Imago Dei Series: Fearfully Made, A Right Body Image

All right, good evening all.

Invite you to take your Bible and go to Psalm 139.

Psalm 139.

As most of you know, Royal and I are grandparents twice over.

That means we're contractually obligated to love pictures of our grandsons.

And uh we signed the terms of those agreements uh without even looking at the contract.

Um our boys live in London, uh, which means we don't get to see them as often as we'd like to.

Um but thankfully, modern technology's been merciful to us because there's hardly a day that that uh goes by without us seeing a picture or a video of either one of them and often both of them.

And part of the joy is not just seeing the boys, it's watching them develop.

And more recently, it's been fun watching Callum not only doing a number of things in videos, but also sometimes even recognizing himself.

And he'll he'll look at a video and he'll you could see his eyes bright up, and he goes, That's Callum, that's Callum.

And it's really, really precious.

There was one we just received a few days ago, him jumping on the bed and acting silly after recognizing he was being recorded.

And then he he got on top of Matt and said, Papa.

And then he looked, looked by him and said, Window, right?

Didn't he say window?

But it's kind of fun for him just to see his eyes brighten up and look in there and look on the screen and go, that's me.

That's me.

And sadly, the journey begins because for the rest of his life, he's going to be looking at pictures of himself.

And uh all of us have been a part of that, right?

We are getting accustomed more and more to seeing photos of ourselves.

And he hasn't learned to judge himself at all.

He's just excited he's in there somehow on the screen.

But the day will come when, like a lot of us, uh, we get a picture and we look immediately at ourselves.

And inside, before we even say anything, we don't look at it with disinterested curiosity.

We look at ourself.

And there's some sort of like internal committee that's already performing an evaluation on what we look like, and often pronouncing a judgment before we have anything to say.

Well, there's something behind that, and there's something in our world today that leads us into those kind of thoughts about our bodies.

We are subjected to relentless evaluation, either by advertisers or through comparisons with others, perhaps even in our family, or off-handed comments that dig deeper than they deserve to ever be allowed in.

And we assess our bodies against those standards, and we assess our bodies by those evaluations that are handed to us by the culture that we're in.

The problem is, is the culture does one of two things, and they're contradictory.

First of all, it says that our body is the greatest expression of our reality, right?

That it is the primary currency of human worth.

And yet, at the same time, it'll say that our actual bodies are not good enough and they always need something for improvement.

The problem is, is neither one of those are true.

And like I said, they're contradictory, but they also don't come from a place that has our best interest and our are flourishing at heart.

In fact, they kind of thrive on the fact that we don't think in a flourishing way about our body.

And they haven't really thought carefully or even honestly about what the body is.

And so we're going to go to God's Word this evening in the middle of our Imago Day series and look at something that deals with the implications of the image of God.

And we'll get to a passage that will talk about why this message fits into this series.

The Christian world has often talked about the body, but it hasn't always talked about it in a faithful way to Scripture.

You may, you may have, even in your own self, some understanding of some of these ideas.

That the body, yes, is part of who we are, but it's the inferior half of the body-soul distinction.

Or you might think of it as the source of temptation, that somehow, if we just would get rid of this body, that we would be able to be free and flourishing in our spiritual life, that something about our actual physicality is holding us back.

And given those ideas and others that are like them, we think of somehow as our body as something to be managed until we get to the place where we can just be released from it and we can enter into that glorious place in which we're in God's presence.

Well, as we've gone through the Imago Day series, starting in Genesis and talking about God's declaration of us as the image of God, we must remember that he made that declaration over embodied people.

And as we'll see when we get to 1 Corinthians 15, that we will bear the image of the heavenly, talking about the resurrected body of Jesus Christ.

So there is very much a context to what we're going to be looking at this evening.

But it's also the most intimate part of this series because it's talking about, well, the very body we brought into this room this evening, the very body that we have been evaluating perhaps our whole life, the very body that perhaps others have done wrong things to.

Our bodies that don't always work as we would like them to be and have never measured up to some standard we've kept in our head.

And so the text that we're going to be looking at tonight will help shape a biblical understanding of our body, particularly as it's made in the image of God.

We'll be looking at Psalm 139, we'll be looking at 1 Corinthians 6, and we'll be looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

And here's what I want us to sort of carry through those three passages is because our bodies were made by God, and our bodies are indwelt by the Spirit as believers, and that God intends to resurrect our bodies, then we should be offering and presenting our bodies to God.

And so let's look at that first one.

We are to present our body to God because it is his craftsmanship.

We're here in Psalm 139, and if you're at all familiar with Psalm 139, you know that it's one of the most intimate personal psalms in the whole Psalter.

It's a meditation on God who searches us, who knows us, who understands our sitting down and our rising, who knows even the very intents of our thoughts from afar.

And in the middle of the psalm, David traces it all the way back to his origin when he began in the womb, before he had done anything to deserve any attention.

Now God knew him totally then.

So take a look at verse 13 with me.

For it is you who created my inward parts.

You knitted me together in my mother's womb.

Well, take a look at those two verbs, created and knit, because they're very important words.

The first one talks about creation, to make something, to possess something.

It's uh the process in which God is not just observing our physical forming, but he's the actual author of it.

He's engaged in making us.

And then the second one, knit.

It talks about a craftsman who's attending to structure, who's attending to texture, who's bringing together complexity and order in order to develop us as we are.

These are glorious words.

These are not words of some emotionalist, distant biological happening just by way of chance.

This is a personal God who's engaged at the very origin of our person in bringing us together by his creation and his craftsmanship, who's brought together all the complexity and all the order that makes up our human body.

Now take a look at verse 14.

Not only do we see that God is the active agent in making our body, but we also see the quality of what he's done.

I will praise you because I've been remarkably and wondrously made.

So instead of looking at the verbs this time, we'll look at the adverbs.

Remarkably made, wondrously made.

These are interesting words.

They will go a place I don't think all of us might expect them to go.

The first one, remarkably made, is the very word in the Psalms for the fear of the Lord, that sense of awe that we all receive when we find ourselves actually contemplating God as a reality.

That is what he's saying.

I have been made in an awe-inspiring, fearsome way.

Remarkably made.

But take a look at the next adverb, not only remarkably made, but wondrously made.

And here is the very same words for the wonder of God's activity as he's demonstrated his power in miraculous ways in the book of Acts, or the book of Exodus, rather, where he's met up against Pharaoh and has presented the mighty deeds of God, where he's parted the Red Sea, where he's brought water out of the rock, where he's fed the people with manna, this miraculous demonstration of God's awe-inspiring activity.

So think about this.

The psalmist has reached for some very, very important words to think about his body creation, craftsmanship, and the wondrous fear of God in his presence, and the fact that he has acted with miraculous ability.

That's our bodies.

And because God is acted in such a way as the creator of who we are, we should present our body to him.

Verse 15 is interesting.

He says, My bones were not hidden from you when I was made in secret.

It's interesting, you know, David is described as uh a relatively handsome young man when he's mentioned in scripture.

But that's not where David goes.

He doesn't say, Hey, I look better than the rest of the guys I went to high school with.

He says, My bones, you know, those things on the inside of him, those things that nobody's kind of going, nice femur there, David.

You know, not saying a word about those sorts of things.

But he's saying, you know me from the very inside of me, my my frame, my structure, the substance of who I am, what actually makes me me.

You know it.

Now, David's not running into a new stream here.

He's pulling back from Genesis, isn't he?

About God's creation.

He's even talking about Job, where Job talks about the same thing, where God's hands have shaped him and knit him together.

And perhaps even alluding to some of that creative work of God in the new creation, in which Paul talks about that being God's craftship or workmanship, that we were created unto good works.

We've been made anew for a completely different purpose than our life of sin.

So let's take about some of these real life world examples of evaluation.

Take a person in his or her 50s, spent 40 years cataloging their body, using the evaluations of the world with a precision that they wouldn't bring into any other area of life whatsoever.

Every photograph, every mirror, every fitting room brings a full-on onslaught of that mental checklist of whether you measure up or not.

Or take someone who's a teenager who's just starting to really find the overwhelming strength of that inner monologue about his or her body that's running continuously.

And it's there underneath every other thought, like a second track of a mental, a mental uh functioning.

Psalm 139 doesn't enter into that conversation.

It doesn't go in there and say, I have a different way to think about it.

It doesn't wrestle with the world's evaluation and say, let me just add a little bit of a different perspective here.

It shuts the conversation down.

It says this isn't how you should be thinking about yourself.

The question is not whether or not your body meets that inner or cultural standard.

It's about whether or not you recognize what your body is.

The wondrous, the remarkable craftsmanship of the creator God.

That's a different question altogether.

That's a different evaluation than what most of us give to our bodies.

Because that is God's definition of our body.

That it is his creation, it's his craftsmanship.

And what he does is remarkable and wondrous in the arena of worship itself.

And so, a couple of things that we can do this week while we're walking around and passing a mirror or looking at somebody's uh phone and seeing ourselves on it, we might have to change the way we immediately respond and tell ourselves, I am remarkably and wondrously made.

And let that just settle over the audits that we give ourselves.

I'm remarkably and wondrously made.

It is a substitution of one authority for another.

It's saying that my evaluation is more important than God's statement about who we are.

But there's the other side, which is just as wrong.

It is the elevation of our body to the primary project and projection of who we are.

That too refuses to hear Psalm 139.

We need to listen to what God says about who we are, God's craftsmanship.

It's not self-achievement, and it's not just good genes.

It's about God's good work within us.

Because David's response here is not about aesthetic satisfaction, it's about worship of a God who made us.

And the right response to our body is not to continue to evaluate it the way the world does, but to handle it the way God has given it to us, as a craftsmanship out of his creative hand.

And that brings us to the second point.

Not only to present our body to God because he made it, but we should present our body to God in honor because the Holy Spirit dwells within it.

So let's go over to 1 Corinthians chapter 6.

1 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

1 Corinthians chapter 6.

1 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

And in this chapter, Paul is writing to a congregation in crisis.

Corinthians live in a city, it's one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Roman world.

And it's also one of the most morally complex cities of the Roman world.

And the church, unfortunately, has imported in a number of assumptions of its surrounding culture and the way it's acting with inside the community of Christ.

And Paul wants to tell them something, and I'd like for us to land particularly in verses 19 and 20, but we'll be looking at a few more verses.

And he says this to them Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?

You're not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God with your body.

Now, Paul is giving that response to something that I think he's answering back to them in verse 12.

So take a look at verse 12.

And you see this phrase in parentheses.

I think it's exactly what they were saying in the church.

Everything is permissible.

Why would they say that?

Well, because there was a logic underneath it that came from the culture, not Christ.

And what they were saying is well, the body is material, and material things belong to a lower category than spiritual things.

And because the body is at a lower category than spiritual things, then what the body does with food and what the body does with sexual activity is spiritually irrelevant.

What matters is the soul, because it'll live for on.

The body's temporary, so it doesn't really matter.

Now, Paul's answer to that question is immediate, and his answer to that question is total.

So let's take a look at what he has to say.

Verse 15.

He tells us there that our body is a member of Christ.

Don't you know that your bodies are a part of Christ's body?

It's an interesting statement.

The physical body of a believer is joined to Christ as much as his mind and his spirit.

Not simply the immaterial part of who we are, but the material part of who we are.

Take a look at verse 20.

He drills down and doubles down on it.

You were bought with a price.

What was the purchase of that?

The body of Christ, the incarnation.

Christ didn't come in some temporary accommodation of a body, entering flesh in order to accomplish his work, and then departing from it and leaving the shell of it here on earth.

The disciples, when they looked in the tomb, looked there and it was empty.

Why?

Because the body of Christ was resurrected.

The body of the Son of God was part of that price of our redemption.

It belongs to Him.

So let's read verses 13 to 15 and just see the flow of logic here.

An answer to this question: everything is permissible.

Food is for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both of them.

And he stops and he says, However, the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

God raised up the Lord, and he will also raise us up by his power.

Do you not know that your bodies are part of Christ's body?

So should I take a part of Christ's body and make it a part of a prostitute?

Absolutely not.

What is the Corinthian logic here?

That the body and the spirit are separate, non intersecting entities.

And what happens with one doesn't have the same effect that happens on the other.

But that is just not the reality of the case.

God did not form Adam and Eve in some disembodied spirit and said, Let me grab a hunk of clay here.

And give them a shell that will allow them to live inside of it.

He made a person out of both of them.

And the Hebrew word for soul, nepesh, is the word that doesn't think of some immaterial part separate from a material part.

It is the person, holistically.

And this is what Paul is saying here.

But he goes deeper, and I think he gets much, much clearer here in verse 19.

Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?

Now there are two Greek words for temple.

One of them deals with the temple complex in all of its aspects, all the outer courts and all the walls, and all the parameters of it.

And then there's another word that deals with the holy of holies, the actual place where God's presence is said to be residing and meeting with people on earth.

This is the word that Paul uses here.

Do you not know that your body is the very place where God Himself is intersecting heaven and earth?

That's a remarkable statement.

That our bodies are not part of the broader temple complex with all its courts and colonnades.

Our bodies are to be seen as the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies, this specific chamber where the presence of God resides.

That place.

Paul is applying the sacred terminology, just as David did, to our bodies.

I mean, think about God's presence in the tabernacle in Exodus 40.

Tabernacle completed, the glory of God fills it, and even Moses has to stay outside of it.

It's so glorious he can't get in.

Or you think about John 1.14, the word became flesh and tabernacled among us.

And there is that idea that God's presence in human flesh.

That somehow we can maintain a robust prayer life and we can treat our body with chronic neglect.

That we can section off our physical life as the secular portion of our existence, and then give attention to the spiritual part of our existence.

Or to even go as far as the Corinthians did to think that somehow our sexual activity has no bearing upon our spiritual life at all.

Paul will not permit a single bit of any of that at all.

And his refusal is not a prohibition.

His refusal is to define who we are and to show us the honor of our bodies, not simply to tell us what not to do with them.

Just like Psalm 139, elevating our understanding about ourselves as God's creation, God's craftsmanship, fearfully and wondrously made, but also to see our bodies as God's possession and the very dwelling place of God Himself.

Think about where you might feel like you're in a special place.

For our society, particularly our American culture, thinking of things as sacred is really a hard thing to do sometimes.

But there have been some times in my life where I've really been caught out of myself to think of a place as unique and different and special.

And one was when I took my son Ben to Washington, D.C., and we were there at the Vietnam Memorial and the Wall.

And I could cry about it even now, but just watching men walk up to that wall and families walk up to that wall and to and to touch names there.

I just had to stop.

There was nothing to say, but just to be quiet in the presence of what was going on in that place.

And then the first time I went to the 9-11 museum, and we went down there, and there's this room where there's pictures of all the people who died.

And I went in there and I was just familiarizing myself with it.

And this lady came in with a small group of I can't, five or six people, and she she she went to one photograph and she said, This is my hero.

And this man had given his life to make sure hers wasn't taken.

And again, I I backed out.

I actually walked backwards out of there because I thought this is too sacred of a moment for me to be in.

This is this is extremely special.

And I backed out.

What is Paul saying here?

Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

This is a sacred spot where God has made his presence known.

And so we are to be in a place of reverential care when we deal with our bodies.

That it is as much God's as our thinking or as we might separate ourselves out to be in our spiritual understanding, taking care of our bodies when it needs rest, giving it adequate nutrition, providing for it when it's ill, ensuring that it's in a place of service when it's called upon to be somewhere, to help someone.

All those things are all wrapped up in the idea of understanding that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Now let's go to the last point and go to 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

Paul talks about our bodies in a particular way that is quite a bit different than sometimes we might speak.

He talks about groaning and waiting and longing for a day of redemption, not release from his body.

And the trajectory of Scripture shows us, as he indicates here, that it's not escape from the material world, but into a purely spiritual existence that's what we're looking for at the end.

But it is a new heaven and a new earth in which resurrected bodies will dwell.

And what he tells us here in this passage of scripture in 1 Corinthians 15 is that the resurrection of Christ is the pattern and the promise.

We've talked about that just a moment ago.

That Christ's body rose, the graveclothes folded and left, the physical body recognizable, touchable, Thomas putting his hands in the wounds, the disciples eating what he cooked on the beach, and he ascended bodily into heaven.

We believe the bodily ascension of Christ.

And Paul's argument here when he talks about this is to say that Christ's resurrection is the first fruit.

It's the first collection of the new creation fruit that comes from Christ's victory over sin, death, and the grave.

That what happened to his body is going to happen to our body.

Notice what he says in verse 50.

What I'm saying, brothers and sisters, is this flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit incorruption.

Listen, I'm telling you a mystery.

We will not all sleep, but we will be changed.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed.

For this corruptible body must be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body must be clothed with immortality.

And when this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place.

Death has been swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your victory?

Oh death, where is your sting?

This body.

This body that's been touched by illness, this body which has been broken in different places, this body which has been looked after and neglected in many different ways, this body which is the object of other people's evaluations and my own, this body, this body will be changed and made incorruptible and immortal.

Because Christ's body also was raised and ascended and is still in a bodily form in the glorious presence of the Father.

He entered it permanently and irreversibly.

He didn't shed his body when his work was done.

His body was brought into the eternal presence of the Father on high.

So think about this.

The next time you see a photograph, the next time you look, and there you are, and the evaluation's about to kick off.

Say to yourself this I'm fearfully and wondrously made.

Say to yourself, indwelling in me is the very presence of God.

Say to yourself, Yeah, you haven't seen this body yet the way it's going to be.

This body will be transformed into that glorious immortality in which I will in every way, shape, or form conform to the glorious likeness of Jesus Christ.

That is part of the Imago Day.

And like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, yes, we bear the image of the earthly, but through the resurrection, we too will bear the image of the heavenly.

It's part of his redemption.

How wonderful it is.

We don't have to neglect it, we don't have to talk bad about it, and we certainly don't need to be evaluating it.

We just need to hold it with respect and care and hope.

So let's pray.

Father, we thank you that your salvation is ours, that you've granted to us life in the Savior, in a life in ways that I has not seen nor is ear heard, nor entered into the hearts of men.

We thank you that what we look at is wondrous, crafted by you, with complexity and organization brought so that we could exist in this world in the way we do, that our bodies are the very place in which you inhabit, that our bodies are the very focus of our hope that we will be brought into your presence, resurrected.

Father, in whatever way we can, as we consider our bodies throughout the days that we have, whether our bodies reside in weakness or strength, whether they're evaluated well or poorly by the world's standards, may we present it to you and honor it as you want us to honor it.

And Lord, give us that abiding hope that this body too, just as Job said, in my flesh I will see God.

And we pray this in his name.

Amen.