Americans spend far more time worried about their eating habits and exercise for a trim body and very little time on their character or spiritual condition.
Most "Christians" today are more concerned about outer appearances than they are on the spiritual well being.
I am convinced that if we focus more on the spiritual man than the fleshly body everything else in our life will fall in line.
HOWEVER, that does not mean that if our spiritual man is progressing in holiness that our physical bodies will be perfect and beautiful.
We are living in dying flesh, the body is the shell that encases the spirit and soul. It is wasting away in death every day. We can hope to do our best to feed and cloth it but when that becomes our main focus everyday more than our character then we have lost our moorings.
As we grow older our bodies that are dying and have been dying from birth are progressing toward the grave. There will be no stopping those weak bones, wrinkles and grey hair that adorns our bodies from growing more feeble as the years pass.
We are born dying, we work with what we have, we take care of our body, but it should never be that we obsess over our bodies as they are failing. The older we get the more we should be focused on the inner man. Perhaps this is the reason the Lord cursed our bodies to be dying from birth, so that we set aside the thoughts of a perfect body to enhance the inner man, the inner man that will live forever in heaven with God.
No one will take this body of death with them to heaven, it will be changed into a new perfect body that will live on in eternity.
1 Corinthians 2:14
"But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised."
Those who are fleshly in their emotional bent are fixated on this life, this body and stuff they can amass before they die. Their body returns to dust and they leave all their belongings to someone else.
What if born again believers were to stop obsessing over their outer appearances and begin seeking Christ for a Spiritual uplift. Less thinking about remaining as young as we can as long as we can and more pondering the glory of Christ and what is coming after we leave this life.
Ecclesiastes 12:7
"then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it."
2 Corinthians 4:16
"Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day."
Psalm 115:1
"Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!"
We live in a culture that thinks its sad for a man or woman to have grey hair so many die their hair, I did it myself a time or two. But when I began to ponder God's perspective about grey hair I began to see it was His design in this fallen world that our grey hair would be a sign of something:
Leviticus 19:32
32 ‘You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the Lord."
When the younger generation honors and reveres their mother and father they will be blessed of God.
Since the younger people do not understand the trials and struggles of the older folks and their marriages they are not qualified to judge it, they are only commanded to honor those who are their elders, mother and father alike as well as grandparents.
In these last days of arrogance and rebellion we see very little of this principle of honor toward elders being demonstrated in our day.
The young people spend more time being angry and resistant to teaching and correction than they do in honoring and valuing those who are their elders.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 "3 But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these."
This is sad but not without hope! Since we know this is the last days with all its evils, we also know that right after this comes the rapture and then the final judgment when Christ will destroy evil with the breath of His mouth after which He will rule the world in perfect justice.
Our time is hard now but not bleak at all for the future. The great glory that is coming overshadows this short time of peril.
Hallelujah!
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