Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

This week we are looking at what the Bible says about our physical bodies. Modern people (even many Christians) tend to think the important, valuable part of us is tucked away and hidden on the inside, and our physical selves are just disposable and unimportant. That our bodies don't say anything important about who we really are. But the Bible says, no– every part of you is valuable to God. Every part of you is important to him. Body and soul. And He has a good plan for all of you-- body and soul.

The gospel story is good news for our bodies. And seeing this good news, seeing how valuable our body is to God, transforms our relationship with our body from one of pain and shame to love and hope.

*Correction: in the sermon I misquote a statistic about people reporting unhappiness with their bodies after using Instagram. I said it was 70% of women and 48% of men. The accurate statistic was 60% of women and 48% of men, and it was taken from this article on the After Babel Substack."-- Sam

QUOTES:

“In the Bible, our body is not an accessory to who we are; it is part of who we are. We can't properly understand who we are apart from our body. Your body is not other than you. It is not just a receptacle for you. It is you. In the Bible it's not just that you have a body; you are a body.- Sam Allberry

“Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body-which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy!”— CS Lewis

"I haven't been cheated out of being a complete person—I'm just going through a forty-year delay, and God is with me even through that. Being 'glorified'—I know the meaning of that now. It's the time, after my death here, when I'll be on my feet dancing. "-Joni Erickson tada 

“Christianity assigns the human body… much richer dignity and value. Humans do not need freedom from the body to discover their true authentic self. Rather we can celebrate our embodied existence as a good gift from God. Instead of escaping from the body, the goal is to live in harmony with it” -Nancy Pearcey