Body: Biblical spirituality for the whole person

people, ideas, books, standpoints etc. are often a complex mix of good and bad (not to mention neutral). So often we are invited to declare something either ‘this’ or ‘that’, when in reality it is both.

It is not just helpful or generally good to exercise your Spirit-given gifts. It is vital.

Soul-making implies a deliberate intention on our part to pay attention to who we are called to be and to seek regular refreshment so that we can grow more and more into the people God yearns for us to be.

If we accept Paul’s view of ‘spiritual’, as that which pertains to the Spirit of God, then such a view includes our bodies, since God’s Spirit gives life to them.

among the earliest Christians the experience of the Spirit was profoundly ecstatic. The Spirit broke in to people’s lives inspiring them to miracles, to prophecy, to speaking in tongues and many other such actions.

Taking proper care of our bodies – those temples of the Holy Spirit – should be ranked alongside prayer as a Spiritual discipline.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that, if there are no signs of ecstatic experience, the Spirit is absent. The Spirit also inspired people in other ways.

Christians should live as though they have already been raised to new life in the new creation, but will wrestle constantly with this because they are thoroughly enmeshed still in the old creation.

The bodies we have now are bodies that move inexorably towards decay and death; our resurrection bodies will move in the opposite direction.