Body and Spirit

I've felt really crappy for the past few days, some type of cold or sinus infection. It's made me kind of lethargic. Not only physically, but spiritually. It's funny how our physical body affects our spirit. There is some type of link between the two. I often tend to view my body as nothing more than the car in which my spirit drives around, but there is more to it than that. The body can be a help or a hindrance to the growth and nurture of my spiritual life. I guess that's why things like posture affect our prayers. That's why kneeling or raising our hands can actually enable our spirit to physically express a spiritual attitude. The body is our primary vehicle for acting out what our spirit is becoming. This is interesting when you consider that Jesus was the "incarnation" - the Word made flesh. In the same way, the Holy Spirit works in our hearts to help utilize the body for the Kingdom of God. It is the theatre where the truth of God is "incarnated" for the world to see. That's why Paul says, "I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasting to God -- this is your spiritual act of worship." (Rom 12:1)

Our body is not just a vehicle to drive a spirit around, but becomes the area where we work out our salvation. It is the testing ground where our spiritual growth is visibly developed and demonstrated.

Dallas Willard writes, "So what we find, then, is that the body is the place of our direct power. It is the little "power pack" that God has assigned to us as the field of our freedom and development. Our lives depend upon our direction and management of it. But it has and acquires a "life of its own"--tendencies to behave without regard to our conscious intentions. In our fallen world this life is prepossessed by evil, so that we do not have to think to do what is wrong, but must think and plan and practice--and receive grace--if we are to succeed in doing what is right.
But Christ shows us how to bring the body from opposition to support of the new life He gives us, "the spirit" now in us. He calls us to share His practices in sustaining His own relationship to the Father. Indeed, these practices--of solitude, silence, study, service, prayer, worship, etc.--are now the places where we arrange to meet regularly with Him and His Father to be His students or disciples in Kingdom living.
Some may think it strange that such practices, the disciplines for life in the spirit, are all bodily behaviors. But it cannot be otherwise. Learning Christlikeness is not passive. It is active engagement with and in God. And we act with our bodies. Moreover, this bodily engagement is what lays the foundation in our bodily members for readinesses for holiness, and increasingly removes the readinesses to sin -- "So that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." (Phil 1:20-21)"

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