How to Biblically View and Care for our Physical Bodies?

How to biblically view and care for our physical bodies. That is the topic we'll discuss today on the Christian Worldview radio program where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host.

Thank you for your prayer, notes of encouragement and financial support. Our website is thechristianworldview.org and all our contact information and social media pages will be given throughout the program today. Just a very quick announcement that our recent speaker series event with Alex Newman on the push for global governance is now available for you to watch on video.

Just go to our website where you can watch the entire event there. Now to our topic of the day. While there is great diversity in the world, whether religion or culture, socioeconomic groups, personal experience, family background, education and many more, there are some things we all have in common. One of them is a physical body. It's interesting to note that God spoke everything into existence except for Adam, man, which God formed from the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.

That's from Genesis 2.7. God didn't have to create a physical body for Adam, but he did, and there's significance to that. We often focus on the immaterial part of life, our soul and spirit, but let's consider that God designed a material, physical body to embody the soul and spirit. So how should we view and care for the body God gives us? Should we see it as temporary, decaying and therefore fairly unimportant, thus, quote, eat, drink and be sedentary for tomorrow we die? Or should we view and care for the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, as it says in 1 Corinthians 6?

And what exactly does that mean in practical ways with regard to eating and exercise and rest? So let's start with this. How we view and care for our physical bodies is important to God and therefore should be to us as well. It says in Psalm 139 that God specifically created your body. For you formed my inward parts. You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to you, King David writes, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works and my soul knows it very well. Not only did God specifically create your body, but your body is your spiritual service of worship. There's the familiar passage in Romans chapter 12. Therefore, I urge you, Paul writes, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. But not only that, but for the Christian, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 6, starting in verse 15. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

May it never be! Flee immorality, sexual immorality, for every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Verse 19. More in the body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?

For you have been bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body. There's a lot in that passage. When you become a believer in Jesus Christ, you become part of the universal body of Christ, that's all true Christians, and you are also the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to reside inside of your body. GodQuestions.org had an interesting thing to say about this doctrine of your body being the temple of the Holy Spirit. They said, if God meant simply to convey the idea that the Spirit lives within the believer, He could well have used words such as home or house or residence. But by choosing the word temple to describe the Spirit's dwelling, He conveys the idea that our bodies are the shrine or the sacred place in which the Spirit not only lives, the Holy Spirit, but is worshipped, revered, and honored. Just consider Jesus Christ and His physical body.

The Son of God came in a physical body, not as a spirit. He healed people's bodies all throughout His ministry. He offered His own body on the cross for our sin, even communion that we remember in church. 1 Corinthians 11. For I received, Paul writes, from the Lord that which I also deliver to you, that the Lord Jesus and the night in which He was betrayed took bread. What did that represent? And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, This is My body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of Me. Christ came with an actual body, and that body was crucified on the cross, and His blood was shed to pay God's just penalty for the sins of all who would believe. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9. Do you not know that those who run in a race all run? You need a body to run, by the way, but only one receives the prize.

Run in such a way that you may win. Verse 27. But I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified. So there's an element here that you have a body, it has sinful desires, it needs to be disciplined, it needs to be made our slave, and we don't become a slave to the body. So what doesn't glorify God with our bodies? As we read in these passages we've just gone over, well, sexual immorality is an obvious one. Any thought or any action of sex outside of a marital relationship is dishonors, the temple of the Holy Spirit, your body. Drunkenness and drug use does not glorify God. Ephesians 5. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Another one is cutting or marking the body. There it says in Leviticus chapter 19, you shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead, nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves, I am the Lord. That's what God said to the Israelites in the Old Testament. Another thing that doesn't glorify God with our bodies is gluttony. Proverbs 23 says, do not be with heavy drinkers of wine or with gluttonous eaters of meat, people who eat too much with no consideration for their body. One more way we don't glorify God with our bodies is when we choose to be sedentary rather than moving or doing some exercise. God designed our bodies to be able to move and that actually makes us healthier. So here are two sinful ditches with our physical bodies. The first is making the physical body to be of little priority.

In other words, the body's perishing, it's non-spiritual like the Gnostics in the New Testament believed. The matter was evil and the spirit is good and so we have very little bodily discipline. We eat too much, the wrong kinds of foods, too sedentary, not enough rest. We make excuses for our body and just overlook it. That's one sinful ditch. On the other side is another sinful ditch where the body becomes of highest priority, where we focus on body image and we obsess over exercise and have a strict diet and what we wear for clothes is of big importance and makeup and supplements. Always pursuing the fountain of youth, even surgeries where we basically exalt or worship our bodies.

That's a sinful ditch as well and cultural pressure by the way through media and marketing and our flesh even leads us into one of these sinful ditches. God's message is I've wonderfully made your body view it and care for it as the temple of the Holy Spirit that it is. Our guest today on the Christian worldview to help us understand how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies is Haley Erickson. She's a nutrition coach, personal trainer and speaker and she has a very interesting story about how God brought her to understand better how to view and care for her body. Her story was recently featured on the 700 Club television program.

Let's listen to a few minutes of excerpts from that to give you a better idea of who Haley is and how God brought her to himself. Haley Erickson had long lived by the motto, Eat Clean, Train Mean. Haley had never been happy with her body or her weight, something she picked up from her mom. I saw my mom always dieting and talking about what her body looks like and needing to change her body.

And so I know as like a young girl like really looking up to my mom. I really thought that like well I must need to look a certain way to also be loved and accepted by others. So in high school, she started eating healthy dieting and exercising constantly. Although I tried to play it off as I'm just super healthy, like I just love to exercise I love to eat healthy in my heart I knew this is not healthy this is an obsession my life was totally revolved around food and exercise and what my body looks like. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror that was always something that needed to be better. What, whether it was fixing my body or something about my face.

It was never good enough. Then, her sophomore year in college, Haley overheard some of her sorority sisters, talking about going to the beach for spring break and needing to lose weight. Now she took her obsession of non stop weight training and counting calories, to a new unhealthy level. This led to many physical and mental health issues, just very like lonely and sad and just felt very isolated and truly like the gym was my best friend, which is really sad to say because I didn't have those solid relationships, but also physically it really took a toll on my health, although I kept pushing past the pain. Then during Christmas break of her junior year, Haley slipped on black ice and injured her leg. It wasn't broken, but doctors told her she couldn't exercise for weeks. The now 20 year old became desperate, and I begged God to please show me the purpose of my life, because everything I was living for was gone, and I didn't know why I was here, what the purpose of my life was, and I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted to live anymore, like that's how dark it was.

It was everything I had built my life on was gone. Weeks later, as soon as the pain subsided, Haley was back in the gym. This time, she met then 85 year old Mary Jane. The two hit it off and Mary Jane invited Haley to her home the next day. When the conversation turned to families, Haley shared a picture of hers, explaining she grew up in a Christian home. She didn't know her new friend was also a follower of Jesus. I asked her, are you a Christian? And then she cried.

And I knew that something was missing. And I thought, this is why she's here. Till then, Haley considered herself to be a Christian. Mary Jane explained God's plan of salvation through Christ. John 3.16, for God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, that if you believe in him, you will not perish, but have everlasting life.

And I put her name in it. For God so loved Haley, that he gave his one and only son, that if Haley believes in him, Haley shall not perish, but have eternal life. Haley accepted Christ into her life that day and began to grow in her faith. The Lord led me to really cling to truth instead of what I thought was my identity and what made me worthy.

Now a nutrition coach, personal trainer, and public speaker, Haley still likes to stay fit. But she says she now sees herself through God's eyes. The Lord really helped me renew my mind with seeing who he says I am instead of what this world or what I thought made me worthy and just seeing the truth of my identity in Christ. You will meet Haley Erickson next on The Christian Worldview. We'll go deeper into how God saved her using that elderly lady named Mary Jane.

There's a surprise coming in case you haven't already figured it out. And then Haley will share with us what God has taught her about viewing and caring for our earthly bodies. Short pause first to tell you about some ministry resources.

I'm David Wheaton and you are listening to The Christian Worldview radio program. Christians with discernment know that the U.S. public education system is humanistic to the core. That is because subversives have successfully removed from government schools the most important subject to understand truth and reality, God. While Americans were once educated at home or privately in an explicitly Christian way, today government schools are radically anti-Christian, propagandizing children with evolution, graphic sexual content, gender confusion, and globalism. Alex Newman's book, Indoctrinating Our Children to Death, is our new featured resource. It's softcover, 276 pages, and retails for $17.99. You can order the book for a donation of any amount to The Christian Worldview.

Go to thechristianworldview.org, call toll-free 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. David Wheaton here, host of The Christian Worldview, to tell you about the Overcomer Course for Young Adults, held June 21st and 22nd at beautiful Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota. Age 18 to 25 is a highly transitional time. The convictions developed and the decisions made during this crucial stage sets one's course for years to come. In eight sessions over two days addressing life's most important issues such as God and the Gospel, right thinking and living, relationships and marriage, vocation, the local church, and more, the Overcomer Course is designed to help young adults gain clarity and conviction on God's plan and their purpose in it.

There will be plenty of time for interaction and discussion as well. You can find out more and register by calling 1-888-646-2233 or by visiting thechristianworldview.org. Welcome back to The Christian Worldview.

I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianworldview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies. And now joining us is Haley Erickson, who's a Christian nutrition coach, personal trainer, and speaker.

Haley, God saving you was the turning point of your life in eternity. Specifically, that went down to how you view your body and how you should care for your body. They told some of the story in that television special, but give us a little deeper look into how you viewed and cared for your body before God saved you. Before coming to faith in Christ, I was enslaved to food and exercise and what my body looked like.

Very early on in life, I started to find my identity and what my body looked like because of numerous factors, but a lot of comments made about my appearance and also just the world we live in that praises people for what we look like. And so that naturally led to an eating disorder and exercise addiction in my college years and my life solely revolved around food and exercise in my body. Every day was filled with what I was going to eat, critiquing what I had just eaten, which it was, of course, never good enough, and thinking about what the next meal was that I was going to eat. It was obsessing about ingredient labels. I was avoiding social situations at all costs because of the fear of food in those interactions. And I was racing to the gym to work off the food that I had just eaten. And so my life was truly food, exercise, and my body with also school added to that. Talk about the influences going on in our culture today that could lead someone toward this sort of wrong view of what it means to be healthy.

I don't think it's necessarily something new. I think it's become even more prevalent with social media broadcasting what everyone else's life looks like and how perfect everyone's life appears to be because we tend to post what is great about our life, not the hardships. And so I think that's definitely made this challenge even greater because everyone can see what other people have and we want what we don't have. But I think even biblically, we see that man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at our heart. And so I think this is something that really just goes back to just our sin nature and wanting to focus on anything that we can do to make us worthy instead of the only place where our worth can come from, which is from God and God alone.

From Him creating us and Him paying the greatest price to save us. Haley Erickson is our guest today on The Christian Real View. She's a nutrition coach and personal trainer. Now, Haley, in that television feature, there was an older woman named Mary Jane, I think it was.

I think I might know her. Just go more into that story, because that really is truly God's providence in the way you met at the gym. Tell us more about what happened there and how that led to God saving you.

Yeah, it's such a beautiful story. I had reached rock bottom with my eating disorder and exercise addiction. As I was so enslaved to this, I actually was going for a run and I slipped on black ice and severely injured my knee to the point where I could barely walk. And I was absolutely devastated because everything that I had built my life on was gone. And so the following month after that, I wasn't able to work out and I was just in such a dark place and I finally reached rock bottom. And I just remember being in bed one night and I desperately cried out to God. And I just begged him to please show me the purpose of my life because I knew there had to be more than what I was living for.

And finally, about a week after praying that prayer, I was able to walk. And so I went back to the gym because I couldn't handle being away any longer. And that day at the gym, your sweet mom, Mary Jane approached me. And if you know me back during this time, I was like the most unapproachable person at the gym.

I have my hat on, my headphones in. I mean business when I'm at the gym. And so Mary Jane is probably the only person that God could have used to get a hold of my attention that day. And she tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I would be her trainer. And I told her wasn't certified at the time, but it turned into us talking for about an hour at the gym and exchanging numbers. And I asked her if I could come over to her house the next day because I was home over winter break from college.

And so I went over to her house the next day and I brought over with me a family Christmas card just to tell her more about my family. And as I was showing her this picture of my family, I just told her that, like, yeah, I was raised in a loving Christian home because I think we got on the topic of talking about faith. And she just said, like, just simply asked the question back to me and said, Oh, so you're Christian. And right then and there, I heard the Holy Spirit's very clear conviction just say, you pose her, like almost as if I heard an audible voice. And I just immediately broke down bawling because I was just convicted in that moment of my sin of disbelief. Like, here I was claiming to being a follower of Christ because of my religious activities because I had gone to church and I went to Christian camp in my youth years. But I knew in that moment that I did not know Jesus, that I was a sinner in desperate need of my Savior.

And so I was convicted of that sin of disbelief. And Mary Jane, as we all know, is a very strong follower of Christ. And she knew that I just had some powerful encounter with God. And she knew that that is exactly why God brought us together in the one place where I was running from God, which was the gym. That is where he chased me down to save me by sending Mary Jane.

And I just think that is so powerful. So she asked me if I would like to receive God's free gift of salvation. And so she sat down with me and shared the greatest gift that I could ever receive, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And she walked me through probably about like an hour long gospel presentation, helping me understand what Christ had done to save me. Well, it's just an amazing story of God's providence and how he was drawing you to himself and how that would take place through meeting my mom, who I believe was in her 80s at the time at that gym. But just explain, Haley, what my mom told you about the gospel at her dining room table that day.

What she explained to me is that God is such a loving, relational God who longs to be in relationship with us. But the problem is, is that we are sinners and that our sin has separated us from God. And we see in Romans 3 23 that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We've all inherited that sin nature that was a result of the fall in the Garden of Eden with Adam. And we also have all confirmed that sin through our thoughts and words and actions. And the problem with sin is that our sin must be punished. It cannot be found in God's presence because God is absolutely holy.

He is perfect and he is just. And so we see in Romans 6 23 that the punishment for our sins is death, which is a spiritual death. It's separation from God. And so we all come into this world separated from God. And if we continue in this state, it's going to lead to eternal death, eternity apart from God in what the Bible calls as the lake of fire, which is hell.

It's a place of eternal torment. And so that is the bad news that what we deserve is wrath and eternal separation from God. And if we don't understand that, then we won't see our desperate need for the good news of what Christ came to save us from. We see that the story doesn't end there, but we see God's amazing grace and mercy and love that he sent his son, Jesus Christ, who stepped down from his throne. And he took on human flesh and blood becoming like us. He was born a virgin birth, though, and he was conceived of the Spirit bypassing that sin nature that we've inherited. And so he is the perfect sinless son of God, and he lived the perfect life that we never could. And he went to the cross to take our sins and the punishment that we deserved. And three days later, he rose victoriously, showing that he conquered sin and death so that all who trust in him, we can be forgiven of all of our sins, and we can be brought into a right relationship with God and have eternal life with him.

And that is the good news. And this is all a free gift that we can either accept that by faith, or we can reject that and face the just judgment for our sins. Wow, that is just a beautiful description of the biblical gospel, Haley, and what a miracle that God brought you to saving faith at a low moment after praying to him and using my little old mother to meet in a gym. Just an inspiring story of God's goodness and grace. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Now, I'm going to check with my mom in a couple weeks. We're going to be having her on the program in her annual Mother's Day interview, so I'm going to ask for her side of the story in that conversation coming up, but I have a feeling it's going to match up exactly with what you just said. Haley Erickson is our guest today here on the Christian Real View radio program. Our topic is how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies, and Haley is a nutrition coach and personal trainer.

You can find all the links to what she does at our website, thechristianrealview.org. Now, in your mission of what you do now, Haley, to help people with nutrition and training and you do speaking and so forth, you use the passage from Romans 12.1. The mission is to help those you work with steward their bodies for God's glory. But it took you some time after God saved you to understand just what that looked like. So let's go to the after picture now and what the transformation, as your mind was renewed, as it says in Romans 12.1 and 2, what was that transformation like to getting a biblical view of the body and how you care for it? To be completely honest, for the first three years of my walk with Christ, I continued to cling to my idols of food and exercise and chasing after this perfect body. And so essentially, I was kind of keeping God in a box.

And I was like, God, you can have everything in my life, but not these like these are mine to control. I would say I was gradually progressing in my faith. I hadn't really read the word of God yet. I was just doing kind of daily devotionals, praying occasionally and listening to sermons and did notice that the Holy Spirit was changing the desires of my heart. But finally, my health reached rock bottom about three years into my walk with the Lord yet again. And God really got a hold of my heart through some health challenges. And I just felt the Lord so clearly impressing on my heart just to surrender these idols to him that he just had so much more on the other side of my surrender than what I thought would satisfy me. And so I was just in such a desperate place that I finally decided to surrender these idols to God. And I gave up like controlling and restricting food and dieting forever. And I was like, Lord, like, I want nothing to do with this.

I give this all to you. And I also decided to fast from the gym. And I think it was about one to two months of fasting from the gym, which for me that like the combination of those two was absolutely terrifying.

And instead of going to the gym during that time, which obviously we know exercising is good, but for me, what I needed to do was to step away from the gym for that period of time. Instead of going to the gym, I spent every morning and night outside of work reading God's word for the first time, like truly immersing myself in the word of God. And the Holy Spirit just did so much sanctifying work in my life and just showed me the power of just the word of God and the Spirit of God changing me and making me look more like Christ. And I would say some of the biggest things that I noticed during that time with the changes in my life were the Lord really showing me who he says I am, helping me understand how the gospel changes who I am, like my identity in Christ, and also helping me understand that my behavior flows out of that identity because we act in ways that confirm what we believe to be true. Our identity is so critical to see ourselves as God sees us, and that takes place, that transformation takes place through the renewing of our mind as we're in the word of God on a regular basis. Walk us through what that looks like to have Scripture transform your identity. What the Lord was leading me to do through this healing journey was surrounding myself with truth, like outside of just reading the Bible but then posting truth all around me. And so I would write, you're fearfully and wonderfully made, or I'd write like you're a child of God and all these different scriptural truths like on my mirror.

And I would start declaring that over myself instead of what I thought made me worthy. To this day, I still do that. I can't get enough of God's word. Anyone that knows me, I have sticky notes all over my desk at work with different scripture that I want to memorize.

I post it on my bathroom mirror still to this day. I have it on the background of my phone because that is how God changes us by the renewing of our minds. And then another thing that's been really huge that shaped the way that I view my body and also how I care for my body is God helping me understand what this body is as a temple of the Holy Spirit. When we look at the temple in the Bible, we see that a temple is God's dwelling place. And so what God's showing us is that his spirit dwells inside of us.

The Holy Spirit is within us. And so this is God's dwelling place, but also a temple is completely holy. It's completely set apart unto God, set apart from sin and belonging to God. We see that this is God's holy dwelling place, meaning it belongs to him and it's completely set apart unto him for his kingdom to be done.

And it's also a place of worshiping God. And so that means that everything we do out of this body is to be done as an act of worship to God. We see that whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. What we see in Romans 12 one is that we are to offer ourselves our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

That is the only true and proper worship that we can offer to God in response to Christ and his finished work as payment for our sins. Haley Erickson is our guest today here on The Christian Real View, how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies. She's a nutrition coach and personal trainer. She has a Bible study for people who want to get engaged with what she does.

You can find all the links to her work at our website thechristianrealview.org. Haley is also going to join us during dinner on the first night of the Overcomer Course in June for a Q&A session on nutrition and fitness. Again, the Overcomer Course for Young Adults takes place June 21st and 22nd at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota.

If you are from Minnesota or really from anywhere in the country and you're a young adult or you know a young adult, this course that we're going to tell you more about the sessions later in the program today would be of, we think, very helpful for a young adult going through the highly transitional time of life. We'll pause briefly to tell you about some ministry resources, but stay tuned. We have much more coming up on how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies.

I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to The Christian Real View Radio Program. Christians with discernment know that the U.S. public education system is humanistic to the core. That is because subversives have successfully removed from government schools the most important subject to understand truth and reality, God. While Americans were once educated at home or privately in an explicitly Christian way, today government schools are radically anti-Christian, propagandizing children with evolution, graphic sexual content, gender confusion, and globalism. Alex Newman's book, Indoctrinating Our Children to Death, is our new featured resource.

Its soft cover, 276 pages, and retails for $17.99. You can order the book for a donation of any amount to The Christian Real View. Go to thechristianrealview.org, call toll-free 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. A miracle is a supernatural act of God in which he interrupts the normal course of life in an extraordinary and remarkable way to accomplish his purposes. The gift of miracles was a gift given to a supernaturally endowed person.

God worked miracles through that individual, confirming that that individual was a spokesman and representative for God. Just call us toll-free, 1-888-646-2233, or go to thechristianrealview.org. Welcome back to The Christian Real View, I'm David Wheaton.

Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter. Our topic today is how to biblically view and care for our physical bodies. And as we transition from hearing about how God saved and is sanctifying Haley, we'll get into now the care for our physical bodies. And just as we do, we have to realize that everyone has different body characteristics, health issues, exercise, capabilities. So we're not going to give specific diet and exercise advice, aside from the impetus to just look into it for yourselves, to eat better kinds of food, to move as you are able, and to steward the body God has given you for his glory, and so you can be of good use to him. It seems to me, Haley, there's two extremes you can obsess over your body, where it's just your top priority in life, and it's all about how you look and what you eat and how you exercise and everything else. You were on that side of the ledger before coming to saving faith. And then the other side is, I think, equally sinful, is where we put really not very much attention to the temple of the Holy Spirit, as you just talked about, where we neglect our bodies.

We don't think it's important. We're gluttonous, maybe, in the way we eat, and maybe we don't want to move and just get movement and exercise and things that are good for the body God gave us. So let's talk about some of the things that you work with people on and that you've learned in your own life about how to properly have the right perspective on our bodies and how to actually take steps to start caring for our body in the right way. But before we get to those steps, how does someone get to the place mentally and spiritually where they recognize they have a wrong view and care of their own body, whether obsessing over it or neglecting it, how do they recognize that and then have the strength or the volition to actually change the way they think and what they do? First off, how we recognize that we have a wrong view of our body is when we're seeing this body as our own.

And so you see that with both of those extremes that you just shared. One extreme is seeing that it doesn't matter what I do with this body because we don't care to move our bodies, we don't care to eat well. We think maybe it's my body, I can do whatever I want with it. And then we also see the other extreme where we think that our body is what makes us worthy, and so we obsess about food and exercise and what we look like. And so regardless of which side we fall towards, we know both of those are sinful and they're both sinful because they're both focusing on ourselves and serving ourselves and what it will bring us instead of focusing on serving and glorifying God with these bodies and seeing that they belong to him and to be used for his glory. And if we're having the wrong view of our body, we're putting ourselves on the throne, then we're thus going to care for our bodies in a way that is not glorifying to God. And so I think in order to care for our bodies in a way that's glorifying to God, it starts with first seeing that, God, you created this body, you paid to save this body, this body belongs to you, this is your temple, and you paid the greatest price for this body.

It's an understanding of the gospel message and letting the gospel really shape how we live this life that will influence that worship and that desire to honor and glorify God with everything that we do and letting God be on the throne of our hearts. Okay, Haley, that's how we have a God-centered view of our bodies, but how do we get off the couch, so to speak, and actually start caring for our bodies in ways that are honoring to God? One of the biggest things we need to see is that these are sin struggles. And so I think a lot of times we think of food and exercise in some of these areas as not really spiritual problems.

We just think like, oh, I'll just go on a diet or I just need to work out harder. And so we're just relying on human solutions to really what is a sin struggle and needs a spiritual solution. And so first and foremost, we know that only Jesus can set us free from the power of sin and the penalty of our sin. We need to be born again. We need to be born of the Spirit and have that true relationship with Christ. And just like other sin struggles in our relationship with the Lord, this is something that we need God to sanctify us in through our walk with Him. And so after we've trusted in Christ for our salvation, we need the Holy Spirit to work in our lives and to conform us more and more into the image of Christ as we read God's Word and live in obedience to His Word. And so that is why I do biblical counseling with my nutrition coaching, because only God can change the desires of our heart, and He's the one that gives us the desire and the power to do what pleases Him as we see in Philippians.

Very well said. And I can see how that is the starting point is realizing who our bodies belong to and seeing as a spiritual issue. And then what you believe, what your identity is spiritually is going to then lead to the way you live your life. It's almost like think biblically, live accordingly.

If you're thinking biblically about your body, then you're going to, through the power of the Holy Spirit, of course, want to live accordingly. All right, we're not going to have too much time to get into a lot of the different things you work on. I know you're going to be coming to the Overcomer Course for Young Adults in June. We're going to have a special dinner session, Q&A with you that evening.

That's going to be sort of a bonus session, so I'm looking forward to having you flesh some things out there and answering questions for those who attend the Overcomer Course for Young Adults. But I'm just going to touch on two of the obvious things with regard to, let's say, eating and exercise. Let's start with the eating aspect of it. Now, there's a lot to say here.

You've produced a lot of content on this. But just give us some simple things that you like to keep in mind and encourage Christians to think about when they approach eating. And you talk about prayer, and it's not just praying for your food, but there's actually you pray going into the eating and having a certain perspective on it.

Tell us more about that. I think prayer is so important because that's how we depend on God. That's how we rest in His strength to do what we cannot do in our own strength. When I was going through this journey and I was starting to read God's Word, I was just going to passages trying to see every time Jesus ate in the Bible and trying to learn from my Lord and Savior to see what does it look like to glorify God in my eating. And what I noticed is that every time Jesus ate in the Bible, He gave thanks to the Father for His food. And so He is modeling to us perfectly what it looks like to glorify God in our eating. I've struggled with everything under the sun in terms of different health challenges or overeating, emotional eating, restrictive eating.

I've struggled with all the different things. And so because of Christ's finished work, we can go to God boldly with confidence, approaching His throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace to help us in our time of need. He wants us to come to Him with every struggle that we might have, whether it is something like overeating or for me it was a lot of fear around food because of the fear of weight gain and the fear of not being loved if I didn't look a certain way.

And so it was really casting those fears and cares onto Him. Food is both sustenance that God has given us to sustain our bodies physically, but food is also something that God has given us that's absolutely delicious. Just as we can't live physically without food, we can't live spiritually without Christ, who is the bread of life and He came to give us life.

And just as much as food is delicious, well, the greatest pleasure, the greatest treasure that we could ever have is found in our abiding relationship in Jesus Christ. And that, for me, reminding myself of that before I eat is so powerful because that helps me want to enjoy food the way God designed it to be for fuel and to be satisfied from it, but to not eat beyond that where I'm eating until I'm uncomfortably full or I'm turning to food for emotional reasons. Because then I'm really believing a lie and being deceived to think that food can fulfill something that I know only Jesus can satisfy. I often thought, just a little different angle off this, that why did God design us to have to eat every single day?

We typically eat two or three meals a day. Why didn't He just design us to eat once a week or once a year or something? I think there's a spiritual parallel there as well, is that eating physical food nourishes us physically, but we need the spiritual food of the Word on a regular basis. As we eat physically on a regular basis, I think we need to take in the Word of God spiritually on a very regular basis to have spiritual nourishment as well. So I don't know if there's chapter and verse on that, but that's just something I've often thought about the frequency of the way we eat is that there's a spiritual lesson in there. I'd like to get into more with just the way modern food is, with the amount of genetically modified foods and the bad additives and the sugars and all the different things.

I'd like to go into a store now and just look at everything there. I've had to be with our family history, with the heart disease and so forth, with my dad and so forth. I've had to be much more cognizant of that.

You just realize how food has really changed. I'd like to get more into that, but we don't have time to do that today, but hopefully maybe at the Overcomer Course for young adults we can talk more about that there. Let's do one more main pillar of caring for our bodies, and this is movement or exercise. Our society has become incredibly much more sedentary as we've become more industrious with computers and machines and so forth.

We're just not as active as we once were. Talk, Haley, about why movement, exercise, and we're not talking, it's not the same for everyone riding a bike 100 miles in a day or something like that, but just why, generally speaking, movement is so important in the care of the bodies God has given us. We know exercise is so good for our health for so many reasons. It helps us have more energy, it gives us those endorphins, so we tend to be in a better mood. We have a stronger, healthier immune system, obviously assuming that we're not over-exercising because that can actually suppress your immune system. It also helps with our sleep, and for many of us we tend to want to eat healthier as well. When you start doing one aspect of caring for your health better, you start to want to care for your body in other ways better as well, too.

Well, that makes perfect sense. Just in closing, I've introduced you as a nutrition coach, personal trainer, and speaker. Just give us an idea of some of the things you do around your business that you call Holistically Haley. I do my nutrition coaching with biblical counseling as well as personal training and public speaking. And with the nutrition side of my business, I recently launched a Bible study course, which is an online course.

It's a 12-week course, and it's called Fuel Your Purpose. And that is a Christ-centered approach to helping people overcome their food, exercise, and body image challenges so that they can fulfill their God-given purpose. I do one-on-one small group corporate training as well as I do my Fit for Christ program, which I've done for the past two summers with Heritage Christian Academy.

And that includes strength and conditioning. I also included 30 minutes of teaching with the nutrition and biblical teachings as well as prayer and fellowship. And then lastly, I do public speaking as well in schools, and I'm hoping to get into more colleges this coming year as well.

Sounds like you're very busy on a very important topic that is really pretty neglected, I think, within the body of Christ. We have Haley's links to what she does. Her direct website is holisticallyhaley.com, or just go to our website, thechristianrealview.org.

We have all the links to what she does there. Haley, we're very much looking forward to having you come to the Overcomer Course for Young Adults this summer for that evening session to talk about nutrition and food and other ways we can care for the bodies God's given us. So thank you for coming on the program. All of God's best and grace to you. Thank you so much, David.

Thanks for having me today. All right, if you joined us late, we've been talking about how to view and care for the body, the physical body that God has given us as Christians. And just the main points to summarize those, the passage of Scripture, and we read many at the beginning of the program, but one key one is right there in Romans chapter 12 verse 1, where Paul writes, and here's a therefore statement.

It's kind of a summary statement. I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. God gives us a body, and a Christian should view and care for their body, as Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 6, as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

This is where the Holy Spirit resides, in order to, as our spiritual service of worship. So we decided to do this topic because it's an important topic, because of the two sinful extremes that Christians tend to land in with their physical body. On one side, they either neglect it, and there's no disciplining of the body, so there's poor nutrition going into it.

They're not moving, exercising the body. It gets out of shape. There's little thought, for the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, there can be an obsessiveness over the body, especially for the younger generation during that time of life, where there's a lot of pressure on them to view and care for their body in very worldly and self-glorifying ways. So just to simplify, think of four categories to consider when caring for your body. Number one, nutrition. What you put in your body. Eating good, healthy food, rather than all the processed, sugary foods and drinks. Number two, exercise. How you move and use your body. Sedentary, when you could be doing some movement, leads to problems. Number three, rest. Proper sleep and recovery time is very important. Number four, spiritual.

Being right with God, having sin confessed, seeking to honor God and loving others, of course doesn't guarantee you'll have good health for your body, but the opposite, spiritual problems on the inside, like sin and guilt and conflict, anxiety and stress, can cause physical problems in our bodies because the immaterial dwells inside of our material bodies. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to do a Q&A with Haley Erikson, our guest today, on nutrition and exercise and health during the first evening, during dinner, of the Overcomer Course. Now, the main sessions of the course are specifically designed to help young adults gain clarity and conviction on who God is, what His plan is, and their purpose in it. So we have four sessions the first day, and then four sessions the second day, and so health and fitness is not the theme or the focus of the conference, that's going to be a Q&A the first night. The sessions have to do with really the big issues of life. The first session on mission and identity and purpose and how we understand that when we believe in the gospel. The second session is on what is your foundation for right thinking and living, and it starts right back at the beginning of the Bible that God exists and speaks and how that changes everything. The third session is being focused on the fundamentals, that understanding God's arc of history provides the framework for understanding the world we live in.

That's really about worldview. The fourth session that takes place the first day is about how do you grow as a Christian and how do you disciple or share it with someone else. The fifth session, the second day, is about some big issues of life like trusting God's design in gender, sexuality, singleness, and marriage. That's a huge topic that a young adult should really be understanding and living out. The sixth session, which is the second day, embracing God's design for vocation or work, the way we spend our time and how we use our money. That's a big issue. The seventh session is engaging God's design in the local church.

There's no such thing as a Christian who shouldn't be part of a local fellowship of believers and how God designed that for the believer. And the final session, session eight, is how to overcome the world. We have so much opposition.

How do you overcome temptation? So these are the eight sessions. This is not going to be a camp, so to speak, where you go and have burlap sack races and water balloon fights. This is going to be a substantive time over two days. It takes place on Friday and Saturday, June 21st and 22nd at Stonehouse Farm in Jordan, Minnesota.

Jordan is just outside Southwest Metro of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. And so I just encourage you to spread the word, share the link from our website. We have a whole page on our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can find out more about us or just give us a call. Our phone number is given right after the program today. Note that it's already 60 percent full and it's pretty evenly divided between men and women.

And we're talking young adults like 18 to 25, 26, 27, just sort of in that age range during that highly transitional time of life. And by the way, you can come from out of state and we'd encourage you to do so. This is a beautiful time of year in Minnesota.

There's lots to do in the area. So hope you consider that and spread the word about the Overcomer Course, June 21st and 22nd. Thank you for joining us today on the Christian Real View Radio Program. In just a moment there will be information on how you can hear a replay of today's program, order transcripts and resources, and how you can support this nonprofit radio ministry. Let's anchor ourselves in what Scripture says. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. So until next time, think biblically, live accordingly and stand firm. The mission of the Christian Real View is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript, or find out what must I do to be saved, go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. Christian Real View is a listener-supported nonprofit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Real View partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianrealview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Thanks for listening to the Christian Real View.