a kind of softness. That it would be self indulgent, or vain, or beside the point, when the point is God and other people and the work.

She stood there with her hand on the door for a good while.

Because if that is true, then the body she has been running into the ground for twelve years is the one thing in her whole life that she has decided God is not interested in.

He bought the whole of you

I want to hand you the verse first, because people quote half of it at each other and the half they leave off is the half that changes everything.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.1 Corinthians 6:19 to 20

Read the last four words. In your body.

Not in spite of it. Not once you have got past it. In it. The place where God is glorified, in that sentence, is the same tired frame that was up at twenty to five and has eaten one thing standing up. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says glorify God in your body, and the Holy Spirit is named two verses earlier as the one living in it, so the location of the worship and the location of the tiredness are the same address.

And look at what He calls it. A temple. A dwelling. The place where He actually lives, which is a thing you would never describe as the van the important part travels in.

Then the other half: you were bought with a price. Whatever else that means, it means the transaction covered all of you. He did not buy the thinking bit and leave the rest at the door. There is no arrangement in which your soul belongs to Him and your shoulders are your own problem. Romans 8:23 says we wait for the redemption of our body and names the Spirit as the firstfruits of it in the same passage, which puts the shoulders inside what He redeemed and not outside it.

So here is the thing to hear, and I want it to land somewhere below your ribs.

Looking after your body is not vanity, and it is not beside the point. It is looking after something that belongs to Him and that He lives in, and He has never once wanted only the half of you that has ideas.

Now, I have to be careful here and I am going to say why out loud, because you deserve to know what I am not doing.

I am not giving you a plan. No diet, no regime, no list, nothing to buy, no view on your medicine and no opinion on your treatment. If you are under a doctor, stay under your doctor. If somebody has given you care, keep taking it. That is not what this message is for and I will not go near it. 1 Timothy 5:23 has Paul giving one plain practical word about health and stopping there, and it is the same Spirit who inspired that restraint.

And this matters even more: nothing here says that a body which is unwell has been badly kept. Bodies get ill. Faithful, well loved, carefully tended bodies get ill, and so do the ones nobody ever looked after, and nobody reading this is being told that their diagnosis is a report card. If that thought arrived while you were reading, put it down. It did not come from here and it did not come from God. John 9:3 has the question of whose fault it was refused outright before it could take root, and it is the same Spirit who comforts rather than audits.

There is a tradition behind this site that knows something about the morning after. People who waited for a future that did not arrive on the day they expected it, and who had to work out what to do with an ordinary Tuesday afterwards. And what some of them built, when the sky did not open, was a life that took the body seriously: rest, plain food, quiet, a Sabbath that meant it.

That is not a consolation prize.

You live in the body He gave you, today, in an ordinary week, and it has never once been the lesser calling. Genesis 2:7 has God forming a body with His own hands before any breath went into it, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that order at the very front of the book, which means an ordinary week lived in an ordinary frame is where the whole thing was always meant to happen.