Abdullahi works nights. Six evenings a week, at seven o’clock, he takes his place in the small gatehouse of a residential estate in Lekki, and he stays there until seven the next morning. He opens the barrier for late cars, signs in delivery riders, walks the perimeter fence with a torch every two hours, and listens for anything unusual in the dark. His wife and three children live in Kafanchan, in southern Kaduna, and most of what he earns goes to them. He shares a room in Ajah with two other men and sleeps there in the daytime, when the room is hottest and the neighbour’s generator is loudest.
On Sunday mornings he goes straight from the gate to church, still in his uniform trousers, and sits near the back so that nobody will notice if he nods off.
One Sunday the church held what the bulletin called Health and Wellness Sunday. The guest speaker was a pastor from Victoria Island, lean and muscular, in a fitted suit. His sermon came with slides. He showed photographs of himself in a gym at five in the morning. He talked about organic vegetables, eight hours of sleep every night and a weekly session with a personal trainer. “Your body is a billboard for your faith,” he said. “When people see you, they should see discipline. A man who cannot control his belly cannot control his spirit.” The congregation laughed and clapped.
Abdullahi did not laugh. He was a broad man with a heavy frame, and the usher who showed him to his seat had once joked about it. He had never been inside a gym. He could not remember the last time he had slept eight hours. He ate whatever the buka near the estate was selling when his shift ended, because it was cheap and it was there. As the sermon went on, he felt something close to shame settle on him. If this was what a faithful Christian body looked like, then he was failing God every day of his life, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He told me afterwards that he nearly stopped coming to that church. What kept him was a conversation at the health desk by the door, which I will tell you about at the end.
Abdullahi’s question is a good one. What does it actually mean to look after your body as a Christian, when your life looks nothing like the pictures?
Exercise thyself unto godliness
Paul wrote to his young co-worker Timothy, who was leading the church in Ephesus. False teachers had arrived with a programme of strict bodily rules, as if holiness could be achieved by denying the body its ordinary needs. Paul’s response is firm:
Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.
Marriage and food are gifts of God, “created to be received with thanksgiving.” The body and its ordinary needs are not enemies of holiness. They are sanctified “by the word of God and prayer.” Then Paul turns to Timothy personally:
But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
“Exercise thyself rather unto godliness.” The word exercise is the Greek gymnazo, from which we get gymnasium. Paul borrows the language of physical training, which every young man in a Greek city knew well, and applies it to the life of faith. Godliness requires training too: steady, repeated practice of prayer, Scripture, obedience and love, until it becomes a settled way of life.
“For bodily exercise profiteth little.” This phrase is often misunderstood. Some use it to dismiss physical activity altogether, as if Paul thought it was pointless. Others feel it is embarrassing and skip over it. But Paul does not say bodily exercise profits nothing. He says it profits little, and the Greek phrase can mean either “a little” or “for a little while.” Physical training is genuinely useful, within its limits. It benefits the body in this present life. Godliness, by contrast, “is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”
So Paul ranks them. He does not set them against each other. Caring for your body has real value. It simply cannot carry the weight that godliness carries. A strong body will not make you holy, and it will not last forever. A godly life shapes everything, now and for eternity.
That single verse already answers the guest speaker. Physical discipline is good, but it is not a billboard for faith. You cannot read the depth of a person’s walk with God from the shape of his body. And a believer who has never seen the inside of a gym may be far further along in the training that matters most.
Two errors Paul refused
In these few verses Paul steers between two opposite mistakes, and both are still with us.
The first is contempt for the body. The false teachers in Ephesus treated the body with suspicion. Holiness, for them, meant denying it: no marriage, no certain foods, harsh restrictions. Paul describes similar teaching in Colossae, with its rules, “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (Colossians 2:21), and its “neglecting of the body.” He says that such things “have indeed a shew of wisdom,” but they are “not in any honour” (Colossians 2:23). They look impressive. They do not actually make anyone holier. Neglecting the body is not a spiritual achievement.
That error appears in our setting whenever believers treat their health as unspiritual, or boast about how little they sleep, or ignore illness because attending to it feels worldly. It is close to what Adeolu believed in an earlier teaching, when he called his body “just a tent.”
The second error is the worship of the body. This one is newer in its forms but just as old in its roots. It treats physical appearance as the measure of a person’s worth, and fitness as a kind of righteousness. It fills social media with “body goals.” It sells products, programmes and plans with the promise of a better self. And it can creep into churches, where a slim figure is quietly treated as a sign of discipline and a heavy one as a sign of sin.
Someone may ask about Paul’s own words to the Corinthians: “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:27). Does that not sound like contempt? Read the context. Paul has just compared himself to an athlete who “is temperate in all things” in order to win a prize (1 Corinthians 9:25). The athlete does not hate his body. He trains it, so that it serves his purpose instead of ruling him. Paul’s purpose was the gospel. He would not let appetite, comfort or laziness govern a life that belonged to Christ. That is discipline for the sake of service, and it is a long way from the harsh rules of Colossae. The same apostle could write, “All things are lawful unto me... but I will not be brought under the power of any” (1 Corinthians 6:12). Self-control is freedom from being mastered.
Paul refuses both errors with the same principle. The body is good because God made it, and it is to be received with thanksgiving. But it is not God. It is to be cared for, and it is not to be worshipped. “No man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it” (Ephesians 5:29). Nourish and cherish: that is the language of loving care, neither contempt nor obsession.
PunchlineThe body is good because God made it, and it is not God. Care for it with thanksgiving, without contempt and without worship.
Stewardship of an ordinary life
The Bible’s best word for our responsibility toward the body is stewardship. “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” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). We considered that passage in its Corinthian context in an earlier teaching. Here I want to notice one phrase: “which ye have of God.” Your body is something you have received. It has been entrusted to you.
A steward is someone who manages what belongs to another. “It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2). Not spectacular. Not perfect. Faithful.
And faithfulness is always measured in the actual situation the steward has been given. In the parable of the talents, one servant received five talents, another two and another one. The master did not expect the servant with two to produce what the servant with five produced. He praised both faithful servants in exactly the same words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things” (Matthew 25:21). Jesus also said, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10).
This is liberating. Stewardship of your body does not mean matching someone else’s routine. It means faithful care of the body you actually have, in the life you are actually living, with the resources you actually possess. A night security guard, a nursing mother of twins, a trader who sits in a market stall from dawn to dusk, a student living on very little, a man recovering from surgery and an elderly woman with arthritis will all look after their bodies differently. Each of them can be found faithful.
Paul puts it at the heart of Christian worship: “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). Notice that this appeal comes “by the mercies of God.” Caring for the body is a response to grace, never a way of earning it. You do not look after your health in order to make God love you. You look after it because He already does, and because the body you live in has become the place where you serve Him.
The Lord looketh on the heart
When God sent Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint a king from among the sons of Jesse, the prophet’s eye went straight to the eldest:
And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD’s anointed is before him. But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.
Eliab looked like a king. He was tall and impressive, the kind of man people instinctively follow. Samuel, a great prophet, was certain that this was the Lord’s choice. And God corrected him: “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature... for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.”
That sentence should be written over every conversation about health in the church. We are very quick to look on the outward appearance. We comment on people’s weight when they arrive at a family gathering. “You have added o!” “Ah, you have become so thin, are you sick?” We assume that a slim person is disciplined and a heavy person is careless. We assume that a muscular person is healthy and a frail one has done something wrong. None of those assumptions is reliable, and all of them can wound.
A person’s size or shape can be affected by many things: genetics, medication, illness, pregnancy, stress, poverty, the kind of work they do, the hours they keep. Two people with very different bodies may be equally faithful stewards. A person who looks fit may be struggling with a hidden illness, and a person with a heavier frame may be in good health. Only God sees the whole picture. Only He looks on the heart.
Remember too what Isaiah said about the Servant of the Lord: “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). The Saviour of the world did not look like a magazine cover. Peter tells believers that their true adorning is “the hidden man of the heart... even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:4).
So let us stop moralising appearance. Stop commenting on other people’s bodies. Stop treating weight as a measure of godliness, in either direction. If you are concerned for someone’s health, speak to them privately, kindly and only if your relationship gives you the right, and encourage them to see a doctor, who can actually assess it. And if you have been on the receiving end of such comments, know that God does not look at you the way those people did.
Prosper and be in health
The apostle John opened a short personal letter with a prayer that has encouraged believers for generations:
Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
“I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health.” John wanted his friend Gaius to be well in body as well as in soul. He was not embarrassed to pray for physical health. He wished it “above all things,” which in Greek carries the sense of “in all respects.” John wanted Gaius to flourish in every area of life.
I believe God delights in the health of His people, and that it is right to pray for it, expect it and pursue it. Health is a blessing. The ability to work, to provide for your family, to serve in your church and to enjoy God’s world in a body that functions well is a gift worth asking for. Believers should not be shy about praying, “Lord, keep me in health.”
But notice the comparison John makes: “even as thy soul prospereth.” Gaius was spiritually healthy. John had heard that he walked in the truth (3 John 1:3). His soul’s health was the first thing John celebrated, and he prayed that Gaius’s body would flourish in the same way. The order matters. Soul and body belong together, and the soul’s prosperity comes first.
This verse is a prayer, not a guarantee that every believer will be free of illness at all times. Faithful believers in the New Testament were sometimes sick, as we have seen elsewhere in this series. And it is certainly not a standard against which to judge people. A believer who is unwell is not prospering less in his soul. But it gives us permission to want health, to pray for it with confidence, and to take sensible steps toward it as part of our stewardship.
She hath done what she could
Now we come to Abdullahi’s real difficulty. What does stewardship look like when your circumstances are far from ideal?
In the final week of His life, a woman came to Jesus at a dinner in Bethany and poured a jar of very costly ointment over His head. Some of the guests were indignant at the waste. Jesus defended her:
And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.
“She hath done what she could.” That is one of the most generous sentences Jesus ever spoke about anyone. He did not measure the woman against what someone else might have done, or against an ideal act of devotion. He measured her against what was possible for her, and He called it “a good work.”
Paul expresses the same principle about giving: “if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not” (2 Corinthians 8:12). God measures faithfulness by what you have, not by what you lack.
That principle applies to the care of the body. God is not asking Abdullahi to live like the pastor from Victoria Island. He is asking him to do what he can, with the body, the hours and the income he actually has. For one person, that may mean walking to the bus stop instead of taking a keke. For another, it may mean taking the stairs at the office, or stretching for ten minutes before a long shift, or getting to bed half an hour earlier. For someone with a disability or a chronic illness, it may mean following the exercises a physiotherapist has recommended, or simply keeping every clinic appointment. For a mother with small children, it may mean accepting that this season will not include much time for herself, and finding small mercies where she can.
None of these is impressive. All of them can be faithful. “She hath done what she could.”
And sometimes doing what you can includes accepting what you cannot change. Poverty, unsafe neighbourhoods, long commutes, shift work, the cost of good food and the lack of nearby clinics are real constraints on health. Many of them are not the fault of the people who live under them. A church that understands stewardship will not only encourage individuals to care for their bodies. It will look for practical ways to help those whose circumstances make that care difficult.
Habits that fit a real life
What, then, are some general habits of healthy stewardship that most believers can adapt to their own situation? I offer these as pastoral encouragement, not medical advice. Your own doctor is the right person to guide you in the specifics.
Have regular check-ups. Many serious conditions, including high blood pressure and diabetes, are common in our communities and can develop for years without obvious symptoms. A simple blood pressure reading and the screening your doctor recommends for your age can catch problems early. If your church, workplace or local primary health centre offers free screening, make use of it.
Take prescribed treatment faithfully. If your doctor has prescribed medication, take it as directed and keep your follow-up appointments. Avoid buying strong medicines over the counter without proper guidance, and tell your doctor about anything else you are taking.
Move your body in whatever way your life and health allow. Walking, climbing stairs, working in a garden and playing with your children all count. You do not need a gym membership or special equipment. If you have a medical condition, ask your doctor what kind of activity is safe for you.
Guard your sleep. Another teaching in this series takes up rest in detail. For now, simply recognise that sleep is part of stewardship, and that people who work at night may need to protect their daytime sleep with particular care.
Eat with thanksgiving and moderation. Paul tells us that God created food “to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:3), and Scripture also counts temperance among the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23). We give the subject of food and appetite its own teaching, so I will say only this: receive what God provides gratefully, and let self-control grow as a fruit of the Spirit rather than a source of anxiety or shame.
Keep yourself safe. Wear a seatbelt. Insist on a helmet when you ride an okada. Avoid habits that slowly damage the body, and if you are struggling to stop one, ask for help.
NuggetPay attention to warning signs, and do not pray past them quietly. Pray about them, and take them to a doctor.
Start small. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” One small habit kept for a year is worth more than a dramatic plan abandoned in a fortnight.
A church that helps
What would it look like for a church to encourage healthy stewardship without heaping condemnation on people?
It would preach the goodness of the body and the grace of God before it preached any habits. It would hold health days with free blood pressure checks and screening, perhaps with the help of medical professionals in the congregation, and it would make them welcoming to everyone. It would never mock anyone’s size or shape from the pulpit or in the corridor, and it would gently correct those who do. It would think about the people whose lives do not fit the ideal: the shift workers, the very poor, the disabled, the chronically ill, the carers. It would ask what help they actually need.
It would also model balance. Leaders would speak honestly about their own efforts and struggles, rather than presenting themselves as the standard. Members would be encouraged to support one another: to walk together, to remind each other of check-ups, to visit the sick and to help with hospital bills. Health would be treated as part of the ordinary life of discipleship, not as a performance.
And it would keep reminding everyone that godliness is “profitable unto all things.” The goal is not a perfect body. The goal is a life lived faithfully before God, in a body cared for with gratitude.
As Abdullahi was leaving church that Sunday, a retired nurse who ran the health desk by the door called him over. Everyone called her Mama Nurse. She had a blood pressure machine on the table and a stack of small cards. “Sit down, my son,” she said. “Let me check you.”
His blood pressure was high. Not dangerously so, she said, but high enough that he needed to see a doctor that week. She wrote the name of the primary health centre near his house on a card and made him promise to go.
Then she asked him about his life. He told her about the gate, the hot room in Ajah, the generator, the buka, the money he sends to Kafanchan. She listened without interrupting. When he mentioned the sermon, she shook her head. “That pastor has his own life,” she said. “God has not given you his life. God has given you yours. So let us ask what faithfulness looks like in yours.”
They worked it out together over the following weeks. He went to the health centre, and the doctor started him on treatment and asked him to come back every month. He hung an old wrapper over the window of his room to keep out the light, and bought a cheap pair of earplugs for the generator. He began walking the full perimeter of the estate on every round instead of just the front fence, which added up to several kilometres a night. He kept a bottle of water in the gatehouse. When he could, he ate something before the buka closed instead of after. None of it cost much.
PunchlineSix months later his blood pressure was under control. He had not become the man on the slide. He did not expect to.
“I used to think God wanted me to look like that pastor,” he told me. “Now I know He wants me to be faithful with the body He gave me, in the life He gave me. That one, I can do.”
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- How have you tended to measure a healthy Christian body? Has that standard come from Scripture or from somewhere else?
- What does 1 Timothy 4:7-8 teach about the value and the limits of bodily exercise?
- Have you ever made or received comments about someone’s weight or appearance? How does 1 Samuel 16:7 challenge that?
- What does “she hath done what she could” mean for the care of your own body in your current circumstances?
- What is one small, faithful habit you could begin this week?
This Week
Choose one small habit of stewardship that fits your actual life, and keep it every day this week. It might be a short walk, an earlier bedtime, a glass of water before work or a blood pressure check you have been putting off. Each time you do it, thank God for your body in a single sentence. Then, for the whole week, refuse to comment on anyone else’s size or shape, and notice how often the temptation arises.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the body You have given me. It is Your gift, and it belongs to You. Forgive me where I have neglected it, and forgive me where I have worshipped it or judged others by theirs. Teach me to care for it faithfully in the life You have actually given me, without comparing myself to anyone else. Train me in godliness above all, because it is profitable for all things. Keep me in health, as my soul prospers in You. And help me to look on others as You look on them, at the heart. 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.