Gary Thomas - Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

EVERY
BODY
MATTERS

Strengthening
Your Body
to Strengthen
Your Soul

GARY THOMAS
Bestselling Author of Sacred Marriage

To Bob Marvel and Torry Lingbloom, my Bellingham running buds.

Bob, thanks for the memories of two shared Boston marathons and one Portland, many cups of chai tea, and fruitful times of ministry. I respect you so much and am grateful to call you a friend.

Torry, Im so thankful for your friendship; you may be one of the most pleasant men Ive ever met, but hey, its time to get over your frustration with a thirty-year-old rule and join Bob and me in Boston someday!

I live in a crucible between impressive success and miserable failure when it comes to personal discipline.

Mark Rhodes story is one that just about any person can relate to.

I struggle constantly with my weight. I have a really hard time fighting against the self-defeating behavior that makes me gravitate toward sweets or fast foods. In no way do I feel like I have conquered or mastered the ability to lift up my body to what it could be. I certainly weigh more than I should and more than I want to.

Mark is in his early fifties. Hes a senior director at World Vision International; before that, he made his living working in advertising. On his last business trip, he ate twenty-four restaurant meals in a row. Like many of us, hes concerned about his health habits, and like many, he lives with a constant sense of failure that he could be doing more about his weight. He could be doing it better, could be more disciplined.

Whether youre in your twenties, thirties, or forties or facing your fifties, sixties, seventies, or beyond one thing is certain: youre doing it in a body, a body that not only contains a soul but affects your soul as well. We are not angels, pursuing God without physical covering, and if we try to pretend that we are living as though the state of our bodies has no effect on the condition of our souls all the proper doctrine in the world cant save us from eating away our sensitivity to Gods presence or throwing away years of potential ministry if we wreck our hearts physical home.

Thats the spirit out of which Mark Rhode lives. He wants to pursue God, to serve God, to know God, but he lives in a body that often seems at war with his soul.

In this, he is typical.

This book is for those Christians who, like me and Mark, recognize we might have grown a bit soft in our bodies and in our souls. In the deepest parts of our understanding, we suspect there may even be a connection, but the application is so unpleasant that we often ignore this soft-spoken truth. For most of our lives, we have emphasized growing our souls, not always realizing that a lack of physical discipline can undercut and even erode spiritual growth.

Since focusing on the spiritual is our default line of thinking, lets take a few moments to look at what a healthy soul is, and then, in that context, well see how difficult it is to cultivate such a soul while largely ignoring our bodies.

People often speak of wanting hearts of gold, an apt and vibrant metaphor, but I suggest an additional one. Lets start speaking of souls of silver. Silver souls speak of a divine touch, souls that have been refined, purified, and made beautiful through a difficult, sometimes brutal, refining process.

Silver is harder than gold and has the added benefit of possessing the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. Because silver is a little harder than gold, once it is pounded, it tends to hold its shape better (though such shaping takes that much more force). If our aim is to conduct Gods presence not to impress people on our own, but rather to be available to help connect others to God I cant imagine a more apt metal metaphor to choose.

The Bible celebrates the silver-making process as a metaphor of personal refinement. Scripture assumes that we arent what we need to be our souls are polluted, weighted down by dross and goes on to describe how God will treat our souls as a silversmith treats raw precious metals:

For you, God, tested us;

you refined us like silver.

You brought us into prison

and laid burdens on our backs.

You let people ride over our heads;

we went through fire and water,

but you brought us to a place of abundance.

Psalm 66:10 12, emphasis added

This speaks of a fierce but beautiful refining process that leads to a place of abundance. To get us there, the silversmith doesnt just speak comfort and ease to his silver. He doesnt massage it into shape. No. He puts it through the fire. He even beats it and hammers it until it becomes what he has designed it to be.

The Bible declares that this is exactly what God does for his people. Consider Zechariah 13:9: This third I will put into the fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. Or Malachi 3:3: He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.

The refinement process is as fierce as it is necessary. The goal is to be purified and refined for Gods service, just like silver:

In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for special purposes and some for common use. Those who cleanse themselves from the latter will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.

2 Timothy 2:20 21, emphasis added

The reason I want to get in shape then, the reason I long for Gods church to get in shape, is not to impress anyone, not to make others feel inferior, not to demonstrate our own personal discipline and self-control. God forbid! On the contrary, it is to become, as Paul writes, instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.

Read these words again, slowly, because this teaching about the connection between physical and spiritual fitness requires that our motivation be as pure as we can make it in this fallen world. We are called to be all of the following:

instruments for special purposes

made holy

useful to the Master

prepared to do any good work

Desiring a silver soul means that we stop treating our bodies like ornaments with all the misguided motivations often displayed by those who build their bodies out of pride and ambition and start treating our bodies like instruments, vessels set apart to serve the God who fashioned them. Whether we have strong or weak bodies, healthy or sick, overnourished or undernourished, how do we begin moving from where we are now to more purposefully building bodies that function like instruments?

An athletic club I once went to displayed two chunks of silicone on top of the reception desk one weighed five pounds, the other ten. It was a vivid way of telling us, This is the extra weight youre carrying. Pick it up and feel its effects.

Just as our bodies can be weighted down with extra baggage, so our souls are encrusted with dross. To make silver, the silversmith has to remove the dross that clings to it. Dross is the waste or other chemical element that surrounds silver; it has to be removed in order for the silver to be refined. You dont create silver; you