The Real You

Please stand as you are able as we read God’s word:

Genesis 2:4–7 KJV

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

In 1956 a new TV game show hit the airways and became an instant success. Three contestants would be brought in, all claiming to be a particular person. Only one was actually that person. Then a group of panelists would be allowed to ask each contestant a question. The true character had to tell the truth, the other two imposters could lie to try to make the panelists believe they were the central character. After a period of time the panelists had to vote on who they believed was the true character, at which point the announcer would say, “Would the real ______________ please stand up”. I can remember watching reruns of this with my parents and the delight they had in seeing if they guessed who the real whoever was. When the show was over, there was no longer any confusion over who the actual person was.

Times have changed. The certainty we once had about other and about ourselves has eroded. Embedded in the heart of many ppl today is the question, “Who is the real me?” I’m so confused, would the real me please stand up.

Popular to hear ppl say things like “I have to be true to myself”. What does that mean? Usually means being true to some feeling inside them. The real me is my inner life - the part that thinks and feels.

Even in church it’s common to think about our real life as the spirit/soul. That this is the part of us that relates to God and will go spend an eternity either with him or separate from him. The result of this thinking is that it causes most secular - and many spiritual - ppl to think of their bodies as nothing more than a vehicle for the soul. Our body becomes a meat suit that we put on for this part of our life but that we will eventually take off again.

To understand why this thinking is so prevalent need to go back to 4th century BC and a guy named Plato. Today he owns boutique consignment shops, but back then he was a brilliant philosopher - even a theologian of sorts. Plato came up with lots of interesting and helpful ideas. But one idea that has really stuck that hasn’t been very helpful is this idea that the real me is a spirit. And the spirit wants to ascend to be united with god as Plato perceived him. And the body was an encumbrance keeping the spirit imprisoned.

Fast forward to the time of the early church and these early thoughts of Plato have given rise to a form of belief called Gnosticism. Gnosis in the Greek means “knowledge”, and gnostics believed that they had special or privileged knowledge about life and spirituality. They deeply influenced the early Christians and much of our NT is countering the teaching of these gnostic teachers.

Gnostic beliefs led to one of two extremes. Some gnostics believed that - since the only thing that mattered was the spirit - that all matter was bad or evil - including the body. And so these gnostics practiced extreme asceticism - starving or abusing their bodies.

Paul may have been dealing with this form of Gnosticism when he told the Colossians Colossians 2:22–23 “All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”

This kind of gnostic thought is still very prevalent today among those who practice forms of self-harm like cutting. At the surface, cutting is a way of dealing with the tremendous inner pain caused by abuse or the guilt associated with certain behaviors. But under the surface there is an aspect where the body is seen as the source or cause of the pain. The body becomes an enemy to be punished.

The other extreme Gnosticism took is that again, since the only thing that mattered is the spirit, the body was completely incidental. It was just a Tupperware container holding your soul, so you could do whatever you wanted with it. This typically led to extreme forms of hedonism - drunkenness, sexual experimentation, etc. This influence of Gnosticism is probably what Paul is confronting in the Corinthian church when he writes, 1 Corinthians 6:15 “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!”

Again, this kind of gnostic thought still exists today, particularly when it comes to sexual expression. The highest principle that guides our current culture regarding sex is “consent”. Meaning, if all parties involved consent - and no one gets hurt - then there’s no problem. It’s just a biological thing with no meeting beyond surface level.

In October, OnlyFans star Lily Phillips went viral for sleeping with 101 men in 12 hours in an extreme challenge. When asked later in an interview about her self-respect she replied, “None of it mate. Out the window.” She went on to say “I don’t even know what self-respect means at this point”. As sad as this is, what is truly heartbreaking is how I was told she looked after the event. The life had gone from her eyes. The point is that our body isn’t merely a suit that we can treat as we like with no ramifications.

“Who is the real me?” My body is the real me.

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I hope by this point you’re beginning to ask, so why does this even matter? I’m so glad you asked! Because, for one, the separation of body from soul to define human identity is completely unbiblical. The Bible treats humans as wholistic entities and rejects the idea that the real me is just my inner life and my body is perhaps a useful but ultimately meaningless addition. And for two, this false separation of body from soul has led to all manner of unhealthy attitudes toward and treatment of the body.

The point is that your body is not just a receptacle for the real you. Your body is you. The Bible claims that you don’t just have a body; you are a body. Very early in the biblical story we see the answer to the question, who is the real me.

Genesis 2:7 KJV

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

When it says that “man became a living soul”, the Hebrew word used is nephesh - usually translated as soul in our English Bibles. However, this is an unfortunate translation bc the word “soul” carries a lot of baggage. As we’ve already discussed, because of Plato most of us understand the soul to be the non-physical, immortal essence of a person that is trapped inside their body that gets released at death.

But in the Bible, a person’s nephesh refers to their whole body. While there is an understanding that we have both a physical and spiritual life, the Bible never separates us into divisible parts. In the Bible, people don’t have a nephesh, they are a nephesh. You don’t have a body; you are a body. It is part of the real you.

Notice that God didn’t make a soul named Adam and then looked for a container to store it in. He started with matter. He formed a body and then brought it to life. Carl Trueman writes:

“There is no ‘us’ that exists independently of our flesh and that is randomly assigned to the bodies we have. Our bodies are an integral part of who we are. And I do not ‘occupy’ my body as I might occupy a house or a space suit or a deck chair at the beach. On the contrary, it is an integral part of me, inseparable from who I am.”

Imagine you are walking your neighborhood at night when someone mugs you - I know, terrible thought. They knock you down, hit you, kick you, and take your stuff. No one in this situation will distance themselves from what happened to their body. We may feel violated if someone breaks into our car or house. But when people hurt your body, you know that they have not just damaged some of your property; they have violated you. What you do to someone’s body, you do to a person.

Who is the real me? You body is the real you.

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There’s two conclusions we should drawn from the Genesis passage. First,

The body isn’t everything.

Your body is the real you, but it is not all you are. Adam was not just a body. God made him, but then needed to breath into him his life-giving breath in order for Adam to be fully alive. Apart from this life-breath from God, the body is only a corpse.

So you body is not the sum total of who you are. Bodies are essential but on their own they are not sufficient. God made them, but he also looks beyond them. When Samuel is sent to select the next king of Israel, the very first person he examines is the oldest son of Jesse. He had all the right attributes - tall, handsome, strong - you and I would have voted for him. But God brings him up short. 1 Samuel 16:7 “But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.””

You may not love the body you were given. You may not be pleased with the outward appearance. But it’s important to know that in God’s estimation, you are much more than your appearance. Your body - with all it’s glory and limitations - is you. But it’s not the totality of you. Realizing this will help you have a healthy view of yourself and others. God give us the spiritual eyes to see beyond the outward appearance of others, and beyond our own judgment of our appearance.

The body isn’t everything, but then our second conclusion,

The body isn’t nothing.

Just as we shouldn’t see the body as the sum total of who we are, neither should we fall into the lie that it has no bearing at all on who we are.

Avatar (show pic) is a prime example of this kind of thinking. Set 150 years in the future, humans are trying to inhabit a distant moon populated by the Na’vi, a tall, blue-skinned race - with tails. But to do this, they have to put their consciousness into hybrid bodies called avatars. Bodies become exchangeable.

Avatar expresses what is a common way of thinking today. Increasingly, it’s not the body we look to to get a sense of who we truly are. The real us is the soul within. N.T. Wright says this:

“The great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each one of us there is a real, inner, private ‘self,’ long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives.”

As a result, defining ourselves by an inner sense of who we are then becomes the basis for our ethical thinking. Whatever our “true” self wants and desires becomes self-justifying. The quest to be authentic legitimizes virtually any kind of behavior. Our longings and urges must be gratified to be true to who we are. So if having an affair, experimenting sexually, or mutilating yourself is what it takes to be true, everything is permissible.

The myth that our body is meaningless is prevalent in our modern hook-up culture. We’ve taken the Bloodhound Gang’s song, The Bad Touch, and embraced it: You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals // So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel. If the body is meaningless, then sex is meaningless. I can do it with whoever, whenever, and however I like. Yet the apostle Paul warns to 1 Corinthians 6:18 “Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself.” The warning isn’t here bc God is a prude. He invented sex. God is pro-sex. But… there is something about sexual union that goes beyond mere biology - you cannot participate in it without it affecting your entire nephesh.

But the example of Lily Phillips, and a million like her, shows this view of the body to be a myth. What is done in the body is done by the real me or to the real me. The body and the soul are not separate or interchangeable - they are the real me. What our body does, we are doing. The body isn’t everything, but neither is it nothing.

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All of this leads to an inescapable conclusion: God loves your body. Your nephesh. Let that sink in. He has formed it, and he has given it his very life-giving spirit. God loves your nephesh so much that became one so that he could save ours.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews applies Psalm 40 to Jesus when he writes, Hebrews 10:5 “Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me;” Had he been writing in Hebrew he would have said “a nephesh you have prepared for me”. Jesus became what he intends to redeem. Jesus didn't just temporarily take on a human form, but fully integrated himself with it forever. He has the body of a human. He has the soul of a human. All without giving up any of his divine attributes. Jesus loves your body.

And in taking on our nephesh, he took on our sin. 1 Peter 2:24 “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” Jesus had to become what he intended to save. He became a nephesh - a body and soul - so that he could save our nephesh. Jesus loves your body. Have you ever responded to this love of Jesus?

And that means you should love your body. How do you feel about your body? Do you see it as part of the real you, or do you recognize the effects of gnostic influence in separating your body from your real identity? How could you begin to love your body better - as Jesus loves it?

This is not a gotcha about exercising or eating better. It's about a sanctified nurturing of your body. In other words, are you giving your body the care it needs? Are you allowing it to rest when it needs to rest? Are you doing intentional things to relieve your body and mind of stress? Are you getting enough sleep? Do you have times when you unplug from work and worry to just relax and be with God?

Loving your body the way God loves your body will not happen accidentally. You will have to choose it. To be intentional.

I think one intentional choice you can begin making is to the spiritual practice of Sabbath keeping. I've preached on this topic last year. It is probably the most neglected spiritual practice, but we all need a sabbath. A time to stop, rest, and delight in God and creation. Vacations are great, but they aren't sabbath. Days off are awesome, but they aren't sabbath if we are filling them up with catching up on all the things we feel we need to do. Sabbath is the God-ordained way for us to recharge our batteries and refresh our nephesh.

Who is the real you? Your body is the real you. Love it the way Jesus does.

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Communion

Come Holy Spirit and overshadow these elements. Let them be for us your body and blood so that we can participate in your redemptive work for us. May we find mercy, healing and salvation through the finished work of the cross.

Amen.