Reset: Physically

Reset • Sermon • Submitted 6 years ago

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How do you view your body? The tendency in the church is to separate the physical and the spiritual. But the scriptures exhort us to be aware of both. In fact, the incarnation teaches us God doesn’t devalue the physical, but hyper values it. But different from physical new year’s resolutions of losing weight or getting in shape, we’ll talk about how to give our bodies as “living sacrifices” (Romans 12) unto God.

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Introduction:

Here's the full list of resolutions people told YouGov they were committed to (respondents were allowed to include more than one in their reports):

Health and Organization Beat Out Travel and Reading

According to the data pulled from Google by iQuanti, these are the most popular New Year’s resolutions:

1. Get Healthy: 62,776,640 searches, a 13.77 percent increase over last year during the same time period, when it was searched 55,177,290 times.

2. Get Organized: 33,230,420 searches, dipping by 7.41 percent compared to last year’s tally of 35,888,700.

3. Live Life to the Fullest: 18,970,210, spiking by 13.04 percent from last year, when it maxed at 16,782,030.

1. Eat better — 37 percent

4. Learn New Hobbies: 17,438,670 searches, up 4.72 percent from last year’s total searches of 16,652,950.

5. Spend Less/Save More: 15,905,290 searches, up 17.47 percent from 13,539,500 in 2016.

6. Travel: 5,964,130 searches, down by 0.82 percent from 2015’s 6,013,550,

7. Read More: 4,746,560 searches, down 5.63 percent from last year’s 5,029,790.

Grand Total: 159,031,920, up by 6.67 percent from last year’s searches, which numbered 149,083,810.

Not Just Healthy, But Fit

2. Exercise more — 37 percent

That fact that getting healthy tops the list is no shocker — it’s among the most tried and true New Year’s resolutions. But this year, people are specifically interested in gyms fitness, rather than simply improving their health.

3. Spend less money — 37 percent

"There was a 315 percent increase around the search term ‘gym’ and a significant increase around fitness-related searches, which shows just how important people are taking physical fitness," said Sastry Rachakonda, CEO of iQuanti.

4. Self-care (e.g. getting more sleep) — 24 percent

5. Read more books —18 percent

6. Learn a new skill — 15 percent

7. Get a new job — 14 percent

8. Make new friends — 13 percent

9. New hobby — 13 percent

10. Focus more on appearance — 12 percent

11. Focus on relationship — 12 percent

12. Cut down on cigarettes/alcohol — 9 percent

13. Go on more dates — 7 percent

14. Focus less on appearance — 3 percent

https://patch.com/us/across-america/here-are-most-popular-new-years-resolutions-2018

The most popular resolutions remain the same year after year. It caught my eye for two reasons. This week we are starting this series called Reset. It is not a resolution but a 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 physical, financial, relational, and spiritual reset.

Secondly, 6 out of 14 (43%) of the most popular resolutions was about fitness or the physical which is exactly what we are talking about this week!

Body:

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.

I. We have to know the right “why”

When I read those resolutions 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 “loose 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 “why” 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

1 Corinthians 6:19–20 NLT

19 Don’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, 20 for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

9 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? 20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and 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 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 can walk in and if you are at the top of a curl, there is nothing more interesting than your bicep! If you are a trying to hide from someone, 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.

There was a time I was constantly consumed with exercising. I would be doing sit-ups and pushups in my room, lifting weights, or playing basketball outside no matter what the weather was.

I have known many individuals whose physical routines had become more important than anything else in thier life. It was more important than relationships and even their time with God. Their body was not a temple, it was their 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.

Romans 12:1–2 NLT

1 And 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. 2 Don’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.

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

II. 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 2018, 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.

Question 1: What do you need to clean up?

2 Corinthians 7:1 NLT

1 Because we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit. And let us work toward complete holiness because we fear God.

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 TV consumption 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 or anything that leads us there! 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 2: 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. I eventually joined a church and entered into Christian community where I finally confessed my struggle and sought help. But my struggle with pornography continued. Over the next 10 years, I got married and continued to grow in my relationship with Christ while still continuing to stumble with pornography on a regular basis. I had grown accepting of the status quo. Joining Celebrate Recovery forced me to confront that and to recognize my own powerlessness to stop. At the beginning of 2015 with consistent quite time with God and with regular attendance at Celebrate Recovery and the added incentive of the upcoming birth of my daughter, I reached four and half months of sobriety, my longest stretch yet. Unfortunately my quiet times went by the wayside and I ended up in yet another downward spiral. This forced me to surrender to God and trust Him to save me. I realized I had been going to meetings to fix my problems instead of going to meetings because I can’t fix my problem. Last August, one of the pastors preached about giving in rather than giving up, and coming closer rather than trying harder. Those characterized where I was and as I sought to live that way, I have begun rebuilding my sobriety. Last week, I received my four month sobriety chip for the second time this year. I am not where I want to be but I am trusting God to get me where I need to go one day at a time.

Stop failing and start surrendering. Where do you need to surrender to God in your physical this coming year?

Question 3: what are you pursuing?

This isn’t just a message about what to clean up but it is about what to pick up as well. What are you pursuing in Christ?

Romans 6:12 NLT

12 Do not let sin control the way you live; do not give in to sinful desires.

12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.

Some translations use “lusts” for “sinful desires.” We tend to narrowly define lust as sexual desire but lust is any desire that seeks to possess or fully consume its object. Lust sees people as tools. It sets aside their emotions and it puts your wants ahead of the needs of others. It takes. Lust is impulse. Lust and love do not co-exist. But Paul continues:

Romans 6:13 NLT

13 Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God.

13 And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

We think our desires have to be suppressed to be holy. But we see an interesting twist in the Scriptures here from Paul. He doesn’t say that. He says when you bring your whole self, including your body and your desires, when you submit those desires to God, He can redeem them for purposes of righteousness. We take desire and we think we have to either give in or suppress but Paul offers an alternate form right here. He says don’t give in, don’t suppress, give them up. Surrender them to a living God who is active to use them as instruments within you. There is a distinction between impulse and desire. Impulse is when you get lonely and you go to that freezer and get that ice cream out. That is impulse. But there is a desire within that moment that God can pull out and use that for his purposes. We are so quick to give in to impulse or pushing it down. But maybe there is a desire within that whole thing happening that God can pull out and use for the purposes of the kingdom of God. I remember in my 20s I had talked with so many other guys about their sexual impulses and their struggles with those things and I was trying to figure out myself and grow and you have to ask the question to God. You have to pray like, God, why did you create us this way? You did this! We have God-given testosterone running within us. That was his creation. Why did He do that?

In this whole search and prayer with God, I was reading through the book of Joshua and I noticed something. Desire is not used improperly within the book. Then I started to notice what else is in the book and it was guys taking the next hill. It was guys pursing dreams. It was guys conquering and guys going after and doing things for the kingdom of God. It was guys active for God’s purposes and my theology because very practical right there. You have to get busy! You have to get active. So I started doing everything I could do for the glory of God. I started playing sports and I was part of every outreach I could do. I went on missions trips. I was in small groups. We have God-given testosterone to be used in activity for the kingdom of God.

Listen, your desires can turn into impulse or they can turn into passion. That’s what I’m trying to say. Are you going to allow your desires to go this way and follow those impulses or are you going to go after God and allow Him to turn those desires into a passion for the kingdom of God that are only used for his purposes? He has called us out. He has given us desires.

Passion is choosing what you want most. Impulse is choosing what you want now.

2 Timothy 2:22 NLT

22 Run from anything that stimulates youthful lusts. Instead, pursue righteous living, faithfulness, love, and peace. Enjoy the companionship of those who call on the Lord with pure hearts.

Flee evil, pursue righteousness.

The Greek word for flee means to turn and run from. So flee is going one way. Pursue is the same verb that flee is but in the opposite direction. So run away from evil but run after the things of God. Go after Him with all the desire He has put in you!

Question 4: what is your strategy?

After you ask what you need to cleanse and what you need to surrender and what you need to pursue, how are you going to get there?

Reset 101 right here, a few simple reminders: Be specific. Be intentional. Be strategic. Be together.

Be specific. Be intentional. Be strategic. Be together.

At the end of the day, my challenge is , in view of the mercy of God, in view of all his grace and mercy that He has poured within us, how are you offering your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God?

Conclusion:

I want to ask you a few questions. Receive these and meditate on them. Allow the Spirit of God to speak into you right now.

What was the last time your body was sore because of helping someone else?

When have you consumed your food out of care for your temple and out of gratitude towards a generous God?

How are you pursuing passion instead of impulse with the desires God has given you?

Have you disciplined your body as you have disciplined your spirit before God?

Have you lived your day with the understanding that your body is a doxology unto God?

Living, walking and praising Him with every breath and every step?

How does the Lord want you to reset in the physical today?

I want to close this by giving you a blessing in prayer today.

May your mind seek wisdom that the Father desires to give. May your eyes see beauty and potential as God sees it. May your lips speak encouragement and praise into what is in front of you. May your heart be responsive to God’s leadings and promptings and may it be full. May your hands be active in caring for your neighbor. May your feet lead you to places that God destines you to be and see. May your body be a living sacrifice unto the purposes of God and his Holy Spirit dwell within you. Amen!

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