"Rhythms of Grace: Embodied Grace" Pastor Nick Tawa October 18, 2026

Yeah, Aiden up here to read some scripture for us.

Would you please stand if you are able for the reading of God's Word?

The scripture passage for this morning comes from 1 Corinthians 6, 19 to 20.

You're welcome to listen.

Close your eyes or follow along in your Bible.

If you'd like to use the Pew Bible, this can be found on page 991.

1 Corinthians 6, 19 through 20.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God?

You are not your own.

You are brought at a price.

Therefore, honor God with your bodies.

This is the word of the Lord.

Sorry.

How about now?

Alright, let me start over.

I'm gonna start, I'm gonna talk about something that's important to me.

Hard to talk about, okay?

Um our speakers aren't great, so you probably hear me the same with it, without it sometimes.

Sorry about that.

I grew up as sort of a chubby kid.

Um it's really interesting the way that we think about ourselves, sometimes our experience, because when I look at pictures when I was a kid, you're just a kid.

Normal kid, round face, but I got made fun of.

I had three brothers, I had cousins, and kids are mean.

And so in my mind, growing up as a kid, I was this chubby kid, I was quiet, I was shy, I hated school, um.

And I just had a hard time socializing, being at school, and in my mind, a lot of that had to do with my own body image.

And so, what I am teaching on today, uh on one hand, it is so blatantly obvious.

On the other hand, it's not talked about a lot, and there's not a lot of biblical teaching on this particular topic.

And so, as I lay the groundwork, here's what I want you to hear from me.

In Jesus, there's no shame, there's no guilt, there's no condemnation.

In fact, we have lost our ability to disappoint God because of Jesus' work on the cross.

And I know for some of us, whether that be because of culture or family of origin or personality, we just sweep that under the rug, or we don't experience that.

We use language like, I am disappointed in you, or shame on you.

And I just I just want to make it really clear that doesn't come from New Testament theology, that does not come from the way of Jesus.

In all of these rhythms of grace that we're talking about in this series, there is no shame, there is no guilt, there's no condemnation, that we are new creations in Jesus, given a grace that we don't deserve, that we can never earn, and that we are not expected to repay.

We're simply invited to eat at the table of the king because of Jesus.

And so, what I'm talking about today, I want us to keep that front and center.

Because I'll be honest, in our culture, when it comes to our physical bodies, it's a landmine.

And I want to avoid that.

On one hand, we have the neglect of the body.

And this is true, I think, in Protestant evangelical circles.

Uh, you think about sins that are permissible in some of our subcultures.

So for me, even as a pastor, um, if I had an affair, that would be wrong.

Uh if I stole money, that would cost me my job.

But, uh, I mean, I had a long weekend.

If I went home and on the way home picked up uh a dozen donuts, maybe a beer, can of soda, camped out in front of the TV for the next six hours, nobody would bat an eye, be, oh yeah, relax.

No problem.

But if I did that every single day, what would happen to the one body that I have?

The one physical body that God has given me.

On the other hand of the spectrum, if you have a phone, which we probably all do, if you're exposed to the media in some form, and I'm not on social media, I don't watch TV.

At the same time, I cannot escape the media images about what the human body is supposed to look like.

There is this complete distortion, uh, especially I think in Southern California, over what a body should look like.

And so the way of Jesus when it comes to stewarding the physical bodies that God has given us is sort of this narrow path.

Because there's neglect and abuse and denial on one end, and then there's this just distorted sort of worship of the body, eating disorders, unnecessary shame, and neither side of the spectrum is healthy, and I'm probably gonna trigger something somewhere for each of you in the course of this message.

So I just I want to, from the get-go, say that there is a particular biblical view of the physical body that I think we're invited to consider this morning.

So I want to unpack this passage a little bit from 1 Corinthians chapter 6.

1 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

The original context is talking about human sexuality, in particular, what the New Testament writers call sexual immorality.

And in this context, it's talking about the use of human sexuality in pagan temple worship.

But this theology can very easily be expanded to include all aspects of our physical being.

So this is how the Apostle Paul sums up his whole plea to not go to these pagan temples and engage in sexual pagan idol worship, which is foreign to us.

None of us go to some pagan temple and uh have sex with temple prostitutes.

I don't even know where you would go to do that, but what he says here is so profound.

Chapter 6, verse 19.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God?

Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.

We've talked about this in the past.

It doesn't mean a whole lot to us because we're not Jewish.

We never worshiped at the temple.

We don't take yearly pilgrimages on the appointed festival dates in order to convene with the very presence of God.

We don't understand what the temple means to the nation of Israel.

The temple was the then place where heaven and earth converged, where God dwelt with his people in a very specific time and place.

It was the holy of holies.

And through Jesus, there is this fundamental shift in the way that God dwells with his people.

Not through a place, not through animal sacrifices, but through Jesus in your physical bodies.

And it's actually genius because if God is trying to redeem the whole world, make disciples of every tribe, every tongue, every nation, then you can't physically have everyone come to one place in Jerusalem.

You have to go out.

You have to send the gospel, send the spirit, send the presence of God out into the world.

And what Paul is saying here is that is you.

If you are a follower of Jesus, your physical body is now the temple of the most holy God.

One of the great heresies in the Christian church is an idea called Gnosticism, and this was rampant in the first century amongst pagan Greek philosophers.

And Gnosticism was basically this: it's that the soul and the spirit are holy and pure and good, and the physical body is evil and limited and to be devalued.

And so the implicit theology then was it doesn't really matter what you do with your physical body, because we're just caring about the soul.

And there's something about this ancient Greek philosophy that has seeped into our Christian theology.

How many times, perhaps, have you heard preachers say, all I care about is getting souls into heaven?

Or maybe the implicit belief thing, it doesn't really matter what you do with your body, because we're all dying anyways.

We're all getting older.

So eat those donuts.

Drink that soda.

It doesn't matter.

But what Paul's saying here is God cares about your body.

It is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Now I know this gets taken out of context in secular settings as well, that your body is a temple.

This goes all the way back to the theology of Genesis chapter 1, 2, and 3, where God created humanity in his own image from the dust and breathed his life into them.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

So what it means to be human is your physical body with your soul embodied together.

There's no separation here.

It's why Jesus came in the flesh to represent to us who God is.

It's why Jesus' death was physical.

It's why his resurrection was physical.

And so the question I want to ask this morning is how do we honor God with our bodies?

And for Paul to say that you are not your own, your bodies at a price.

This is the whole idea of atonement, that our lives are worth something, and Jesus paid the price to redeem your life.

And again, don't hear this with shame and guilt.

Hear this with calling, hear this with invitation, hear this through a lens of grace.

So this is the theory.

And I don't know about you, but I'm not a theory person.

I was a mechanical engineering major in college, and I was not one of those people that could just sit and lecture, hear the theory, and then go home and have the material mastered.

I need a story.

I need example in order to root my experience.

And so I want to tell this story from the Old Testament.

So this comes from 1 Kings chapter 19.

1 Kings 19 · chapter mention

There's a prophet named Elijah, and he ministered during a very dark time in Israel's history.

There's corruption in government, corruption in the priesthood, and there was idol worship that was rampant throughout the nation.

So this people group that were that that was called originally to represent the very character and light and beauty of God to the rest of the world became just like the rest of the world.

They forgot their calling.

And so even the king and the queen are worshiping these false deities.

And if you know the story of Elijah, you are probably familiar with the highs in his life.

And so I won't get into the details there, but this is the public ministry.

This is the stuff that you might see on the news, you might see on your social media feeds.

These are the things that are celebrated on Sunday mornings.

But after one such victory, where Elijah proclaims the power of the one true Yahweh God over the power of these false deities and does it publicly in front of everybody, he then hits this low.

He enters into this valley.

And what happens here is that because he embarrasses all those who worship these false deities, those that were exposed, including the king and the queen, then have it out for Elijah.

Put a bounty on his head and say, I want him dead.

And so Elijah then is on the run.

And when I think about the geography of ancient Israel, I think it's important for me to realize all this is on foot.

There's no Ubers, there's no public transit.

And so when Elijah's running for his life, he has traveled about 150 miles to get to this particular scene in 1 Kings chapter 19.

1 Kings 19 · chapter mention

So think about that.

I'm not a runner, but I know 150 miles is a long way.

So think about what is happening to his physical body.

So I don't have slides for all this text, but if you can just imagine this story.

Now Ahab, so this is the crooked king, told Jezebel, his wife, everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword.

So these are the prophets of Baal, the false prophets.

So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like one of them.

So in other words, I'm gonna kill you.

I have the power, and you're going down.

Verse 3.

Elijah was afraid.

Elijah was afraid.

I love this.

There's this human component to Elijah that he just stood on this mountain, called down fire from God, and embarrassed all of these false prophets.

I think about the highs in our lives, the things that we celebrate.

And at the end of the day, we stand before God.

Or we sit alone in our homes.

There's a vulnerability to the human experience.

No matter how victorious we are, no matter how successful our lives appear on the outside, we hit these points where we are afraid.

And Elijah ran for his life.

When he came to Beersheba, so this is in the south of the nation of Israel, in the desert.

He left his servant there while he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness.

And so this is significant in the biblical narrative.

What is the wilderness?

God meets people in the wilderness.

God meets Jesus in the wilderness.

He came to a broom bush or a broom tree, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die.

Quote, I have had enough, Lord.

Take my life, I am no better than my ancestors.

And I don't want to gloss over that.

There is a suicidal kind of end of the rope.

It's like, God, I'm done.

I'm done.

Take my life.

I'm no better than my ancestors who have gone before me.

And this is important for us to grapple with in our human existence.

That this is part of our own narratives at one point or another.

Verse 5.

Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat.

He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water.

He ate and drank and then lay down again.

This is so profound.

Elijah's traveling through the desert.

He likely expected to die.

There's no McDonald's, there's no 7-Eleven, it's not like he had a protein bar ready to go.

He has no food, he has no water.

He went out into the wilderness and said, Lord, take my life.

I'm done.

And an angel meets him there in that place of vulnerability and human frailty.

Doesn't give him a lecture, doesn't give him a villa uh a vision, simply gives him water and bread and says, get up, get up and eat.

And Elijah does that.

He takes care of his physical needs.

Water and bread, and then he sleeps.

Have you ever been so tired that all you could do is wake up, eat, sleep, and then go back to bed?

Perhaps that's depression.

Perhaps that's fatigue.

Most likely this is just what Elijah needed.

His body was so depleted.

Emotionally, physically.

And then we keep reading.

Verse 7.

The angel of the Lord.

This is really important.

When you hear angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, there's a profound mystery here.

Some theologians think that the angel of the Lord is the in the pre-incarnate Christ.

In other words, Jesus before he entered the human story.

So there's something important when we hear and read, Angel of the Lord, Angel of Yahweh.

Angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, and said, Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.

So he did it in.

He got up and he ate and drank again.

When I think about rhythms of grace, oftentimes we think about religious practices.

Reading the Bible, prayer, fasting, giving, worship, care for the poor.

All important things.

But I love what the angel Lord does with Elijah here.

Doesn't give him a sermon, doesn't send him a podcast link, say, hey, listen to this.

I think this will really benefit you.

He says, get up, eat, drink.

The journey is too much for you.

And then without getting ahead of the story, and the story does continue, Elijah does not take his life.

He travels another 200 miles south to Mount Sinai, where it all began for the nation of Israel, where God first revealed himself to his people, gave him the Ten Commandments, gave him the Torah, instructions on life, the original thin space.

And in order to get there, Elijah had to simply eat, drink, and sleep.

And this is a profound reminder for me that your physical body does matter.

That we are finite physical beings.

Sleep matters, hydration matters, food matters, and I would argue mobility, strength, endurance also matter.

I want to ask you this morning, how is your body?

Right now, how is your physical body?

And again, this is without shame, without guilt, but the reality is God has given you one physical body in which you will live and live out your calling, serve, earn a living.

Everything you do is done in this one physical body.

And like I said in the beginning, this is blatantly obvious.

We all know this.

But oftentimes we're not taught to value our physical bodies as if it is deeply spiritual, as if it is a gift from God, as if you were bought with a price, as if there's value, inherent value to your physical body.

So if if you want to take notes, or if you have a journal, uh, I like physical journals, if not use your phone, would you just jot down some thoughts?

How is your body?

What sore in you?

Are you sleep deprived?

Are you sick?

Are you recovering from something?

Are you grieving the loss of something?

Mobility, strength, a certain ability perhaps that you have.

How is your physical body?

And building on our practices, rather than let that be just an idea that kind of goes in one ear and goes out the other.

I believe that God wants to speak to you.

Sometimes that's through my voice, oftentimes, hopefully, it's it's more than that.

And so I'm gonna provide us with just a moment of silence.

You can close your eyes if you like.

But this is your time to meet with God in quiet, and quiet is becoming increasingly less common and needed in our society.

And just talk with the Lord.

How is your body?

What does that mean for worship?

What does that mean for your calling?

And would you speak with the Lord and listen in this time?

Thank you that you see us.

You know us by name.

And every day your mercies are new, and you invite us to experience your grace in new and fresh ways.

So we ask that you continue to speak.

And we pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.

One of the spaces that has been really important for me over the past ten years or so is a friend of mine who is a pastor who has invited me to work out in his garage.

He's a CrossFit trainer, he's a local pastor, and the environment that he has created for just a handful of us has been life-changing for me.

One of the things I love about this space is that he does embody this culture of growth without shame, without comparison, without competition, and does it in a way that is both effective and free from a lot of the pitfalls of body image and vanity.

One of our key verses that shape this community comes from 1 Timothy 4, verse 8.

1 Timothy 4:8

It says, For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

And that's sort of anchored the way that I think about my physical body.

That there is some value to the way that we steward our bodies and worship God through our physical bodies, but there's a bigger picture going on.

The way that we are formed into the image of Christ has infinite value in this life and the life to come.

And so one of the really small things that I love about our little garage and torrents where we work out is there's no mirrors, there's no tripods with cameras set up.

This is just for you.

To work out, to try things, to fail, to progress, and to do it together.

And so my invitation for you this morning, uh, each week I have a simple practice, is this week I want you to think about what is one thing, just one thing, that God may be inviting you into to honor God with your physical body.

And the possibilities are endless.

And it's tailored just to you.

And that's why I wanted to provide that moment of silence for you to just talk with God.

What does that mean for you?

And it looks vastly different for each person, depending on your life stage, your age, your season of life.

In the same way that God never expects us to live up to someone else's standard for any aspect of your discipleship or growth.

The same is true with our physical bodies.

At no point in this life or the life to come are we gonna stand before God and God say, Why were you not more like that guy?

I mean, maybe that's the voice of your parent in your head, but that's not how God operates.

God has a calling for for your life.

God has a vision for your body.

And so I'm not a nutritionist.

Uh I'm not I was gonna say, I'm not a trainer.

I I was a CrossFit trainer at my old church.

I I had the um privilege of of just trying different things, and so for a while I was sort of the fitness pastor, and it was kind of cool that that was my job title for a little bit.

Um But I'll to take all this with a grain of salt.

I I just want to spark a little bit of creativity in your prayer life for what it might look like to see your physical body through a lens of stewardship on one hand and worship on the other.

I mean, even thinking about what we think about of worship uh in a narrow sense, singing songs.

I I'm I'm a terrible singer, I'm not musical.

But singing is a physical thing.

You have vocal cords, you have lungs.

It's a physical act of worship.

So I want us to think about just a few things.

So starting with the basics, food and drink.

Are you getting enough water?

Oftentimes cultures did not have access to adequate supplies of clean drinking water.

This is evident throughout the biblical narrative.

To have well water was a gift from God.

And so, are you drinking enough tap water?

Our tap water is good.

It might not taste great, but it's it's safe.

Are we drinking enough water?

And what are we putting in our bodies?

There are a lot of nutritional paradigms out there, but I think what is most helpful for me, I don't know if this helped for you, but I think about food in terms of food closest to its natural state.

What has God provided for us?

Stuff that grows in the ground?

Um, something that you can kill if if you're not vegan?

Um seeds, nuts, uh sugar should be rare.

A treat.

God created things to taste good as a celebration.

Not every day, but something to be in enjoyed.

One of the things that's been important for me in a culture where food is mass-produced, where there are so many dollars flowing through trying to get us addicted to marketing and tastes and manufactured foods, is just recovering a sense of what is food for?

A sense of my own satiety and hunger.

What do I need to sustain me throughout the course of my day for whatever I happen to be doing?

I I grew up in a family where um we ate a lot, and the food wasn't always the most nutritious.

One of my fondest memories, uh, talking about uh some of the holes in evangelical Protestant uh subculture.

My dad was a pastor, I would consider him uh a man of of with a lot of integrity.

Um but one of the bad habits he had was he would bring home late at night um onion rings, fried zucchini, french fries, and cokes.

Uh we didn't have soda in our home, so it's like coke was was amazing.

It was a drug, and it is a drug.

And that and that's how we spent time as a family.

Um my dad coached a lot of my sports team, so after uh a hard practice, let's go to McDonald's, let's get some fries and a Coke, and I'd be like, yeah.

And and so that that's not food.

These are chemicals and mass-produced uh ingredients of of fat and salt and um I've I've lost at least a sense of of am I actually hungry?

Okay.

Uh and I know food is really complex in our culture, and um again, no shame, no guilt.

Um, but just think about what are we eating?

What are we drinking?

Alright, next one, rest.

This I think is so important.

Because I d I know there's some people that can survive on just a little bit of sleep.

Uh I'm not one of those people, so normally I get seven or eight hours of sleep every night.

Last night I got about five and a half and it wasn't great, and I feel it.

I feel it in my soul, I fear it feel it in my emotions.

And this is how God designed us.

And so, whether you're like me, where one bad night of sleep messes you up, or it takes a week or months in order for that lack of sleep to catch up with you.

I want to simply ask, how much sleep do you need?

How much sleep do you think God wants you to get?

And how do we get there?

Maybe it's screen time, maybe it's lifestyle, uh, maybe it has to do with caffeine intake.

I know it does for me.

Uh maybe it has to do with alcohol intake.

Uh, I used to enjoy alcohol in moderation until I started to realize like I think it's affecting my sleep.

And so for the most part, I no longer drink, and it's not a moral thing, it's not a spiritual conviction.

It's simply like it's it's just hard to get a good night's rest if I'm drinking.

And so, again, no shame, no guilt.

Just think about are you getting enough rest?

In the same way that Elijah simply needed to eat, drink, and sleep.

Um lastly, I want to talk about physical movement.

And I know we're all in different stages of life, uh, different seasons, different genders, and so physical exercise means different things to different people.

But the fact that you are breathing today means that you still have a functioning physical body that is capable of regeneration and progress.

One of the things that I think about in my own journey is when I had shoulder surgery, and I've had I've had quite a bit of injury, so I always kind of go up and down in sort of my ability to be healthy and to have to rehab to kind of get back there.

But I a few years ago I had shoulder surgery, woke up from surgery and couldn't do anything for a few weeks, and then you start rehab, and then you begin to go from here to here to here, and it's it's painful.

And if you've gone through rehab, you you know what that process is like.

But the beauty of the way that God created our human bodies is that there is that ability for progress and for healing.

And it might look like moving your finger from here to here, but that's part of what it means to be human, what it means to live an embodied life of grace.

So, all to say, as you sit with God, and as you just ask this question in your own practice of solitude and silence, I want you to consider this bigger picture.

That God has given you one physical body in which to live out your entire life.

Your practice of prayer, your relational patterns, pleasure, rest, eating, sleeping, all in your physical body.

It's a gift that you are to steward, and it's also your instrument of worship.

And so as you think about the abundant life that God invites us into to taste in this life and to experience in its fullness in the life to come, what does that mean for your physical body?

And think about just one thing this week that perhaps God is inviting you into.

It could be a walk, it could be a simple breathing exercise.

It could be a simple challenge to drink an extra glass of water and just see what that does to your body.

One of my practices is that I always sleep with a glass of water by my nightstand because I wake up stressed out, depressed, not wanting to get out of bed.

And it's helpful for me to just think, okay, just sit up, drink that glass of water, and then go from there.

So it doesn't have to be complex.

I was reminded this week of what it means to live this embodied grace.

Uh for so much of my life I have struggled with a sense of body image, a sense of worth, how I operate in the world.

Uh it's why I partially why I'm not on social media, partially why I don't go to gyms where there's mirrors.

Um growing up as a chubby kid who is shy and insecure, those narratives and those voices stick with me.

And I know it might sound ridiculous, it might seem like, oh, there's, I don't understand why you would wrestle with that, but that's something that has followed me throughout the course of my life.

And I was reminded this week, in very simple terms, but just kind of cut to the core of me, is that God, through his grace in Jesus, doesn't love the version of me that is fit and disciplined and socially acceptable and articulate.

God loves the chubby kid who was shy and not socialized, who didn't want to go to school, who would say things that he didn't know was inappropriate or offensive.

That's the person that God loved, that Jesus died for and continues to see.

And I have this moment of realizing, like, wow, that is what grace is.

And there's something freeing about that, there's something disruptive about that.

And so that's why one of my life verses comes from the book of Romans, chapter 5, where we are reminded of what grace is.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

It's not us working really hard, it's not us living disciplined lives so that God might see us more favorably.

It's that God has died for the ungodly in our most vulnerable state.

Romans chapter 5, verse 6.

Romans 5:6

You see, at just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.

But hear this, verse 8.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

While we were still in our unredeemed, unsocialized, unfit state, Jesus saw us, died for us, and welcomed us into a better way of living and being with God.

And I don't know what that looks like for you.

The fact that you're here shows that you are somewhat socialized.

You know how to get dressed and get in your car and have conversations.

And so sometimes it's hard for us to connect with the part of ourselves that sometimes feels unacceptable or full of shame.

But I would argue that that's the part of you that God wants to meet.

That's the part of you that God wants to love in the depths of who you are.

And so, in your own practice of embodied grace, that is my invitation to you to ask, what are those parts of you that God wants to speak into?

Wants to pour out his grace upon.

In my workout community, uh, we have a prayer that's written out.

And I want to share it with you because it's moving to me.

I'm gonna call Kevin back up to close us in a time of musical worship.

I have the words on the screen, and so this is what we pray every day before we work out, after we've warmed up, after the timer goes off, but it kind of anchors us in what it means to care for our bodies in an embodied state.

Father, I offer you this workout as an act of worship, as a way of honoring you with my body.

And I pray that as I exercise, that I will do so to your glory.

I thank you for creating my body, for the privilege of being healthy enough to use it, for the joy of feeling the wind in my face, the burden in my muscles, the sweat cooling my skin.

May the pleasure of movement, of winded lungs and aching muscles be a reminder of the goodness of a creator by whom I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

May I remember that my body is a temple of your Holy Spirit.

That I am not my own, but have been bought with the price.

That one way I honor you is by being a good steward of my body.

Help me to keep my workouts in proper perspective, remembering that physical exercise is of some value, but that godliness has value for all things, both in this life and the one to come.

Protect me on one hand from the temptations that reflect neglect of my body, gluttony, drunkenness, and sloth.

Protect me on the other hand from the temptations that come from getting in shape, vanity, pride, and making my body or my workouts an idol.

Help me to have a healthy estimation of myself.

Not based on how I look or how I perform, but based solely on the one to whom I belong.

My worth comes from the fact that I am in Christ, created in your image, and have been adopted as your beloved child.

Cause me to be an encouragement and blessing to those with whom I train today.

A good friend and a helpful member of this community.

Please help us to exercise good judgment about what we can and cannot do and keep us safe from injury.

I ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.