What If the Shame You Feel About Your Body Was Never From God?

What if the shame you carry about your body was never something God asked you to carry? Christian shame about the body runs deep, but we find freedom when we learn that this shame is antithetical to the Gospel.

In this first message of our new series, The Wisdom of Your Body, Rev. Dr. Christopher Carter traces one of the most damaging ideas in Christian history — that your body is the problem, that "the flesh" is what God is against, and that feeling ashamed of being in a body is somehow holy.

It is a lie. Jesus didn't say this. Paul didn't say this.

Working through Galatians 5:13-26, Dr. Carter shows why Paul's word for "flesh" (sarx) is not talking about your skin, your appetite, or your body at all. Paul is writing to a community arguing about circumcision and religious status, and he uses sarx to mean self-indulgence — the ego that builds rituals for its own comfort. When Paul sets flesh against Spirit, he is not splitting you in two. He is asking whether you will live according to the freedom you have in Christ or be held captive by selfishness and ego.

And the body-versus-spirit divide we inherited? Much of it owes less to Scripture than to a Greek philosophy the early church absorbed — one that treated the body as the problem to be escaped. But Genesis says God breathed life into dust, and the same word carries both meanings: breath and spirit. You are not a spirit trapped in a body. You are an embodied spirit - an enspirited body.

Stay to the end for the practice. It is the whole point of the message.