Your Body Is Part of Your Story
Matthew 19:4-6 - "He answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.'"
We sometimes speak about the body as though it were packaging — the temporary container surrounding the person who really matters. But Jesus never spoke that way. When religious leaders questioned Him about marriage, Jesus went back past the debates of His day to the beginning of the human story: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female.” For Jesus, the body wasn’t a late addition to personal identity. Embodied sex belonged to the Creator’s intention. Of course, our bodies don’t tell us everything about who we are. Height doesn’t determine character, disability doesn’t determine value, and hormones don’t determine holiness. But the body does tell the truth about something: male and female are created realities we receive.
The world encourages us to surrender our God-gifted gender whenever internal feelings disagree with it. For people struggling with gender dysphoria, feeling alienated from one’s body can produce real distress, fear, shame, and loneliness. And Christians should be among the least willing to mock that pain. But, compassion can’t require the body to lie. Feelings tell us truthfully what we’re experiencing, but they don’t always tell us truthfully what reality means. Anxiety can make danger feel certain when it isn’t. Shame can make forgiveness feel impossible when Christ has already declared otherwise. A feeling can be sincere, powerful, and painful without possessing the authority to define us.
The Christian view of the body is high. The body is part of the person God made, the life Christ purchased, and the future He will redeem. Scripture promises resurrection. Jesus took a body like ours. He experienced hunger, fatigue, physical pain, and the vulnerability of being struck and killed. The risen Jesus didn’t leave His body in the tomb. He emerged embodied and transformed. And this gives us hope within bodily suffering. We need not call brokenness good in order to call creation good. We can grieve sickness, disability, unwanted desires, mental distress, and aging. We can seek healing and wise help as people whose bodies are destined for redemption, not erasure.
And this provides an opportunity for you to live out the reality of a Surrendered Servant, as you continuously make yourself available to Jesus and allow Him to live His life through you. Surrender, in this regard, is about bringing your whole embodied life to Jesus and saying, “This life belongs in Your hands. Live through me here.” Christ comes by His Spirit to inhabit His people. His life can express patience through your tired body, purity within your disordered desires, courage inside your anxiety, and love through limitations you wish were gone. Availability, not self-reconstruction, is the believer’s posture. Your body is not the whole of your story, but it is not a meaningless prop within it. It came from the Creator, has been corrupted by the fall, and is claimed by the risen Christ. One day He will make it whole.
Head: My body is not an obstacle to my identity, but part of the very life my Creator intends to redeem.
Heart: Where have I treated my body as an enemy, an embarrassment, or raw material that belongs entirely to me?
Hands: Offer one embodied part of your day (eating, resting, working, moving, or serving) to Jesus as an act of availability rather than control.
Prayer: “Lord Jesus, thank You for taking human flesh and carrying my embodied life into Your redeeming work. Meet me in the places where my body feels painful, limiting, or difficult to receive. Forgive me for despising what You made or claiming the right to redefine what belongs to You. Make me available today so that Your patient and holy life may be expressed through mine. Amen.”
-PK