BODY
You were
placed here to train for eternity. Your body was only intended to be a house
for your immortal spirit. It is flying
in the face of God's purposes to do as many do – to make the soul a servant to
the body, and not the body a servant to the soul.
Thoughts for Young Men.
Discipline,
for the Christian, begins with the body. We have only one. It is this body that
is the primary material given to us for sacrifice. We cannot give our hearts to
God and keep our bodies for ourselves.
Elizabeth Elliot
Our bodies
are inclined to ease, pleasure, gluttony, and sloth. Unless we practice
self-control, our bodies will tend to serve evil more than God. We must
carefully discipline ourselves in how we “walk” in this world,
else we will conform more to its ways rather than to the ways of Christ.
Donald Whitney
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life,
1991, p. 132, Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com, All rights reserved.
For more information please see the website www.BibicalSpirituality.org.
Bodily
exercise will profit nothing if abstracted from those more spiritual. The glory
that God hath, and the comfort and advantage that will accrue to your souls is
mostly from the spiritual exercise of religion.
Thomas Brooks
Farewell Sermon at the Great Ejection.
Why is
discipline important? Discipline teaches us to operate by principle rather than
desire. Saying no to our impulses (even the ones that are not inherently
sinful) puts us in control of our appetites rather than vice versa. It deposes
our lust and permits truth, virtue, and integrity to rule our minds instead.
John MacArthur
The Book on Leadership, 2004, p. 153.
They
that would keep themselves pure must have their bodies in subjection, and that
may require, in some cases, a holy violence.
Thomas Boston
Whatever
increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind – that thing
is sin to you.
Susannah Wesley
Quoted by John Kirk, The Mother of the Wesleys, Poe and Hitchcock, 1865, p. 178.
If
your body makes all the decisions and gives all the orders, and if you obey,
the physical can effectively destroy every other dimension of your personality.
Your emotional life will be blunted and your spiritual life will be stifled and
ultimately will become anemic.
Michel Quoist
The
Christian Response, Gill and Macmillan, 1965, p. 4.
Modern
Christians, especially those in the Western world, have generally been found
wanting in the area of holiness of body. Gluttony and laziness, for example,
were regarded by earlier Christians as sin. Today we may look on these as
weaknesses of the will but certainly not sin. We even joke about our overeating
and other indulgences instead of crying out to God in confession and
repentance.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 108. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
Quite
possibly there is no greater conformity to the world among evangelical
Christians today than the way in which we, instead of presenting our bodies as
holy sacrifices, pamper and indulge them in defiance of our better judgment and
our Christian purpose in life.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 109. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
As
we become soft and lazy in our bodies, we tend to become soft and lazy spiritually.
When Paul talked about making his body his slave, so that after having preached
to others he himself would not be disqualified, he was not thinking about
physical disqualification, but spiritual. He knew well that physical softness
inevitably leads to spiritual softness. When the body is pampered and indulged,
the instincts and passions of the body tend to get the upper hand and dominate
our thoughts and actions. We tend to do not what we should do, but what we want to
do, as we follow the craving of our sinful nature.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 111. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
We
have to take control of our bodies, and make them our servants instead of our
masters.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 111. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
To
put to death the misdeeds of the body, then, is to destroy the strength and vitality
of sin as it tries to reign in our bodies.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 84. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
No second
class citizen, the body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19) and is
indispensable to the activity of the heart. Without it we would have no access
to the physical world and we simply would not be persons. Accordingly, Paul
could not imagine a person without a corporeal nature (1 Cor. 15). The whole
person consists of body and heart together. Both are essential and neither can
function in the material realm in isolation of the other.
Edward T. Welch
Blame
in on the Brain? P&R Publishing, 1998, p. 39-40.
[The body] is
the mediator of moral action rather
than the initiator. In a sense, it is
equipment for the heart. It does what the heart tells it to do; it is the
heart’s vehicle for concrete ministry
and service in the material world. In this capacity, it is not the source of
sin and is never called sinful.
Edward T. Welch
Blame
in on the Brain? P&R Publishing, 1998, p. 40.