Week 40—Friday 2 Thessalonians 3:7-13
Week 40—FRIDAY
SPIRITUALIZATION—FIRST REFUGE
OF THE SKEPTICAL MIND
We saw yesterday that it was a merciful thing for God to ask us to offer our bodies as a “living sacrifice.” The emphasis is on “living.” The body that belongs to Jesus Christ is a “living” body. It can throw off disease germs; it can absorb hard knocks; it has a built-in repair shop, balancing the accounts by throwing off fatigue toxins each night; it is dedicated to health, not disease. So it breathes health, exudes health—it is health. If I am God’s I am a “living sacrifice.” If I am not God’s, I am a dying sacrifice.
No wonder then Paul said, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” This fulfills this voice: “Lo, I have come to do thy will . . . a body hast thou prepared me” (Heb. 10:7, 5).—the will of God was to be done in and through the body.
But we often do what The New English Bible does when it says, “I implore you by God’s mercy to offer your very selves to him: a living sacrifice.” It substitutes “your very selves” for “your bodies.” In other words, they spiritualize it. Now spiritualization is the first refuge of the skeptical mind. When we don’t know what to do with a thing we spiritualize it. That takes it out of the concrete and puts it into the abstract. For instance, when Jesus said that the first item in his Good News was “the gospel to the poor,” we make this the spiritually poor, for that takes it out of concrete relations and puts it into the Word made word. Renders it innocuous.
Paul says the presenting of the body is your “spiritual worship.” The spiritual is only spiritual when it is presented in incarnate terms. When you lift it out of material relations you make it the Word become word so that the spiritual has lost its spirituality and become verbal. So Christianity which is not the Word become flesh is less than Christianity.
O Lord Jesus, when we fellowship with you totally, we fellowship with you. If not totally then with an abstraction, a fiction. Save me from denaturing you and help me to take you as you are that you may take me as I am. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “I am in Nero’s prison, but I’m not Nero’s prisoner”—I’m bound to the earth but not earthbound.