Healthy Living - Body, soul and spirit!

Healthy Living

A healthy lifestyle is holistic. You cannot look at just the physical side of healthy living and negate our responsibility to nurture the spiritual side, and vice versa.

God created us as physical and spiritual beings. He created us as physical when He made us from the dust of the earth and gave us bodies, breathing life into us. He created us as mortal, finite beings - but He also created us as spiritual beings, to live or die eternally.

So because God created us to live in tension with ourselves, balancing the spiritual and the physical, healthy living is to look after both areas of our life, to live a holistic lifestyle.
More often than not we hear teaching on the nurturing of our spiritual lives, discipleship – what it means to live a truly Christian life as a disciple of Jesus, and so on, but not very often do we hear teaching on looking after our physical bodies.

It is my belief that if we take just as much care of our physical bodies – the way we dress, the way we eat, exercise and rest – as we do of our spiritual state, we will set a precedent amongst non-believers. They will see Christ in the way we live our lives.

So that is what this article is about – the physical side of healthy living, looking after our bodies. However please realise that although this is what I am focusing on, I am in no way ignoring the spiritual.

Some time ago, I felt challenged to a healthy lifestyle. A scripture He gave me was Hebrews 3:4-11. I know you have probably only ever heard this passage in the context of spiritual rest, but there are a few key principles that I want to draw out in regards to healthy living.

“(For every house is built by someone; but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that would be spoken later. Christ, however, was faithful over God’s house as a Son, and we are His house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to Hope.

Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your ancestors put me to the test, though they had seen my works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation, and I said, ‘They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known my ways.’ As in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” (NRSV)

Principle 1: DO NOT STRIVE (v4)
God is the builder, not us. He is the one who makes everything happen. Striving doesn’t help anyone – or anything – least of all you. Life, the ministry etc, doesn’t depend on us. God is more concerned about us than He is about the work. He has many vessels through which He can work. It is folly to think that we are the only person who can do the task.
DO NOT STRIVE. IT DOES NOT DEPEND ON US. GOD IS THE BUILDER.

Principle 2: WE ARE THE HOUSE OF GOD (v6)
Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We need to take care of them. If we don’t we will not be good for anything because we will run ourselves into the ground. We need to respect God by taking care of the body He has given us by: -
- EATING HEALTHILY
- EXERCISE regularly
- Getting enough REST

Principle 3: A HARDENED HEART IS THE SAME AS REBELLION (v8, 9)
We need to be good stewards of what God has given us – including our bodies. If we disregard this, we are hardening our hearts towards God, and what He has shown us, and that is the same as rebellion. If we test God in this, we will suffer. God has created a cause-and-effect world, establishments that He has put into place and He will not override them. If we do not look after our bodies, we will reap the effects of that, for example, sickness, burnout and disease.

Principle 4: GOD HAS PROVIDED THE KNOW-HOW TO OBEY HIM (v10)
God has given us the knowledge – through the Bible and science and, believe it or not, common sense – to know what we should and shouldn’t eat. We also know how regularly to exercise, and we can definitely tell when we need to rest. All we have to do is listen to our bodies.
I read this book “What the Bible Says About Healthy Living” by Rex Russell MD. He studied what the Bible says about food, what science says about food and what he has seen himself, for example when patients are told to follow a specific diet in order to get well again.

His conclusion was simple: -
Principle 1: Eat only what God intended us to eat
Principle 2: Eat it only in the form he intended it to be eaten
Principle 3: Fast regularly

Amazingly, scientific research (independent of himself) gave evidence to support why God told the Israelites not to eat certain foods and why they should eat others. (I highly recommend this book. It can be bought on Amazon.)
So we have no excuse. God has given us the knowledge we need, but it is our responsibility to put it into practice.

Principle 5: REST
God didn’t only intend for us to experience spiritual rest. He is a holistic God. He intended for us to experience rest physically, emotionally and spiritually. If we look after our bodies, and get the rest we need – however much that might be – we will be able to more fully enter the rest that God intended for us. We won’t get as sick as often, we won’t get as tired and we won’t get as stressed – the result - we will be much more rested and able to cope with the stresses of living life.

We have a holistic God who is concerned with our physical and emotional being as well as the spiritual. He created all of us – and said, “It was good!” So work with Him on this. He didn’t create our bodies to be a hindrance to us. He created them for our enjoyment as well as for us to know what our limitations are so that we can more fully enjoy and experience a supernatural God.

God knows your body best. Ask Him to show you how much rest you need, what is okay to eat and in what proportions and how much to exercise and even what exercise. He will help you – He helped me.

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