“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined.” (1 Corinthians 15:35-38)
The military culture places a huge importance on physical fitness. Soldiers train many hours each week in the quest for optimum physical health. Gyms are full of men and women working out to strengthen their bodies. This is all part of the military’s obsession with “readiness” for combat. We never want to be ill-prepared for the rigors of war.
But this emphasis on physical fitness is often pursued to the neglect of spiritual fitness. Spiritual fitness, according to the Bible, means that we are reconciled with God through His Son Jesus Christ and maintain a close relationship with Him through daily Bible reading and prayer and regular worship. Spiritual fitness means we take care of the inner man as we do the outer man. And why is the inner man so important? Because that’s the only part of us that will last forever. When we first believed in Christ, our inner man was born again. And the Holy Spirit renews the inner man day by day.
In contrast, the outer man is decaying. That’s right. We may reach our physical prime between the ages of 18 to 35. But after that we begin to fight a losing battle. All our efforts to maintain our optimum physical condition are nothing more than a delaying tactic. We’re trying to stave off the inevitable – physical decline, old age, and death.
But don’t get discouraged. For the believer, the opposite process occurs for the inner man. Paul tells us, “Though the outer man is decaying, the inner man is growing stronger day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). We cannot see it with our physical eyes, but a Christian believer may be fifty feet tall on the inside, though only five feet tall on the outside. And what’s more encouraging is that God will one day raise up a new glorified outer man to match this towering inner man.
What kind of body will it be? Well, Paul the apostle gives us an idea here. He says that our present bodies are like the seed which is planted in the ground. But our new resurrected body is like the plant that the seed produces. The seed is tiny and unimpressive, but the plant it produces is glorious by comparison. To give you an idea, consider the seed of the giant Sequoia. The seed of this tree weighs a mere 1/6000th of an ounce. It’s just a tiny flake. Yet it produces a towering giant, 300 feet tall, 40 feet wide at its base, and weighing 65 billion times its original seed weight.
REFLECTION
- If such glory awaits believers who keep their inner man healthy, pure, and continually growing, why then do we neglect our spiritual fitness?
- Let’s be bigger on the inside than on the outside by developing the inner man.
