The Lord for the Body
1 Corinthians 6:13 - “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
Near the end of the second century, a bishop named Irenaeus of Lyons found himself fighting an idea that was quietly spreading through the churches. A movement we now call Gnosticism taught that the material world was a lesser, shabbier thing, and that the goal of the truly spiritual person was to escape it. The body, in that worldview, was a kind of prison. Salvation, when it finally came, would leave the body behind like a shell you outgrow and discard.
Irenaeus saw the danger at once. If the body is just disposable matter, then creation was never truly good, the Son taking on flesh becomes an embarrassment, and resurrection is pointless. So he defended the body with startling force, condemning teachers who would deny what he called the salvation of the flesh. God, he insisted, does not despise what His own hands have made. The same God who once formed us from the dust means to save us, dust and all.
Paul is fighting the seed of that same error in Corinth. Some of the believers there had begun treating the body’s appetites as spiritually beside the point: food is for the stomach, the stomach for food, both of them headed for the compost heap, so what could it matter what you do with your body? Paul answers. The body, he says, was made “for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” Read that last phrase again. The Lord is for the body.
We’re so used to hearing the body treated as the lower, embarrassing part of us, the part we’ll one day be glad to shed. Paul will have none of it. Your body is no disposable shell for Jesus to discard once He’s rescued the real you. It’s the handiwork of God, it belongs to Christ, and it’s being made new by his Spirit living inside you. Everything in God leans toward this body of yours, not away from it.
So we can stop treating our bodies as either idols to worship or junk to use up. This body is a gift on loan from a God who is deeply and tenderly for it. And that reaches all the way down into the ordinary. The hands you have can serve. The voice you have can bless. The very tiredness you feel can be handed to Him as worship. We don’t honor God by escaping our bodies; we honor Him by giving them back to Him, one ordinary act at a time.
This is the good news the Gnostics missed, and the news we still need. The gospel is not God rescuing souls out of creation. It is God redeeming the whole person, body and all, through the crucified and risen Christ. So whatever you see in the mirror tonight, aging or aching or nothing like you hoped, you’re looking at something God made, something He fills with His own Spirit, something He won’t ever throw away. The Lord is for your body. Let that be louder than every other voice you’ve believed about it.
Today: Take one thing you’ve been treating as merely physical and give it back to God as worship. Use your hands for a piece of hidden, unglamorous service for someone who cannot pay you back. Or take a walk with no phone and no earbuds, and thank God out loud for a body that can move. Or kneel, actually kneel, when you pray tonight, and let your knees tell your heart what it is slow to believe: that this body belongs to a Lord who is for it. Today, let your offering be physical, because the God who shaped you is worthy of all of you.
Prayer: “I praise you, Maker of heaven and earth! You called this flesh good in the beginning, You took it up in Your Son, and You refuse to leave it behind. Thank You that Your salvation is all-encompassing, redeeming my body, spirit, and soul. Teach me to receive this body the way You do, as Your handiwork and Your dwelling, and to glorify You with every part. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK