“God’s Prescription for Health”

Theme: The Daniel Plan

Scripture: Romans 12:1-2

Things I’d like to remember from today’s sermon:

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The Meditation Moments below are taken from The Daniel Plan Journal which may be purchased in Soul Food Books.

Meditation Moments for Monday, January 12 – Read John 10:10 – Jesus wants you experience the fullness of life. Your relationship with God enables you to pack meaning and purpose into each and every moment. Jesus says this abundant life in him will be better than all your dreams rolled into one.

  • In this real and eternal life, every part of you is interconnected: your spiritual health is connected to your physical health, and they are both connected to your mental and emotional health. A problem in one area will affect all the others.
  • God shaped you with this interconnectedness, so on your journey you must learn to trust that he has also given you the means and methods to maintain the good health necessary for an abundant life. God never intended for you to sit productivity with eternal significance.
  • What are the resources and means already in your life that will help you achieve your goals in The Daniel Plan?
  • How would your life be fuller if your were able to reach your health goals? What will you be able to do and accomplish with greater energy and better health?
  • How has your health hindered you from participating in the life God has for you?

Tuesday, January 13– Read 1 Corinthians 10:31 – Food is a gift from God, and it is meant to be savored. When you hurry through meals, you tend to overeat, and you miss the point of the gift. Slow down and appreciate the tastes, textures, and pleasures that good food can give. Today, instead of eating in your car or standing at the sink, try sitting down for each meal and taking your time.

  • Meals are moments when you can refocus on God and thank him for providing you with the food you eat. It’s also a time when you can connect with friends and enjoy a meal together, celebrating what God is doing in your lives.
  • What might happen to the way you experience food if you simply slow down and take time to appreciate each bit as well as the company with whom you eat.
  • How did your meals align with The Daniel Plan plate today?

Wednesday, January 14 – ReadPsalm 28:7 - Think about this: God would not have designed your body to need physical exercise and at the same time make exercise the most grueling, tedious thing you have to do. God knows we are all shaped differently, so there’s an “exercise” out there for every one of us. The best exercise is the one you will actually do because you enjoy it. So what do you love? What sounds like fun? Ask God to show you what it is, and give it a try, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone.

  • Here’s a good place to start: Move towards joy. If you think of exercise as drudgery, as an ought to in your life, your motivation will disappear. If you direct your energies wisely and do something you enjoy, something you get to do, you will find that motivation comes naturally.
  • Today journal about a time you had fun engaging in physical activity-as an adult and as a kid. What activities do your enjoy or did you once enjoy before you got too busy?
  • What comes to mind when you reflect on ‘move toward joy’. Pick a joyful activity and do it today!

Thursday, January 15 – Read Romans 12:2 – You may think transformation of your health begins with physical effort, but the truth is, if you want lasting change in your life, you need to refocus your mind. When you trade your old thinking for new thinking, that’s when transformation starts to happen. Ephesians 4:24 says, “Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” To renew your mind, you’re going to have to let go of the old attitudes, the old thought patterns, the old images that you have been living with so you can put on the new garments God has for you.

  • Which of your thought patterns may be unhealthy or untrue? Ask God to transform your mind with his truth.
  • Dr. Amen wrote a book called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. How do you do that? What are you feeding your brain that needs to be replaced with truth?
  • Whatever you focus on is what you move toward. Spend some time writing down the things you want in life and praying that God will change your focus so you can move forward.

Friday, January 16 – Read Romans 15:7 – God accepts us despite our messy lives, impure motives, and irritating attitudes (Ephesians 1:6). One of the ways we reflect God’s love and bring him glory is to accept each other just as he accepts us. This means we accept others’ quirks and look past their faults in order to see a person created in the image of God. This acceptance makes your friends feel safe with you. This acceptance is what you need for support on The Daniel Plan. To have that kind of critical support with your friends, you will need to accept one another unconditionally. This acceptance creates a safe environment where people are not afraid to express their fears and doubts or talk about their struggles and where lasting change starts.

  • Why do you think people are more likely to change after, rather than before, they find acceptance? How can you
    reach out with acceptance to a friend or person in your Daniel Plan Group?
  • Can you recall five events from your past that make it hard for you to believe that God accepts you as you are?

Saturday, January 17– ReadMatthews 6:11 – Notice the Bible doesn’t say, “Give us today our weekly bread” or “Give us today our yearly bread.” God wants you to trust him one day at a time. You don’t need to be concerned about tomorrow until tomorrow. You don’t need to be concerned about two weeks until next week. This means you don’t have to stress about all the future steps necessary to make you Daniel Strong. You just need to focus on what you need to do for today. You can focus on succeeding at The Daniel Plan one day at a time. Jesus said, “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today trouble is enough for today” (Mathew 6:34 NLT).

  • Why do you think God wants you to take it one day at a time?
  • Make a list of all your concerns related to your Daniel Plan journey. Now trim the list down to only those things you need to deal with today.

Theme: The Daniel Plan

INTRODUCTION TO THE DANIEL PLAN

“God’s Prescription for Health: What God Says About My Body”

Sermon preached by Jeff Huber based on a sermon series by Rick Warren

January 10-11, 2015 at First United Methodist Church, Durango

Scripture – Romans12: 1-2

1And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. 2Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

VIDEODaniel Plan Week 1Sermon Starter

SLIDEGod’s Prescription for Health

Today we begin a new sermon series called the Daniel Plan. The big idea behind the Daniel Plan is that our lives, physical, emotional and spiritual, are given to us as a gift from God. We are called to care for each of these parts of ourselves. I have this theory I have been toying with for years, really ever since I started my career in ministry as a youth pastor. One of the challenges in our culture is that we have separated the mind from the body from the spirit. We go to school for the mind, or sometimes to a therapist, and we go to the doctor, or a massage therapist or chiropractor, for our body and we go to church or some other religious practice for our spirit. I find it fascinating that those three major institutions in our world—schools, health care and churches—are all in crisis right now and undergoing radical change. I think the challenge is that that these areas of our lives were never meant to be segmented and separate, but were meant to be seen as a whole.

While I don’t have all the answers as to how we bring all of these together, over the course of this sermon series, and the next one on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, which is what we will do for Lent, I hope we can begin to see and learn how to bring all the parts of ourselves together to be as whole and healthy as possible. We do that not only through these weekly worship times but also through small groups that I hope you will join as well as some exercise groups we’ll be starting throughout the week.

As we begin this week I want to invite you to pull out of your bulletins your Message Notes and Meditation Moments. At the top you find one of the scriptures we will use and then some blank lines that I want to encourage you to use to write some things down. Then you will find Meditation Moments you can use for each day of the week. During this sermon series those Meditation Moments actually come from the Daniel Plan Journal so if you would rather use one of those, which have the full readings for each day, you can find them for sale in the atrium as you leave.

I do want to share one caveat with you as we begin. The Daniel Plan material comes from Saddleback Church in Southern California and most of it was written by Pastor Rick Warren. I have found most of the material very helpful and I believe there is something we can learn from most material like this that comes from other churches. I also want to acknowledge that each of us will find things in the material that we don’t agree with and that’s okay. The Daniel Plan is not the Bible and it’s not perfect and there will be things in it that you don’t connect with. I want us to be a church that thinks for ourselves and wrestles with tough questions and asks challenging ones as well. So please don’t be afraid to disagree, but also be open to being challenged to connecting our faith with our mind and body so we can be whole persons.

This week we begin by lookingat physical health. The truth is you already know what how important physical health is, and you even know what we should do to take care of our bodies. This is not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery. I’m probably not going to share much that you don’t already know. To get healthy we have to eat healthy and we have to eat an appropriate amount. We have to get moving, like the song from the 90’s said, “You’ve got to move it, move it!”We have to get proper sleep and we have to lower the stress and get more rest in our lives. This is not rocket science. I know this. You know this. There’s nothing I can teach you on that today.

But what I want to do today is to focus on the motivation, the why we should try to be more healthy. Why do we not stickwith get-in-shape programs, get-healthy programs, diets, exercise and whatever resolution we made for the New Year? How many times have you set a resolution to get in shape and a month later it’s out the window? The reason why is, if we don’t have the right motivation, we will not stick with it. We have to be clear on the reason. When we figure out the why in our life, God will always show us how.

To get at the “why”, I want us to look at what God says about the importance of our bodies.Then we will look at a couple of areas for health that you may have never thought of and you won’t find in a nutrition book or exercise programs.

First, let’s look at what the Scriptures teach us about the importance of our physical health. 1 Corinthians 6 is the classic passage on the body where we read these words.

SLIDE12You say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything. 13You say, “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” (This is true, though someday God will do away with both of them.)But you can’t say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. 14And God will raise us from the dead by his power, just as he raised our Lord from the dead.

Some things in life are not necessarily wrong, they’re just not necessary. Does that make sense? We’re free to do whatever we want. But not everything is beneficial. And I’m not going to be mastered by anything – I’m not going to let it dominate me. I’m not going to be addicted to anything. Food was made for the stomach and the stomach for food – but God will destroy both. In other words, they’re not going to last forever. That’s not the real reason we’re here.

SLIDE19Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, 20for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

This passage teaches us several radical counter cultural things about your body. This is the exact opposite of what culture teaches us today, what the media teaches us today about your body. The first thing is this.

SLIDEGod expects me to manage my body

I’m not the owner; I’m the manager. God is the owner of my body, but I am the manager. The Bible uses word, “steward.” “Stewardship” is the old English word for “management.” We’re talking about the stewardship of health today. In other words, I cannot blame other people for how I use or misuse or abuse my body. I can’t blame anybody else. I’m the manager. My body is a gift from God, on loan. God owns it and then he loans it to me; and one day I’m going to give an account. One day I’m going to stand before God and he’s going to say, “What did you do with what I gave you?”

We’ve talked about this many times. Life is preparation for eternity, and God is seeing what he can trust you with. What did you do with the health I gave you? What did you do with the mind I gave you? What did you do with the opportunities, the abilities, the freedom, the wealth, what did you do with what I gave you? One of the things God is going to say is, “What did you do with the body I gave you?” I’m the caretaker of my body. God expects me to manage it.

SLIDEMy body is God’s property

The Scriptures also teaches me that my body is God’s property. That’s fighting words here in America, because all of us were taught growing up, my body is my own body. It’s my body and I’ll do what I want to with it. God says otherwise, “It’s not your body, it’s my body. I just loaned it to you. It’s not yours because you didn’t create it.”

Everything that you see was created by God and the Creator owns it all. You don’t own anything. It’s loaned to you, just like we have talked about our money and how it all belongs to God. You don’t own your money; its loaned to you for about eighty years. It was somebody else’s before you were born. It’s going to be somebody else’s after you die. You just use it while you’re here. He owns it and he loans it. My body is God’s property. In other words, I don’t have the right to just share my body with anybody, and neither do you and that’s a radical and challenging concept for us in our culture.

We Americans today make a common mistake that the Greeks did, which is called dualism. Back in the days of Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, the Greeks believed in dualism which was about separating the mind and the body and seeing them as independent. They said that what really matters is just your spirit or your mind and having those right with God. If your spirit is right with God it doesn’t really matter what you do with your body. They devalued the body. In fact, some of them taught the body was evil, so it really doesn’t matter if you mess up your body because it’s just evil. They believed that what really only matters is your spirit.

The Scriptures teach us something different. Your body is not evil but a good gift from God. Your body is holy because God made it. And everything God makes he makes for a purpose. God has never made anything without a purpose. So don’t compartmentalize and say all that really matters is my spirit, not my body. They both matter. It’s a false myth to say that the body and spirit are meant to be separate, because they are not.