For eleven years Adeolu ran the technical unit of his church in Surulere. If the sound system hummed, he found the loose cable. If the projector died in the middle of worship, he was already on the stairs with a spare lamp before anyone had asked. He was an accountant by profession, and he did the church’s accounts too, usually after midnight.
He had a saying, delivered with a grin whenever his wife complained that he was not sleeping or eating properly. “This body is just a tent,” he would say. “The real me is the spirit. Let the tent manage itself.” He had not seen a doctor in years. He did not need one, he said. He was covered by the blood.
Two days before the harvest thanksgiving, Adeolu was up a ladder in the main hall at eleven at night, hanging a string of lights along the gallery rail. He had been in the office since seven that morning and had eaten nothing since a roll of bread at noon. His head began to swim. He remembers reaching for the rail and missing it. The ladder went one way and he went the other.
The X-ray at the general hospital showed a fractured ankle. The doctor who set it asked him a few quiet questions about his sleep and his meals, and then said, “Mr Adeolu, your ankle broke because your body had nothing left. That ladder was the last straw, not the first.”
He spent the next seven weeks in a cast, first in a wheelchair and then on crutches. And in those weeks he learned two things he had not expected to learn. The first was that his body was not a tent to be neglected. The second came through a young woman named Toluwani, and I will tell you about her later.
The church that thought the body did not matter
The believers in Corinth had a problem with the body, though they would not have described it that way. They lived in a Greek city shaped by a philosophy that tended to treat the physical world as inferior. The spirit was noble; the body was a husk. One popular conclusion was that what you did with your body did not touch the real you at all. Some Corinthians had turned that idea into slogans, and Paul quotes them back to the church:
Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power. Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
“Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats.” That was a Corinthian saying. Food and stomachs belong together, they reasoned, and both are temporary, so bodily appetites carry no spiritual weight. From there it was a short step to treating sexual appetite in the same way. Paul answers the slogan with a sentence of his own: “the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.”
PunchlineRead that last phrase again. The Lord for the body. The Lord has purposes for your body. He has committed Himself to it.
Paul gives three reasons, and every one of them is about the gospel. First, resurrection: “God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.” The body is not a disposable container that will be thrown away when the spirit is released. God intends to raise it. Second, union with Christ: “your bodies are the members of Christ.” The believer is joined to the Lord, and that union includes his limbs. Third, the indwelling Spirit: “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you.”
The word Paul uses for temple is naos, which refers to the inner sanctuary, the place where God’s presence dwelt, as opposed to the wider temple courts. For a Jewish reader that was the holiest space in the world. Paul says that the believer’s body is now that kind of place. The Holy Spirit is not a visitor who stops by on Sundays. He lives in you, and the address He has chosen includes your physical frame.
Then comes the conclusion: “ye are not your own: For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”
The immediate application in Corinth was sexual purity, and we must not weaken that. But the principle reaches further. If your body has been bought, it belongs to Someone. If it is a sanctuary, it deserves honour. And if God is to be glorified in it, then what you do with it is part of your worship. Adeolu’s little saying, “Let the tent manage itself,” was closer to the Corinthian slogan than to the apostle’s answer.
Dust, breath and the Word made flesh
The dignity of the body did not begin at Corinth. It runs from the first pages of the Bible. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). God shaped the body with His own hands, so to speak, before He breathed His breath into it. Humanity was never a spirit trapped in a body by accident. A human being is an embodied creature by design, and when God looked at the whole of what He had made, He called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
David marvelled at the same truth: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works” (Psalm 139:14). The hidden knitting together of his bones in his mother’s womb moved him to worship.
The strongest word about the body, though, is the incarnation. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The eternal Son did not take on the appearance of a body. He became truly human, with hands that worked wood, feet that grew sore on the roads of Galilee and a stomach that grew hungry in the wilderness. And when He rose from the dead, He did not leave His body in the tomb like a discarded garment. He showed His disciples His wounds and said, “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).
Our future follows His. We wait, Paul says, for “the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23), and for the day when Christ “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). The word vile in the King James means lowly, humble. It is a body of humiliation, subject to weakness and decay. But it will be transformed, not discarded.
Paul describes that transformation in one of his great resurrection passages:
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.
Sown in weakness, raised in power. Notice that it is the same body that is sown and raised. God’s salvation does not abandon the physical. It redeems it.
Here we must clear up a confusion that is common in our churches. Paul often warns against “the flesh,” and many believers have heard those warnings as a condemnation of the physical body. But in passages like Galatians 5 or Romans 8, the word flesh usually refers to fallen human nature, the self that lives apart from God, and not to skin and muscle. Paul never tells us to despise the body. He tells us to stop letting sin reign “in your mortal body” (Romans 6:12) and to yield our members “as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Romans 6:13). The body is the instrument. The question is who is playing it.
NuggetYour body is not a tent you are waiting to escape. It was formed by God, bought by Christ, indwelt by the Spirit and destined for resurrection.
Presenting your body
When Paul has finished eleven chapters of the gospel in Romans, explaining justification, union with Christ, the life of the Spirit and the faithfulness of God, he turns to the believer’s response. And the first thing he mentions is the body. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1).
Look at the order. “By the mercies of God.” Paul does not begin with an instruction and then promise mercy as a reward. Mercy comes first. Everything God has done in Christ is the ground on which the appeal stands. You do not present your body to God in order to be accepted. You present it because you have been accepted.
“Present your bodies.” Not merely your hearts or your thoughts. The Greek word for present was used for bringing an offering to the altar, and it was also used for placing something at another’s disposal. Paul wants believers to place their physical lives at God’s disposal: their hands for His work, their feet for His errands, their voices for His praise and their ordinary hours for His purposes.
“A living sacrifice.” The sacrifices of the old covenant were killed and burned. Paul’s readers knew the smell of the temple altar. But the believer offers himself alive, every day, and keeps on living as an offering. That is a picture of a whole life, lived out in a body, belonging to God.
“Your reasonable service.” The phrase can also be rendered spiritual worship. The word for service is the word for priestly worship in the temple. Paul is saying that the most fitting worship is a body given to God. Worship happens when you sing on Sunday, and it also happens on Monday, when you sit at your desk in Ikeja and do honest work, when you lift your neighbour’s child out of the rain, when you walk slowly beside an elderly relative to the clinic.
This changes the way we think about caring for the body. If my body is an offering, then I have reason to look after it. Nobody brings a lame animal to the altar out of carelessness and calls it worship. The prophet Malachi rebuked priests who offered the blind and the sick because they could not be bothered to bring better (Malachi 1:8). The point was their contempt, not the animal’s condition. A believer who wilfully wrecks his body through neglect, excess or contempt is offering God something less than he could. But the offering of a body that is weak through no carelessness of its own is just as acceptable as any other. We will come to that.
Stewards of a borrowed house
“Ye are not your own.” That short phrase sets the whole question of physical health on a different foundation. If my body were simply mine, I could treat it however I liked. But Scripture describes the believer as a steward, someone entrusted with what belongs to another. “It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2). Faithfulness here does not mean perfection. It means responsible care of what has been placed in your hands.
What does that care look like? Some of it is very ordinary.
It means sleep. Adeolu thought staying up until two in the morning was a sign of dedication. His body disagreed. Rest is a subject we give a full teaching of its own in this series, but here it is enough to say that a body deprived of sleep for months will eventually present its account.
It means paying attention to warning signs. Headaches that do not go away, unusual tiredness, persistent pain, a wound that will not heal, a change in your body that worries you: these are things to take to a doctor, not things to pray about quietly while ignoring them. Prayer and a clinic appointment work together very well.
It means regular check-ups, even when you feel fine. Many serious conditions give little warning in their early stages. High blood pressure and diabetes are common in our communities and often go unnoticed for years. A simple blood pressure reading and the screening your doctor recommends for your age can catch problems early, when they are easier to manage. If your church or your local health centre holds a free screening day, go. It is a small act of stewardship.
It means taking prescribed treatment as directed, keeping follow-up appointments and asking questions when you do not understand. It means wearing a seatbelt, and a helmet on an okada, and keeping away from what slowly poisons you.
And it means a kind of humility. Many of us treat our bodies the way Adeolu did, as machines that must keep producing whatever we demand of them. Sometimes that comes from zeal. Sometimes it comes from pride, the belief that we are the exception and our bodies will not make us pay. Scripture is gentler and more realistic: “he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). If God remembers that you are dust, you may remember it too.
Two warnings belong here. A believer who lies awake worrying about every ache has made his body an idol of fear. And the care we are describing has to do with health and usefulness, never with matching some picture of the ideal body; another teaching in this series takes that up in detail. The principle is simple. You look after what has been entrusted to you, because of Whom it belongs to.
Treasure in clay jars
Now we come to a passage that guards everything we have said from turning into something harsh. Paul writes to the same Corinthian church, years later, about his own body:
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.
“We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” The treasure is the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which Paul has just described (2 Corinthians 4:6). The vessels are clay pots, the cheap, breakable household jars that every home in Corinth contained. People in that world sometimes hid valuables in ordinary pots, precisely because nobody would look for gold there.
Why would God put His treasure in something so fragile? Paul gives the reason: “that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” The weakness of the vessel makes the source of the power obvious. When a cracked pot shines, nobody credits the pottery.
Then Paul lists what his own body had been through. Troubled, perplexed, persecuted, cast down. Elsewhere he describes beatings, shipwreck, sleeplessness, hunger and cold (2 Corinthians 11:23-27). He could write, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). The Corinthians themselves had noticed that “his bodily presence is weak” (2 Corinthians 10:10), and some of them thought that disqualified him as an apostle. Paul’s answer is that the dying of the Lord Jesus, carried in his body, was the very means by which the life of Jesus was being displayed.
Hold this passage alongside 1 Corinthians 6. There, the body is a temple. Here, it is a clay jar. Your body is holy and honoured, and it is also fragile and mortal. Say only temple, and every weakness looks like a failure of care. Say only clay jar, and the body seems not to matter. Scripture says both.
Paul experienced this in Galatia too. “Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first” (Galatians 4:13). Whatever that illness was, it was the occasion of his ministry there. The Galatians did not reject him because of it; they “received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus” (Galatians 4:14). God planted a church through a sick apostle.
The outward man and the inward man
PunchlinePaul continues the thought a few verses later: “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).
“The outward man” is the visible, physical person, the body as it ages and wears. Paul is honest that it is perishing. He does not pretend otherwise. Bodies decline. Strength fades. Some bodies are injured early, some carry illness from birth, and all of them, unless the Lord returns first, will eventually die.
But that is not the whole story. “The inward man is renewed day by day.” While the jar is cracking, the treasure is not diminishing. God is at work in the believer in a way that physical decline cannot touch. And the surrounding verses give the ground of that confidence: “he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:14). The perishing outward man is headed for resurrection.
Paul held both realities in his own life with remarkable steadiness. Writing from prison, unsure whether he would live or die, he said:
According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
“Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.” Paul expected Christ to be honoured in his body whatever condition that body was in. Strong or weak, free or chained, living or dying, the body remained the place where Christ was magnified.
This is why “we faint not.” A believer facing illness, injury or the slow work of age does not have to conclude that his usefulness to God has ended. The life of Jesus can be made manifest “in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:11), and mortal flesh is the only kind any of us has.
Illness and disability do not demote you
There is an assumption that runs quietly through many churches, and it needs to be named because it does real damage. The assumption is that a healthy, able body is the normal Christian condition, and that illness or disability means something has gone wrong with a person’s faith, or at least that it makes them less useful to God.
You can see the assumption in the way some people are greeted at church. “Sister, you are still using that stick? You must pray more.” You can see it in the way rotas are drawn up: the ushers must be able to stand for three hours, the choir must climb steps, the media room is upstairs. You can see it when a member who has become ill simply drops out of sight, because nobody can imagine what he could still contribute. And you can hear it in a whispered theology that says, if she really believed, she would have been healed by now.
Jesus confronted exactly this reasoning. When His disciples saw a man born blind, they asked whose sin had caused it, and He answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3). Elsewhere in this series we have seen that God still heals, and that believers should pray for the sick with expectation. I believe that with all my heart. But hoping for healing and honouring a person as they are now belong together. We do not wait for someone’s body to be fixed before we treat them as a full member of the body of Christ.
Paul uses the image of the human body to describe the church, and he says something that turns our usual ranking upside down: “those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” (1 Corinthians 12:22). Not tolerated. Necessary. And Jesus gave His followers a striking instruction about hospitality:
Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.
In the parable that follows, when the invited guests make excuses, the master sends his servant out to “bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind” (Luke 14:21). The people the world left outside are the honoured guests at God’s table. The kingdom of God has never been organised around physical ability.
So let this be plain. If you live with a disability, a chronic illness or a body that does not do what it once did, you are not a second-class believer. You have not been demoted in the kingdom. You are not less faithful because you are less mobile. The Spirit who lives in you is the same Spirit who lives in the fittest athlete in your congregation. Your body is His temple too, and your weakness may be the very clay jar through which His power shines most clearly.
And if you lead a church or a department, look at your building, your rotas and your assumptions. Ask who has been quietly left out. A ramp at the entrance, a seat near the front, a role that can be done sitting down and a willingness to ask, “How would you like to serve?” are small things. They say a great deal about what you believe the gospel does with bodies.
Toluwani was twenty-six. She had been injured in a road accident on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway at nineteen and had used a wheelchair since. She was a graphic designer, and a very good one. Some months before Adeolu’s fall, she had offered to help the technical unit with the slides for Sunday services. He had thanked her politely and explained that the media room was upstairs and the work needed people who could run up and down. She had not argued.
When Adeolu came home from the hospital, Toluwani was the one who organised the welfare visit. She came herself, with two others, and when she saw him in the borrowed wheelchair in his sitting room she laughed. “Brother Adeolu,” she said, “welcome to my world.”
Over the next few weeks he discovered her world. He found out how many church entrances have steps and no ramp. He found out how quickly people stop asking you to do anything. He sat at the back of the hall, unable to reach the media room, and felt useless for the first time in his adult life. One Sunday he admitted it to her. “I feel as if I am no good to God like this.”
She looked at him for a moment. “That is what you have been telling me for two years,” she said, gently. “You just never said it out loud.”
He told me later that it was the most painful sentence he had ever heard, and the most helpful.
When the cast came off, Adeolu went back to the technical unit, but not in the same way. He moved the slide desk to a corner of the main hall on the ground floor. Toluwani designs the slides now, and the congregation agrees they have never looked better. He sleeps more than he did. He eats lunch. He had his blood pressure checked for the first time in years, and he goes back when the doctor tells him to. His wife says the media room misses him less than she does.
“I used to say the body is just a tent,” he told me. “Now I say it is the Lord’s house. You look after the Lord’s house. And you never tell anybody that their house is too weak for Him to live in.”
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- How have you tended to think about your body: as a tent to be ignored, a machine to be driven, or a temple and an offering belonging to God?
- What do 1 Corinthians 6 and 2 Corinthians 4 each teach about the body, and why do we need both pictures?
- Are there warning signs in your own health that you have been ignoring or praying about without acting on?
- What assumptions about illness or disability have you absorbed, perhaps without realising it?
- What could your church or department do to make room for people whose bodies are weaker or less mobile?
This Week
This week, take one concrete step of stewardship for your own body. If you have not had a check-up in the past year, book one, and ask your doctor about blood pressure and the screening appropriate for your age. Then take one concrete step of honour toward someone else: find a member of your church who lives with illness or disability and ask them, without assumptions, how they would like to serve or how they would like to be supported. Listen to the answer.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for forming me from the dust and breathing Your life into me. Thank You that my body has been bought by the blood of Jesus and is a temple of Your Holy Spirit. Forgive me for the ways I have neglected it, driven it, or treated it as though it did not matter. Teach me to present it to You as a living sacrifice, caring for it faithfully without fear or vanity. Where my body is weak, let the life of Jesus be made manifest in my mortal flesh. And open my eyes to every brother and sister whose body is frail, so that I honour them as You do. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.