Why Taking Care of our Bodies Matters in our Christian Journey

By Jessica Brodie

If you’re like me, you’re starting to see ads everywhere about self-care. From losing weight to sleeping well to hormone balance to fitness, the reminders are constant. Yet if you’re also anything like me, you’re exhausted. You’re doing too much.

Yet that’s exactly why taking care of yourself is so critical—except often, we don’t. Life gets in the way. Grief and crisis get in the way.

A few years ago, my teenaged daughter went through a major mental health crisis, and it started not long after the pandemic began. While I had a lifelong foundation as a generally fit person and a healthy eater, suddenly my world had turned upside down. I stopped my fitness routine immediately. Many of my days were spent next to her on the couch, just being there for her while I worked, and I became quite sedentary.

It took a toll on my body. News flash: Just because you have a healthy foundation doesn’t mean that consistently treating yourself poorly won’t catch up with you, and it turns out that being sedentary is not my friend.

Now that she’s so much better, I’m free to do what I need to do again, only I’d gotten out of the habit. Not only did I feel very little motivation to start working out again, but I also found myself so exhausted that it seemed like a horrible idea.

Still, I knew I was “supposed to.” In fact, I knew I needed to in order to remain healthy.

At the beginning of the year, I took my first step—I decided to start going on the treadmill every weekday morning. The first morning was the hardest, and I prayed that God would somehow give me the push I needed to commit. Thankfully, he did. I wrote about that in this blog here—basically, as I took my first steps on the treadmill, I felt God speak into my heart: “You need to be ready for 2027.” I don’t know if that was ominous or if he was referring to something good that’s coming, but it doesn’t really matter. I heard him say I had to be prepared, and that did it for me. Since the first of the year I’ve walked on the treadmill five days a week, and I’ve been weightlifting three days a week. I feel so much better. This month, I’m starting to notice major changes in my body. My arms are toned. My legs are toned. My core is toned. It’s not about how it looks, of course—the point is that I’m noticing. The hard work is starting to pay off, and I’m feeling great. I’m feeling equipped in new ways for whatever the future will bring.

It’s not always easy. On hard weeks, or when I have a work commitment the night before, or when I’m not feeling well, it’s hard to get out of bed that early. Some days, the weight training feels impossible.

But I’ve stuck with it. I’ve asked God on those days to help me, to give me the strength I don’t have on my own, and he has.

My friends, we cannot pour from an empty cup. And when we are bone-weary or in poor health, we’re not treating ourselves well. We’re certainly not able to help God and do his work as well as we could be.

Now, certainly, you don’t have to be able to walk or move around or do anything physically in order to further God’s kingdom. I know plenty of people who are paralyzed who are just as much of a kingdom warrior as those who are not paralyzed.

But we’re supposed to take care of our earthly temples, and if we’re not doing that, I feel like we’re letting God down.

In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, the apostle Paul reminds us, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (ESV).

Glorifying body in our body means doing our best to be holy. It means treating ourselves well and abstaining from harmful practices, whether promiscuity or substance abuse or a daily diet of junk food. It means remembering we are beautifully handcrafted by the Creator of the Universe, who “formed my inward parts” and “knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

I’m still a work in progress — but I’m his work in progress, and that makes all the difference.

What’s one small step you can take this week to better care for the temple God gave you?

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