NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH

January 3, 2016

Physical Reset
Joel Schmidgall

I trust y’all had a great and wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year! Let me tell you, it is good to get away and it is good to get back! My family and I went out to the sunny, balmy, warm California of 45 degrees while y’all had to stay here and suffer in this ice box of 72 degrees at Christmas time! I got ripped off! But it was a lovely Christmas for us and a productive one as well. I was able to eat every sweet treat junk food in my house so that I would not have any temptation in the New Year to eat unhealthy! It is that time of year when we can’t believe we have gone an entire year that we’ve gone without improving ourselves!

I saw a Washington Post article that listed the most popular resolutions. These are generic but I will read a few of them. Get fit. Save money. Eat better. Family time. Quit smoking. Lose weight. It caught my eye for two reasons. Number one was the series we started last week, Reset. It is not resolution but reset. The idea is like if you have a phone or computer that is having some issues, you reset it, right? You give it a soft reset and that fixes some of those minor issues. If you have a major issue, you have to do a hard reset, a factory reset and that clears out all of the data from your hard drive and it stores it to its original settings. That is a reset. It clears and fixes. So what we are doing over the next number of weeks in this series is talking about emotional reset, physical, financial, relational, spiritual reset. A reset is a fresh start, a fresh look at what you have in front of you. So we want to step back and take a reset.

The second reason it caught my eye was what we are talking about today and that is a physical reset. So when I read those off, more than half of them had to do with the physical. All of us want to be in a good place physically. But for many of us our physical goals are like a one day to do list, right? Let’s be real. We don’t get very far. According to a PhD on fitness, carrying out your physical goal starts with choosing the right why. Body schema is the term doctors and scientists use to define our physical sense of self. What is your physical sense of self? How do you see yourself? How do you see your body? I think for many of us, words like love-handles come in or potbelly or maybe it is that feature that is out there a little bit or maybe lose skin or heavy breathing when we walk up the stairs. All of us have a different view on our body schema, on how we view ourselves and how others view us. Your body schema has a lot to do with the lie behind any of your physical goals. If a reset starts with the why, then I think it is important for us to look at the Scriptures and see what they have to say about our physical nature.

Turn to I Corinthians 6:19-20

9Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spiritwho isin you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?20For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your bodyand in your spirit, which are God’s.

Paul is speaking to the Jewish believers in the city of Corinth. These are people who understand the concept of temple. The temple is sacred and holy and to be respected and to be taken care of. It is of highest value. So in one statement, Paul comes out and he identifies and defines the high value on body schema when he says your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, God gave the temple to the people but in the New Testament, God takes the people as his temple.

When we come to Him and find salvation in Christ, what happens? Our bodies become his dwelling place. He resides within us 24 hours a day. Our bodies are not like hotels. God doesn’t just check in when we walk into church. No, He resides within us at all times in all moments every day, every week, the Lord is with us. He is working in us and through us and He never leaves us.

Just like the temple, the body is a place of worship but it is not the object of worship. When you come into this building, it is the house of God. We are in different buildings. We are in rented facilities but it is the place of worship. We don’t worship the temple we are in but we respect it. We clean it and we treat it kindly but it is the place of worship, not the object of worship. If you are not careful your body can become the object of worship. Every gym has 750 mirrors! You can see yourself from every angle and multiple angles. The greatest place to be anonymous is to go into a gym because everyone is staring at themselves flexing in the mirror. The President of the United States and if you are at the top of a curl, there is nothing more interesting than your bicep! If you are a mass murdered, go into the middle of a gym, you are safe there! Everyone is staring at themselves in the mirrors! We can become really focused on self, on the physical, if we get into that. I used to tell my buddy, I cannot wait for tomorrow because I get better looking every day! I don’t say that anymore!

I had a buddy this year who, one of his goals was to step back from some of his physical routines because they had become more important than anything else in his life. It was more important than his relationships and his time with God. His body was not a temple, it was his god.

Do your knees hurt because of physical training or because you have been on your knees with God? Does your stomach ache because of crunches and flanks or does it ache because of the anguish you feel for the broken and the hurting that God has put in your past? God doesn’t call us to care for the physical because He wants our bodies to look better than anybody else. He calls us to care for the physical because these are beings that have been hand-crafted by the living God to be used by Him and for Him and for his purposes and for the kingdom.

Verse 20 says to honor God with your body. The word ‘honor’ is the same word that gives us the word ‘doxology’ which is a statement of praise to God. The Latin term literally means glory be to the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning and is now and forever shall be without end. Amen! In other words, our bodies are walking talking living beings. A living doxology to the praise and the glory of the Father in heaven! That is what God has given us in the physical. He has called us to be living doxologies.

In the church, I think we have done a good job at separating the physical from the spiritual. The body of the flesh from the spirit realm. And sometimes we see the body as a tool of sin and we see the Spirit as the pure part of us, right? But Jesus does not separate the two. In many ways, He does the opposite. When we separate the body and the soul, we derail the exhortation of the Scriptures to live fully in the Spirit and in the physical. Jesus healed in the Spirit and He healed in the flesh.

In the book, Embracing the Body, Finding God in the Flesh and in the Bones, author Tara Owens talks about modern medicine has begun to realize the connection between the soul and the body. As more and more hospitals encourage prayer and meditation or silence as ways to help bring physical healing. Historically, that would have been discouraged but not realizing that healing is holistic and healing in the body goes hand in hand with healing in the soul.

I remember Dr. Foth telling the story about his wife Ruth. Ruth died. In a moment, her heart stopped beating and they called 911 and EMS showed up and they resuscitated her heart and she was rushed to the hospital where doctors told her over the course of the day that she had little or no chance to win. That’s when Dr. Matthews showed up in that room, a Harvard educated top doctor in the hospital showed up and shocks the Foths by asking them in his rounds if he could pray for them. They agreed and he began to pray to the God who is able. And today, years later, Ruth is living an incredible life! She is living life to the full! She is healthy, coming through that experience, beating all odds. The body is not isolated from the soul.

Whether it is body without soul in a hospital or whether it is soul without body in many of the modern churches, you are living a separated life. When God calls us to live life in the full, bringing all things together, think about the incarnation. God coming to earth expressing Himself in us, through us. God came and He didn’t devalue the physical. He hypervalued the physical. The Spirit was made flesh and He dwelt among us. He brings the two together.

You can think of it like a movie character when an alien comes and puts in the form of a human but inside he is not really human. Jesus came and became human. He because within the physical, the Spirit. But we hold the soul up here and the physical down here but Jesus came and brought the two together. And He calls us to do the same, to embrace Him fully in the Spirit and to embrace Him fully in the flesh.

In fact, He gave us two gifts in his last days. In Acts 1, He gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit. He said you will be filled with the Holy Spirit. The second thing He gave us was his body. Every time we receive communion, we come to the Lord’s Table and every time we hear these words Jesus saying to us, This is my body which is for you. He gives us the gift of his body. It is the mercy of God coming into flesh form.

Romans 12:1-2

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God,which isyour reasonable service.2And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove whatisthat good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Transformation comes through the renewing of your mind. If you have not been renewed, if you have not committed yourself to God, you can do that today wherever you are. You can commit yourself to Him and He will bring transformation into your soul. That is where it all starts. The renewing of our minds.

If you are making goals for 2016, start with prayer! Start by coming into his presence and seeking Him and receiving a transformation from Him. The transformation has to cross over into the physical.

In verse 1, we see what true and proper worship really is. It is in view of his mercy, we are to offer our bodies as living sacrifices unto God, holy and pleasing unto God.

In the Old Testament, there were two kinds of sacrifices. We find these in Leviticus Chapters 1-6. The first is a sacrifice of atonement and that is for the remission of sin, to receive forgiveness before God. The second sacrifice is a sacrifice after atonement. It is not to receive forgiveness but it is to give appreciation for what God has done. When Paul encourages us to give our bodies as living sacrifices, he is not saying come and give your bodies as atonement for your sin. That is done through Christ. What our calling is when we bring our sacrifice, it is a sacrifice of appreciation. God, here I am, here is my body, it is imperfect but I bring it to You and my body is a doxology to You. It is an offering of praise.

The offering of the body is not an offering of bodily looks but offering of bodily behavior. When we see in the Scriptures where it talks about the body, it is not about the way it looks, it is about the way it acts. How are we acting and actively sacrificing our body to the Lord?

Notice, it is a living sacrifice. In the Old Testament, a sacrifice was always killed. It was a dead sacrifice that laid on the altar. But here we find a living sacrifice being given from us. What does that mean? It means you give that gift over and over and over again. The problem with a living sacrifice is this, it can crawl up off that altar, can’t it! You know this because you have done it, right? We put ourselves on the altar and the next day we pull ourselves right back off that alter. A living sacrifices is sacrificed over and over, numerous times a day. It is coming back again and again and being a living sacrifice unto God.

When you think about a physical reset, don’t think about how to look better or how to lose weight. Think about how you are worshiping God by being a living sacrifice. That is our calling! That is what I want you to take away from this message today.

Let me give you four simple questions to think about as you consider being a living sacrifice unto God.

What do you need to clean up? II Corinthians 7:1

Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

You cleanse your body by controlling your intake. What are you eating? What are you drinking? What are you listening to? What are you receiving visually? Maybe for some of us we need to do a little pruning. Maybe we need to cut out the sweets or maybe we need to cut our alcohol for a season. Maybe we need to get rid of something. We are living in gluttony and we need to cut out certain things that we are intaking into our bodies. Maybe a few of us need to step out of depression and stop listening to Adele! What are you listening to? Maybe for some of us, we need to get off the computer late at night because we are going to those sites that lead us down the wrong roads. Where do we need to cleanse ourselves before God?

Question two, what do you need to surrender? A living sacrifice is a surrendered life. A living sacrifice is a surrendered life but some of us are trying so hard to do something or not to do something that we haven’t realized that we haven’t surrendered it to God. We might need to stop trying so hard and start surrendering it, letting go of it and drawing close to God. Listen to a testimony who is going through Celebrate Recovery trying to find freedom from pornography.

I would spend hours each night looking at pornography, going to work exhausted the next day.