RE-Charge Bible Study: Our whole selves

THE FULL MONTY:

1 Thessalonians 5 To read if you have time to take in the whole story

THE CONTINENTAL OPTION:

1 Thessalonians 5:12-28 Read this if you only have time for a few, key verses

ONE SHOT ESPRESSO:

1 Thessalonians 5: 23 ‘May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

Have you ever been asked about your ‘spiritual life’? I have. People treat our spiritual lives like they are a completely different part of our lives. It would seem we have divorced our spirit from our bodies and the rest of us. What is a spiritual life without a body?

This is not a new problem. Actually, it’s the oldest problem in Christendom. It was what infuriated Paul when he was busy trying to teach the basics of following Jesus while a bunch of ‘spiritual specialists’ were trying to teach that all that mattered was our ‘spiritual lives’, without any thought to what we were actually doing to our bodies, minds, will or emotions.

The ‘super spiritual’ folks seem to have an attractive option: you could have a powerful spiritual life without any thought to how you actually use your body. This worked well in cities like Corinth and Thessalonica because a common practice at the time was to pig out at feasts until you had to throw up in order to keep on eating (as seen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire). You could also go to a temple and worship a goddess by paying a temple fee and using one of the temple prostitutes as a way of ecstatic praise. Eureka, right? These teachers, these ‘super spiritual’ types, would insist that it didn’t matter what you did with your body, mind, will or emotions, because true faith is about our ‘spiritual lives’ and that is a different thing altogether. This really ticked Paul off. It should worry us in our current world too, because the Gnostics (those spiritual specialists) are back in full swing. Here’s how I know.

Gnosticism is a terrible threat to real Christianity, and to those of us trying to follow Jesus

Topless time travelling

For some background, I speak at a large Christian youth festival called YC, in my hometown of Edmonton, Canada. About 12,000 people gather once a year in a big stadium and I’ve been one of the speakers for a few years now.

One day, I was doing an anti-human trafficking awareness booth at a sex show in a town in my own local area. It is a dark show that presents the sex industry and basically anything sexual. One of the features of the show was a booth that offered free ‘spray art’ on your torso if you removed your t-shirt and went topless for the event. This was a popular booth. I’m not new to the sex industry stuff so that isn’t what shocked me. What shocked me was that at our booth, where I was volunteering for a few hours over the weekend, I was approached by three young girls, about 18 years old.

‘Hey, aren’t you that lady who spoke at YC?’ they asked me. ‘Yep, that’s me,’ I replied. I went on to ask them when they were there – and they all said the same thing: ‘I go every year. It’s awesome. You were great!’ This has now become a new level of awkward, at least for me. For them, it didn’t seem awkward at all. It seemed like it was an amazing opportunity to sign a petition, meet a speaker and move on with their ‘other’ life - obviously not connected to their spiritual one. There was not a hint of guilt, shame or wrongdoing in their voices, expressions or torso artwork. What is that about?

Recently, I received an email from a Christian teacher (whom I respect) about a special spiritual teaching that was available to me because I am so ‘spiritually open’. The offer was to learn how to ‘time travel’ in the ‘Spirit’. Part of it suggested that we don’t have to be limited by our bodies, or our capacities because we are spiritual first and that’s what actually counts - that’s the part of us that can travel outside of time, visit different places of the Earth, connecting with other ‘spiritual realms’ and leaving our bodies behind. WHAT!?

God wants all of us because that’s how he made us

A new Gnosticism

Both of these experiences have happened to me in last couple of months. They are not unique – just the latest in what seems to me to be one of the most dangerous philosophies to face the Christians since the beginning of the Church.

The disconnection between what is real and what is spiritual is almost complete. Gnosticism is alive and well in our time and it is a dangerous philosophy that is a terrible threat to real Christianity and to those of us trying to follow Jesus in a culture that celebrates excessive sin and the disconnection of our true selves from our spiritual selves.

All of us

This is what I love about the end of this letter to the Thessalonian Church. Paul beautifully outlines what we truly believe in a prayer that should be prayed every day by those of us who actually live in this current world, if we aren’t too busy time travelling!

Let’s break it down: May the God of peace (this is ‘shalom’ which is much more than a balanced calm feeling – it’s the fullness of the presence of God) sanctify (this is a word that can be a bit scary if you grew up anywhere near a holiness movement church as a youngster, but it just means ‘set apart’ – it’s synonymous with ‘perfect love’ and is about being more like God).

So, may the God who fills everything in every way, fill you, is what Paul is praying so far. Nice. Just think on that for a moment. And now, ‘may your whole spirit (this is the part of you that is spirit), soul (your mind, will and emotions – your personality, the thing that makes you, well, you), and body (yep, you guessed it, your actual body) be kept blameless. It would seem that all of us, everything that makes us who we really are – not just our spiritual selves – can be infected with the spirit of God. We can be kept ‘blameless’ (which really means ‘without fault’, which really means ‘without shame or blame or guilt or fear or anything that would keep us from the fullness we desire and can have in Jesus’).

In other words, God is not disinterested in our whole selves; he wants all of us. He wants all of us because that’s how he made us. If he wanted only our spiritual beings he would have called us angels, and if he wanted us to be slaves to our every impulsive desire he’d have called us animals. But he made us human - spirit, soul and body: all of us. Everything that makes us human can and should be infected with God’s spirit as we follow Jesus. This is what salvation means. My Caribbean friend puts it like this: ‘When Jesus saved me, he saved me all the way through!’

If God wanted only our spiritual beings he would have called us angels