Love God With All Your Strength: Your Body Is Not a Spiritual Afterthought

The last word in Jesus’ list is strength: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Moses’ version says might (Deuteronomy 6:5). It’s the word for force, ability, everything you’ve got.

Some teachers have read it as your resources, meaning your money, your energy and your abilities. That’s true. But I think it starts with the most basic resource you have, the one you carry around every day, which is your body.

This is part four of a series. We’ve covered the heart, the soul, and the mind. Now we get physical.

God likes bodies

A lot of Christians carry around an idea that’s older than Christianity and didn’t come from it, the idea that the body is a cage and the spiritual life is about getting free of it. In that view the soul is what matters, and the body is just the vehicle it rides around in for a while.

The Bible doesn’t talk that way.

God made Adam’s body out of the dust and called it very good. The Son of God took on a body, ate fish, got tired, bled and was raised in a body with scars you could touch. Our final hope isn’t escaping our bodies. It’s the resurrection of the body.

C. S. Lewis put it with his usual plainness in Mere Christianity: “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.” A few lines later: “He likes matter. He invented it.”

Your body belongs to Him

God made your body and Jesus bought it, so it doesn’t belong to you.

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

The Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563, opens with a question: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer begins, “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

Body and soul. That’s a comfort, for sure, and it’s also a claim on how you treat what He owns.

Paul takes it further when he writes, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).

He calls it spiritual worship. So what you do with your body is a spiritual act.

Training, not idolizing

There are two ways to get this wrong.

One is neglect. You run your body into the ground with no sleep and junk food and no exercise, and you call it zeal. I did this for long seasons of bi-vocational ministry, and my body kept the receipts.

The other is idolatry, treating the body like it’s the thing that saves you. Gym culture can turn into a religion with its own rituals and its own guilt and shame.

Paul holds both in tension: “for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:8). Notice he says some value. That’s more than none, and a long way short of ultimate.

He also used the body as a picture of the whole Christian life. The word he uses for the struggle of faith is agōn, the athlete’s contest. “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable… But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:25, 27).

That’s where Agōn gets its name. We don’t think the gym makes men holy. We named it that because the daily, unglamorous discipline of the body is a picture of the fight of faith, and a part of it, too.

Ten ways to love God with your strength

1. Sleep like you trust God. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). Going to bed at a regular time is an act of faith that the world will keep turning without you. Aim for seven hours.

2. Move your body most days. Walk, lift, run, ride, swim. It doesn’t have to be impressive. Thirty minutes of movement most days will serve you for decades. Pray or listen to Scripture while you do it.

3. Eat with thanks and with limits. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Say grace and mean it. And pay attention when you’re eating to numb something instead of to fuel something.

4. Fast once in a while. Skipping a meal to pray reminds your body that it isn’t in charge. Jesus said “when you fast,” not “if.” Start small, and talk to a doctor if you have health concerns.

5. Get the checkup you’ve been putting off. Stewardship includes maintenance. You’d never run a truck 200,000 miles without changing the oil, so don’t do it to your body.

6. Work hard with your hands. Fix something, build something, mow a neighbor’s yard. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23). Physical work offered to God is worship.

7. Use your strength for someone weaker. Help someone move. Carry groceries for the widow down the road. Your strength was given to you for serving people, and showing off was never the point.

8. Guard what your eyes and hands do. Loving God with your body includes sexual purity. Make the practical decisions ahead of time: where the phone sleeps, what you won’t watch, who you’ll call when you’re tempted.

9. Worship with your body. Stand, kneel, lift your hands, sing loud. Something changes in a proud man when he gets down on his knees to pray.

10. Rest when you’re spent. When Elijah collapsed under a broom tree and wanted to die, God didn’t lecture him. He let him sleep and fed him, twice (1 Kings 19:5-8). Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap and eat a meal.

Bodies that point to the resurrection

This body won’t be with you forever, at least not the way it is now. Mine reminds me of that every morning. But one day God will raise it up, glorified and whole.

Until then, taking care of it is a way of saying thank you, and offering it is a way of saying, “I’m Yours, all of me.”

So pick one or two of these. If you’re in Agōn, they could become your Strength disciplines this season.

Next, and last, in this series: the “+1,” loving your neighbor as yourself.