The Best Thing About Your Body

What do you like best about your body?

Are you pleased with your smile? Your hair? Your height? Do you like the color of your eyes and the dimple in your cheek?

Are you thankful for your taste-buds, tongue, and teeth that allow you to enjoy the flavors of salty, sweet, and sour? Do you thank the Lord for your ability to savor the fragrance of rose petals, the smell of a toddler's just-washed hair, and the aroma of fresh-baked bread?

Do you appreciate the durability of your feet? The stability of your spine? The flexibility of your fingers?

In the next 24 hours your heart will beat more than 100,000 times, your lungs will breathe 23,000 times, and you will use more than 700 muscles—and until this moment you probably hadn't thought about any of those functions today.

Your body contains a complex computer (brain), pump (heart), musical instrument (ear), camera (eye), communication network (nerves), and furnace (stomach). You may not thank God for your digestive system in your daily prayers, but it's amazing when you think about it. Your body moves around on a flexible but sturdy structural framework (bones) under a protective covering (skin) that allows perspiration to escape when you exercise but keeps water from entering your body when you swim.

And yet, while our bodies testify to the creative power of God, there's another painful reality suggested by eyeglasses, hearing aids, bandages, and wheelchairs. We live in a flawed and frustrated world that is groaning and weary "from its bondage to decay" and waiting eagerly to be "brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).

It's a broken world full of bumps and bruises, aches and accidents. It's a world suffering from cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease.

Don't turn physical fitness into an idol. Even if you're fit and strong now, someday your eyesight and hearing will dim, your fingers will stiffen, and your back will ache. Today's star athlete is tomorrow's hospice resident. Someday your heart will stop beating, your lungs will stop breathing, and your brainwaves will cease. If the atheists and materialists are right and you are nothing more than the sum total of your body chemistry, what then? Death eventually will claim even the best-toned and beautiful body, so what then?

"Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," the Bible says, but it quickly adds that a day is coming when "we will all be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:50-51). For a Christian, death opens the door to a fitness level beyond anything you can imagine.

Your natural body is going to be replaced by a spiritual one; your weak body will be replaced by a powerful one; your perishable body will be replaced by an imperishable one; your frail and pain-prone body will be replaced by a glorious one (1 Corinthians 15:42-55).

"Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands" (2 Corinthians 5:1).

The best thing about your body is, you're going to get a new one!