If God Is "I AM", then Who Am I? - Day 27

Day 27 – a balanced life

 

In order to feel content, we must find a way to merge our spiritual selves into our material world. We are, after all, spiritual beings having a human experience.   –KRISTINE CARLSON

 

We are body and soul. God gave us a body so that we could relate to the physical world. He gave us a soul that we might relate to Him. He wants us to commune with Him, to participate in the mystery of divine-human rapport. Perhaps it would be better to reverse the order and say we are soul and body, for the former is the truest essence of humanity and continues after the latter dies. In short, the soul is our vertical, eternal pipeline to God.     

But, in lauding the soul, we should not fail to give the body its due. History is peppered with individuals who have valued the soul and devalued the body to the extreme, saying it acceptable to neglect or abuse the body in deference to the soul. Consider, for example, the Gnostics of the first and second centuries A.D. They considered the body evil through and through. Only the spirit or soul was considered good. As a result, a subset of Gnostics did not think it wrong to mistreat the body by living for pleasure alone. For them, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and raucous behavior became the norm. Other Gnostics took the opposite approach, punishing the body by abstaining from drink, sex, or anything worldly. The paradoxical end result of extreme Gnosticism, therefore, was either hedonism or asceticism.

Paul deplored such disdain for the body. "Don't you know," he challenged the believers in Corinth, "that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?"¹ He valued body as well as soul and consecrated both to the service of God. He seemed to have no inclination toward asceticism. Although single himself, he condoned marriage and sexual expression therein. He also took a liberal stance concerning eating food that had been offered to pagan idols. Furthermore, he was found in frequent association with the heathen, in sharp contrast to the public avoidance manifested by the ascetic.² But he decried the other extreme as well, lashing out at those who live for pleasure alone, even listing in his epistle to the Romans all sorts of hedonistic practices as abominable sins.³

Paul’s advice, then, is that we revere both soul and body and yield each to God. We should forsake deification of pleasure, for this is too self-serving. We should shun the temptation toward ascetic withdrawal, for this amounts to community avoidance. And we should forsake those humanists in our culture who embrace both self and community but have no room whatsoever for a relationship with God. In short, we should strive to live a balanced life.

 

SELF-REFLECT

1

What tends to throw your life off-balance?

2
Have you sought God’s help in balancing your life?

3
Think of two things you can do to improve your body. Think of two things you can do to improve your soul. Ask God to help you do these things.

 

Daily Quotation

Kristine Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 203.

¹1 Corinthians 6:19.

²1 Corinthians 5:10, chapters seven and eight.
³Romans 1:21-32.