About all I remember of high school health class was sex education, trying to remember and write down what I ate in a week, and a film about a guy having a heart attack, during which I nearly passed out.  The teachers were always coaches who seemed like they’d rather be coaching.  What I’ve learned about good health I didn’t learn in health class.

          Paul is specifically addressing sexual immorality.  The root problem is more general, and the principle has a wider application.  “Honor God with your bodies,” Paul instructs the Corinthians (6:20).  A woman led a busy life: difficult marriage, young, active kids, hectic, demanding job.  She got to a point where she “just let herself go.”  God never lets go of us, but we sometimes let ourselves go.  We don’t practice self-control, self-discipline, which is really self-care.  We need to cope with the stress; we want to do it in a socially-approved way.  We medicate ourselves with cola, beer, French fries, pizza, Big Macs, Suzy-Qs, Oreos, and so forth.  Believe me, I know all about it!

          The prevailing wisdom is all things in moderation (all socially-approved things): not a bad rule, I guess.  A better rule is “Honor God with your bodies.”  Self-medicating is all too human.  I’d like to remind you, and myself, that our true medicine is grace and the love of God in Jesus Christ.  We know that, but we haven’t quite gotten to the point of living fully in the light of our knowledge.  We are to honor God with our bodies because God gives us our bodies for a reason: to honor Him by them.  When Paul writes on this subject, I can’t help but think also of what The Body—the Church—is for: to honor God, to glorify and enjoy God.

          We’re on the path that leads to God, the path that God lights for us.  That’s no small thing.  Odd, how we take it for granted, routine, not worth much thought.  In the meantime, we get onto other paths that are hard to leave.  We’re in church for an hour or so one day a week.  The rest of the time, we’re out there.  We let stress carry us into these other paths, convenient, quick, sugary paths.  A young woman in one of my 8 a.m. college classes always had a thirsty-two ouncer of Diet Coke with her; now I’m a huge drinker of cola, as Devon will testify, but I have my standards!  8 a.m. is a little early even for me.

          Those hard to leave paths lead to Chik-Fil-A, to What-a-Burger, to Wendy’s—ooh, those frosties!  We aren’t alone, just look at the drive-thru lines!  For 2019, McDonald’s had net income of over $6 billion.  I certainly made my contributions.  Coca-Cola’s net income for the same year was $8.92 billion, to which I definitely made many contributions.  Billion.  Billions and billions.  “The American Diabetes Association (ADA) released [. . .] research [. . .] estimating the total costs of diagnosed diabetes [rose] to $327 billion in 2017.”[1]  Our cheap habits end up being quite costly.  “The growth in total national healthcare expenditures in 2019 reached $3.8 trillion.”[2]  Healthcare probably isn’t the best term.  Those trillions weren’t spent on promoting health but largely on medical care to treat disease.  Not all of it was diabetes; some of it was cancer, some of it was heart disease.  Not all diabetes, cancer, or heart disease arises from what we do with our bodies, but a significant number of cases do.

          Four trillion is a hefty sum.  We spend more money on “health” care than any other nation on the planet, probably more than the next three to five nations combined, yet studies consistently report that the United States has some of the poorest health in the world.  We spend more and get less.

          I’m not about to propose banning or boycotting any business or product.  What we do to our bodies is not the fault of corporations, snacky cakes, cheesy poofs, or fizzy flavored fructose.  Lest you fear I’m going to guilt trip you about things you like that make you happy, things that seem harmless, please don’t be anxious.  I’m not condemning.  I’m caring.  We have cravings.  We need to find a way to deal with the stress in our lives, of needing to eat but not having enough time to, of knowing we should prepare something for ourselves, but not having the time or energy.  I live these stresses, too.  We tend to solve the problem by giving businesses like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola billions of our dollars.  Then trillions of our dollars are used to treat the medical consequences of our solution to stress.

          What I’ve been talking about so far seems like a physical problem or an economic problem.  A health problem?  Okay! but not a spiritual problem, not a problem of discipleship.  So why am I talking about it?  Because body and soul are intertwined, interconnected in sacred ways.  Honor God with your body (6:20).  The body is meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the body (6:13).  God created, redeemed, and will raise these bodies, glorified.  At the resurrection, these bodies will be raised.  Christ’s death redeems our bodies as well as our souls.  The Heidelberg Catechism, so important to the Reformed faith, begins by teaching our comfort is “That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ”—exactly what Paul is teaching the Corinthians.  If Christ is Lord, he is Lord not only of our souls and our eternal destiny but of our bodies and our physical lives here on this earth.  We don’t live for the Lord just one hour or so one day each week.  God wants what we’re doing here to have effect out there, to shape what we’re doing with our lives.

          Our choices and pursuits have consequences.  Often, I suppose too often, the most significant consequences are long term, so we don’t always see them clearly, and they don’t always seem real or really important to us until much later.  The question each day is for what are we living?  To what end, to what purpose, are we applying our bodies?  I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures of people who have been heavy smokers for decades: dried up, breathing through a stoma.  You’ve seen the before and afters of meth addicts.  At the end of his life, Jack Kerouac wasn’t nearly so pretty as in his younger, less alcoholic days.  I don’t have any pictures of my father after his leg was amputated at the knee because of diabetic neuropathy.  None of them intended to end up that way.  If given another chance at life, probably all of them would be completely resolved to have nothing to do with what destroyed them.  They would direct their lives, their aspiring and fulfillment, towards something, someone, much better.

          At the resurrection, we will have glorified bodies.  No one really knows what that means.  The medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas suggested that our glorified bodies would be like the bodies we had at age eighteen.  Ah, 18.  But what if our risen bodies still bore all the signs of all the wear and tear and abuse our choices inflicted upon them in this earthly life?  Eighteen, please!  So if we wouldn’t want that, why are we hurting ourselves now?

          There is no law against killing ourselves with high fructose corn syrup, fast food, or alcohol, or by denying ourselves food, starving ourselves to supposed health and supposed beauty.  A healthy, beautiful life is a life lived for the Lord.  Period.  But the Lord doesn’t seem to eliminate our stress, and sugar tastes oh, so good!  Others crave carbs, which become sugar, glucose, which the body then stores.  Others crave salty or fatty foods.  Chocolate—ooh, yes, please.  Like those Corinthians two thousand years ago, our freedom seems most often to be expressed in satisfying cravings: if the body desires it, craves it, do it.  That’s freedom.

          We should listen to cravings, because they are telling us something.  Often, our cravings are telling us we have a deficiency.  We know!  A happiness deficiency, a security deficiency, a confidence deficiency, a peace deficiency.  Cravings can be physiological signs of a vitamin or mineral deficiency.  We can address those by what we eat and don’t eat, but cravings may also sometimes point to a deeper emotional deficiency, maybe even a spiritual deficiency.

          The body doesn’t know a licit from an illicit pleasure.  Our bodies enjoy dopamine, the pleasure-anticipation neurotransmitter.  Dopamine is like the answer to cortisol, the stress hormone surging through the blood.  Living increases cortisol, and entire sectors of the economy exist to capitalize on our dopamine.  The consequence is nearly four trillion spent on medical care for our ruined health.  Honor God with your bodies; Christ is our Lord, soul and body.  Indeed, let’s think carefully and prayerfully about what Paul is saying when he tells us that our bodies “are parts of Christ himself” (6:15).

          God asks us to honor Him in all our choices, in every dimension of our living, to trust in Him completely, to seek all our comfort, security, and joy in Him. Our living in Christ is living in and for the love of God, love that expresses itself in godly love for neighbor, godly love for truth and for God’s Word.  This love also expresses itself in godly regard for ourselves.  So easily, we become the focal point of our daily living; we live to do what we want, which more often than we’d like to admit means trying to eat and drink our way to happiness.  The world defines freedom as being free to live for myself.  For us, however, freedom is belonging to God; God sets us free to live for Him, free to glorify God.  This is what God wants and how He wants us to live.  How does God want us to eat?  Whatever the answer, it does not involve hurting our bodies with food, let alone finding our comfort and solace there.

          And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

               [1] https://www.diabetes.org/resources/statistics/cost-diabetes

               [2] Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-office-actuary-releases-2019-national-health-expenditures