Body and Spirit: War or Peace?

Forget everything you’ve learned from the misguided dualists who teach that the body, being material, is inferior to the spirit in your walk with Christ. 

In Jesus Christ, body and spirit are redeemed together. The spirit brings serenity to the body—a visceral peace that nothing outside of Christ can bring. On the other hand, the body informs the spirit with its needs for healthy sleep, nutrition, and exercise.  

Overly emphasizing either the body or the spirit is like saying your right leg is more important than your left leg, and then hopping on that leg for the rest of your life.

 When the apostle Paul speaks of a war between the flesh and the spirit, he doesn’t mean you should abandon bodily cares so that you can be a pure spirit. He means that bodily appetites have limited horizons. 

The goal of life is not contained in fancy clothes, prestigious quarters, or satiating the salivary glands. The goal is to develop a mindset based on trusting in the Lord’s help for physical provisions (home, food, clothing, education, health), while seeking above all else the Father’s will for you. When you seek the balance of bodily health and spiritual guidance, you’ll find they both contribute to a wholesome human nature.

Listen to Christ’s overview: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?...But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6: 25; 33).

By the same token, the body is a complex machine that needs quality care. Do you have a runaway compulsion for sweets, food, alcohol, smoking, drugs, or sex? If so, Christ doesn’t get on your case and carp at you to give these up, but sends the Holy Spirit to help you, like through a Twelve-Step group that specializes in breaking addictions. Thank God, you are not left alone to battle a force that is physically devastating and spiritually demoralizing.

Twelve-Step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous work wonders because they restore balance to the body and spirit. You gain a reprieve from out-of-control appetites by participating in a spiritual fellowship whose foundation is trust in God and service to others. Many of these meetings end by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Your spirituality needs attention just like the body. Opening your spirit to God does not require being religious. It simply requires sincerity, transparency, and humility. You can ask God for these qualities and the Holy Spirit will make sure they become part of your individuality in Christ. Equally important are eating and drinking the Word of God, relating to others who know and love Christ, and helping people whenever you can. 

So there you have it, a short course in understanding Body and Spirit. Along with Mind and Heart (previous blog), these complimentary dimensions comprise human nature, providing you with a reliable set of checks and balances for cultivating your individuality in Christ.

 

Dan Montgomery's Scriptural Self Compass

Kate and I have recently seen the need for a new expression of the Self Compass, one that shows how key Scriptures can contribute toward a balanced walk with Christ. 

Scriptural Self Compass

Love: “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet 3:15).

Assertion: “(An elder) must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it” (Titus 1:9).

Weakness: “These are the ones I look on with favor: those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word” (Ps 25:8-9).

Strength: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isa 40:31).

The wisdom of the Self Compass is that it helps you cultivate the very rhythms of grace seen in Christ's personality through the Gospels. We need Jesus as our personality model, and we need the whole of Scripture, including both Old and New Testaments, to influence our personality and relationships.

I encourage you to meditate on each of these Scriptural Compass points, and connect them with a visualization of yourself putting them into action. 

For the Love compass point, picture yourself cultivating gentleness and respect for family, co-workers, neighbors, and even strangers.

For the Assertion compass point imagine holding firm with Christian values and refuting worldly influences from television, movies, and literature that would otherwise corrupt your Christian orthodoxy.

For the Weakness compass point, pray that the Holy Spirit might help you become more humble and contrite, because the Lord draws near to us when we confess our needs to him.

For the Strength compass point remember to call upon the power of the Lord to renew your strength you in times of adversity or challenge. He will do it!

Keep the Scriptural Self Compass in mind day and night, for these LAWS of personality and godly guidance are meant to bring you ready assistance in a vast array of life situations. Join Kate and me in this prayer:

"Dear God, thank you for the love you show me. Please show me how to assert myself in gracious ways. I humbly call on you in weakness, knowing by faith that you will always strengthen me. In Jesus' name, Amen."

Come Alive In Christ with Your Human Nature Compass

Unfortunately, Christian convention espouses a host of phrases that muddle our understanding of human nature. You hear about the flesh versus the spirit, the new man versus the old man, the spiritual nature versus the carnal nature, the unregenerate nature versus the regenerate nature, and what-have-you. But if you stick to the human nature compass, you’ll have a healthy working model based on Jesus Christ.

Jesus didn’t come to redeem you on the installment plan, part now and part when you’ve died and gone to heaven. He has redeemed your whole being now. In Christ your human nature is made trustworthy, but only if you ask the Holy Spirit to help keep you fit and balanced. Just like a car’s engine can get out of whack and need a good tune-up, you’ve got to take care of your human nature or it will break down.

 Mind and Heart

Put in proper perspective, the mind has to do with thinking, talking, reasoning, gathering facts, setting priorities, and estimating the consequences of choices. There is an age-old bias in many cultures and religions that men are somehow better at thinking and reasoning than women. Therefore, men are somehow closer to God. I feel furious when I hear this because it is so untrue. There is no male or female in Christ (Gal 3: 28). There are only individuals who can think effectively to the degree that they exercise this function. 

Sure, if you don’t use your brain, it will grow as rusty as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. You’ll lock your keys in the car, mess up your taxes, and make idiotic choices. This has nothing to do with genes or gender. It can be remedied by practice in putting on your thinking cap and reasoning things through.

Thinking is what you do in your head—literally, the frontal cortex of the brain. Feeling is something you do in your heart. People who think too much end up emotionally detached: islands unto themselves. People who feel too much are like roller coasters, reacting emotionally to every little thing.

Human Nature Compass

Christ was neither a talking head, like some verbose religious communicators, nor an emotional loose cannon, like some overly zealous followers. Jesus had equal trust in his mind and heart. He made thoughtful choices that were infused by real emotion. He was invested in his relationships, passionate in pursuing the Father’s will, and steadfast in his mission. You and I are called to develop this same inner dynamism.

While thinking helps you make wise choices, emotion is the energy of personality that brings a depth dimension to your behavior and relationships. If thinking is the melody in your life, then emotions are the chords, bass, and syncopation that lets your life swing. 

As an individual in Christ, you learn how to bring the aliveness of your thoughts and feelings into prayer conversations, sharing what’s on your mind and heart with God, and experiencing what Christ has to share with you conceptually and emotionally.  

Mind and Heart

I encourage you to pull out the stops when it comes to communion and communication with the Lord. Try talking out loud sometimes when you’re stuck in traffic or taking a walk. Of course, make sure no one hears or they’ll think you’re nuts. Some of my favorite prayer times are at the spa when Jesus and I are alone in the sauna. 

It is erroneous to suppose that God only wants to hear from you when you are calm and rational. I suppose we get this idea from prayers recited in public settings, where dignity and decorum are required. But one-on-one communion with the Lord is enriched by emotional transparency about your ups and downs, dreams and frustrations. Full-bodied communication stirs God’s heart. 

Kate and I have a longstanding policy of praying out loud for one another during times of need or stress. We don’t do this every day, but every once in a while we go through a “walking prayer.” This means that one of us will pace the floor, walking and talking to the Lord, until the real emotion behind the prayer begins to seep through. Then we will allow bodily gestures, vocal inflexions, and facial expressions to gain momentum until our whole human nature is engaged.

The responses we get from the Lord are as real as our prayers. Try it. You’ll find that your mind opens, your heart warms, your body melts, and your spirit is revived. 

What Constitutes Human Nature?

This question of what makes up human nature has baffled people for eons.

Books by theologians, philosophers, and psychologists abound with varying views about what comprises human nature. Most positions emphasize one facet of humanness as all-important. 

Rationalists teach that the mind is the key to understanding human nature. 

Romantics argue that the heart is the crucial thing. 

Hedonists say no, the body and its pleasures should prevail. 

And Gnostics say the spirit alone is real. 

But the Self Compass approach asks why not combine all the parts that God has made in us, so we can function with a complete package? As you might expect, the compass model presents the case for holistic human nature, suggesting that since Christ, the God-person, experienced and expressed his mind and heart, body and spirit, then perhaps you and I should, too.

The Human Nature Compass

                                                                          

The compass approach is intuitive. Common sense tells you that the mind is for thinking, the heart for feeling, the body for sensing, and the spirit for communing with God. Simple though it is, the Human Nature Compass combines the sophistication of a multifaceted model with the witness of Jesus Christ’s human nature as revealed in the Gospels.

Jesus affirmed our human natures as he affirmed his own, because Christ values the whole of our humanness. In fact, many Gospel stories reflect his complimentary use of a holistic human nature. 

Do you remember when he ran across a woman who was hemorrhaging from an embarrassing female disorder? Jesus sensed her touch of his robe, even though a crowd was pressing him from all sides, and in that touch she was healed. Turning to face her, he thought about how helping her would offend those religious folks who judged her as “unclean.” Nevertheless, he felt compassion for her twelve years of torment. With spiritual authority he extended kinship to her in the family of God: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (Lk 8: 43-48). 

There is a message here. I think of it this way: when God created the cosmos, he paused to say, “It is very good.” Then, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son to become fully human. In taking human nature forever into the Godhead, Christ says to us: 

“You are my kin—

I’ve made your human nature very good, too.”

Find the Courage to Love Again

I learned years ago that what is the most personal is also the most universal. By disclosing to another human being our deepest secrets, we tell the story of humankind, sing the song of the ancients, and create the poetry of the soul. In baring the darkness within us, we find healing from past pain of relationships gone wrong, and in its place, light, and companionship.

I encourage you to reach out more often to those who prove trustworthy and disclose more of your core self, including those locked-away secrets that may be keeping you from disclosing your self (strengths and weaknesses, talents and foibles, achievements and mortifications) to go deeper than usual with the one you love, the partner in whom you seek a heart-to-heart reciprocity. You learn that together you can transcend life’s painful episodes—past and present; those humiliating events that might have conquered you but for your redemptive sharing.

Sled Ride Into Hell

My most humiliating experience occurred during a winter day of after-school sledding. I knew every inch of my neighborhood block from playing kick-the-can during the summers and sculpting snowmen on frosty days like this one.

Cheeks flushed against the cold and trembling with excitement, I stand in line with three other boys who wait their turn to dive through the air, land on sleds, and race to the bottom of the snow-packed hill. My turn comes up and I giggle uncontrollably when body and sled unite for another wild ride. 

I gather myself at hill’s bottom in preparation for the trek back up, when I see five boys forming a curtain of bodies around me. Jimmy, the sixth-grade classmate that I remember for his marvelous drawings in art class, emerges from the circle, hands gyrating in boxer fashion. Is he playing some kind of joke?

Just then a fist whips out and connects solidly with my eye. Three blows follow hard after. I dizzily try to find him in my vision, but he is dancing around. The street itself looks tilted, like I’m in an elevator in an earthquake. More hammer blows sting my cheeks, nose, and chin.

Only when I taste the grit of dirty snow mingled with broken teeth do I grasp that I have fallen. I am in a place where I’ve never been, face numb and throbbing. But where are my legs? My arms? My hands? I can’t find them.

Something wells up inside, from a place I didn’t know existed: a silent scream against having my dignity stripped away. This energy compels me to find my body parts and animate them. I crawl on all fours. Standing up, wobbling, I find Jimmy in my blurry field of vision.

The next half dozen blows I neither see nor hear, and wouldn’t even know about had not bystanders later told me. Mercifully, blackness swallows me like a snake swallowing a fish. I go into the snake’s belly, not having anywhere else to hide.  

When I come to, the world looks red. Two neighborhood friends have heaved shoulders under each of my arms and are dragging me home. My body feels foreign and out of joint. It’s not the physical pain, primarily, that feels so alien, but the humiliation of having not defended myself, the horror of having no answer to Jimmy’s evil assault.

A Real and Present Liberation

Here is what I’m driving at: it is precisely through retelling and reliving our stories that our isolation, and the evil embedded in our memories, is overcome. Every transparent disclosure cleanses and dresses old wounds until such time as we are substantially healed. Healing requires transcending fear and shame, and recovering our lost dignities.

So if you are prepared to listen, I will tell you about Delta.       

That night Mom uses scissors to snip off my undershirt, to avoid pulling it over the cuts on my face. Dad retires to his den, grumbling about having a son who can’t hold his own in a fight.

I crawl into bed, my mind playing mental movies of flashing lights, falling bodies, derisive sniggers, and banging blows. I curl into a ball, cringing. A consoling image vies with the ghostly collage until it comes into focus. It is my girlfriend Delta’s face.

Delta is my fledging attempt at having a girlfriend, my fifth and sixth grade flame. We talk at night on the phone and sometimes hold hands during recess. She has a ponytail, blue eyes, and a smile that tickles my insides.

Though I don’t want to go to school tomorrow wearing my raccoon black eyes and purple bruises, I will go. Delta will help me through this terrible pain. She will know that I am actually quite courageous; it’s just that nobody ever taught me how to fistfight. She will understand that I was ambushed and overwhelmed, and unlike my dad, she will not hold this against me. I drift into a restless sleep, grasping the image of her warm hug.

The next morning at school I arrive late. The whole class, even the teacher, leer at my puffed-out face. I scrunch down in my seat low enough to become invisible.

An eternity later the buzzer sounds. Everyone tears out of the room for the playground. I stay behind waiting for Delta to miss me out there, gasp when she learns what happened, and come running down the hallway to find me.

After five minutes, I peep out and the hall is empty. Another five minutes and the buzzer sounds. The first boy into the room, Terry, runs up to me breathless, and blurts, “Delta thinks you’re a coward. She’s broken up with you. She doesn’t want you to call her anymore.”

Baring the Heart Cleanses the Soul 

So let me wrap this up by saying what you know from your own life experience.  While there are plenty of evils inherent in living and loving, those evils are most effectively overcome by baring the heart and cleansing the soul, by disclosing your pain to a trusted person whose gracious understanding brings you back to social solidarity.

Over the years I’ve risked sharing my inner life many times, and have many times received healing and encouragement. If this weren’t true, I’d be titling this blog, “How to Avoid Pain in One Easy Lesson: Clam Up.” I want to support you in your search for inner healing. I want to say: 

“Whatever pain you’ve secretly endured, go ahead and share it, so that you can keep finding the courage to love again.”

Miracles, Science, and Modern Life: Praying in Jesus' Name

I like writing for the Lord Jesus Christ because I am both a scientist, a psychologist by lifelong calling, and a person of faith. Yet I didn't always have faith.

It started in university years, my awareness that modern life, based as it is on modern science, has little room for a life of faith in Christ, and a scathing judgment that praying in Jesus' name for a specific need is a foolish thing to do.

All of my professors in chemistry, physics, and biology were atheists. The Darwinian Bible of the evolutionary development of humanity, The Origin of Species, was drilled into me principle upon principle, as fundamental to my Bachelor of Science degree.

However, the summer of my graduation, when my own agnostic-atheistic philosophy had driven me into depressoin about the meaninglessness of life, I decided to re-read the Gospel of Christ (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) just to re-evaluate what it said.

I didn't like what I read. The whole New Testament called for a life of faith in Christ, that he died for my sins and rose for my redemption. I had no such faith. My whole perspective on life, which I'd adopted from my sophomore year forward, required empirical proofs and deductive logic to be applied to every aspect of life. If there wasn't scientific evidence for a belief, then toss it out, I reasoned, and if you couldn't make rational sense of a proposition about life, it must not be true.

How arid. How sterile. How lonely my life had become. I had analyzed myself into a corner where I could only count on these facts: that I had to pay yearly taxes to the government and that I would someday die.

An answer was about to rush into the desperate vacuum of my soul. For I went to a simple church service, like the one in which I'd originally believed in Christ at seventeen, and heard the Gospel anew. Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand...If you keep hardening your heart to God, you may well reach of PNR (a point of no return) where you never seek him again...And die in self-willed separation that brings eternal torment.

I didn't like hearing this. Not one bit. I almost walked out of the service. But then a gentle tug pulled at my heart. Perhaps the Holy Spirit? And I walked forward to the altar instead. It took an hour of struggling to pray before the Spirit descended upon me in earnest, helping me to cry my eyes out over walking away from Jesus in my university years, choosing instead a godless, faith-killing Darwinian philosophy that was driving me to despair.

The second hour at the altar was different from the first, for the Lord had heard my cry of repentance, and Christ arose within me with such force in my soul that I felt transported into heaven. I praised God with every cell in my body, tears of joy streaming down wet cheeks, until the janitor tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Good sir, can you finish talking to God on your way home, so I can start sweeping the sanctuary?"

Fast forward three months. I'm enrolled at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, where a summa cum laude degree had earned me a full scholarship. Only I had a problem. I had barely enough money for books, and no money left at all for the white lab coat we med students were required to buy.

Would Monday arrive and Dan Montgomery appear in the class of thirty-two students, the only one wearing street clothes? Time to pray, to apply my scientific background in a more creative way than before. I reasoned, If Jesus tells me to pray in his name for the things that I need, and that God the Father will answer these prayers to glorify his Son, then now would be a good time to do it.

The empirical proof would lie in whether this prayer experiment brought measurable results or evaporated into nothingness. So Saturday morning I said, "Father, I need a medical school lab jacket really bad and really fast. Can you please supply me one in Jesus' name?"

Nothing happened. So I carried on as best I could, picturing my upcoming humiliation in Monday morning classes.

Driving back to campus, I saw a Goodwill store on the left. An inner presence, much like the one I had experienced at the church altar, formed an image in my mind of me walking into the store and reaching into one of the boxes.

Shrugging my shoulders, I thought: What the heck. This experiment may have a very foolish outcome. But on the other hand, I'll never know unless I take the risk of faith.

I walked into the store and stood amidst a dozen huge boxes stuffed to the brim with clothing. I almost walked out again, but not before a presence formed an image in my mind of going to the third box and reaching deep down into it. So I did just that, my heart beating noticeably faster, since the result of the experiment was at hand.

I grabbed a piece of cloth about two-thirds of the way down, don't ask me why. My fingers simply gripped it and I yanked it out.

A white good-as-new medical school lab coat in just my size. 

I rushed to the cashier and paid the thirty-five cents it cost, then hurried to the dry cleaner next door.

In Monday morning's class thirty-two students appeared sporting bright white lab coats, Dan Montgomery among them.

I couldn't stopped smiling at the evidence I wore of the invisible Father whom science denies, yet faith affirms, providing for those who pray to him, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.