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15th March 2024
FridayReflection
'Sam Allberry' asks
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"What Does It Mean to Be Fearfully and Wonderfully Made?"
In Psalm 139, David's praying to God speaks of the care and attention with which God has made us.
By now, God has made billions of human beings, but we're not mass-produced.
We're not churned out in a mechanistic way.
Each one of us is individually handcrafted.
A friend told me he thought his eyes were too close together.
Another feels self-conscious about being too skinny; another about his height.
Once we start broaching the subject of what we like or don't like about our bodies, it seems as though the vast majority of people feel unhappy about some aspect of their physical appearance.
There are all sorts of reasons for this, of course - the unrealistic standards of beauty being pushed on us almost constantly by the media for one - but the cumulative effect is that it can leave us thinking about our bodies in a seriously distorted way.
However we feel about our bodies, though, the Bible makes it very clear that God made them, and he made them carefully:
I just saw an interview with a transgender Hollywood star who has recently started identifying as a man and has now had the various procedures done to bring the body into conformity with that identity.
This comment from the interview stood out:
"It's getting out of the shower and the towel is around your waist and you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, 'There I am.'
Previously, by implication, what had greeted this person in the mirror was a body that seemed to belong to someone else. Now, at last, that was different.
Such feelings can be hugely painful, and we must always be sympathetic to such suffering.
But the leap from feeling an intense sense of not belonging in our own skin to concluding it "isn't really me" is one the Bible won't let us make.
Scripture shows us that just as God has made our bodies (and intended to), so also they are part of our calling.
Our bodies don't represent the totality of who we are. We are more than our bodies.
When God created Adam, he didn't make a soul called "Adam" and then look for some arbitrary matter to contain that soul.
Part of our self-consciousness about how our bodies look may not be so much how we feel about them, but how others feel about them.
A friend of mine in high school had a couple of prominent moles on his face that became the target of other boys looking for any way they could find to tease others.
My friend's experience is not that unusual.
Whether it is bullying from others or some other reason entirely, we can feel that aspects of our appearance cause us problems with others.
We might feel we have a target on us because of it.
The fact is, we can't make our bodies as pleasing to others as we might want.
This is why the gospel is such good news.
The Bible tells us that through his death, Jesus has purchased us.
As a result, we now belong to him:
You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
So glorify God in your body.
If our bodies belong to Jesus, then the only person our bodies need to please is Jesus.
And he is far easier to please in this regard than our culture or our school friends.
Paul urges us to
"Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God".
A body that is pleasing to Jesus is a body that is offered to him and given to his purposes.
And if he is pleased with such a body, we soon learn that this is ultimately all that matters.
The gospel is good news for our bodies, and not just our souls.
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This is an edited version.
The full article and Bible references are avaiable on request
Sam Allberry
is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville.
He is the author of various books, including What God Has to Say about Our Bodies and Is God Anti-Gay?;
and the cohost of the podcast You're Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors.
He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.
