Body and Mind

When many Christians discuss on “spiritual growth,” they generally mean Bible study, prayer, and other “religious” activities. But while that’s an important part of spiritual growth, it’s only one part of the picture.

Since God created all things good, it is safe to say He values them, and so we should as well. This means we need to be concerned about growth in all areas of our lives, not just “religious” or “spiritual” activities. Limiting Christian growth to things like prayer and Bible study is actually more Gnostic than Christian—it suggests that there’s a radical split between the physical and the spiritual, an idea that has no foundation in the Bible.

Our souls are the critical point for personal development, since we need to use our will to choose to take actions that will lead to growth. But developing the soul directly is difficult. Rather, the soul is generally developed indirectly, through building habits of body and mind that will feed and shape it. So let’s look at these two areas.

Ideas about spiritual growth usually ignore the body, but that is a serious mistake. Our physical strength (frequently described in Scripture in terms of endurance rather than raw power) is a critical component to anything we want to accomplish in life. Put simply, if we are tired or lack energy, it is extremely difficult to focus on anything, and we are more susceptible to temptation and more likely to fall into easier (and generally bad) habits.

Without physical energy, it is impossible to cultivate the mind and the soul, a fact recognized by the classical idea of “a sound mind in a sound body.” (It is also the legendary origin of kung fu, which is said to have grown out of exercises that were taught to monks at the Shaolin temple to keep them from falling asleep during meditation.) So it is important to commit ourselves to a process of physical development. This includes taking care of our health (since our bodies are temples of God) and cultivating our energy through diet, exercise, and rest.

With increased energy, we are in a better position to cultivate the mind. Christians tend to assume that this means knowledge of Scripture, and that is certainly part of it. But this is only part of building the mind. If God is the source of all things and Jesus is Lord of all, then God is interested in all of life and we can study any and every subject as a legitimate part of our personal development and as a spiritual activity.

This includes advancing in our professional life. Whatever you do for a living, unless it is criminal or intrinsically immoral, it is a sacred and holy calling by God for your life at this time. Professional development is therefore also a spiritual activity.

If you’ve been a student you already know how to learn, and all those skills can be applied here. But learning for transformation rather than information is a slightly different process. You need to learn new information, but you also need to let that new information sink deep into you to change how you think. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2). So how do we do this? That will be the subject of the next post.

Heart, Soul, Mind and Strength

Continuing our discussion of God’s priorities, we see that proper love comes from the inside out, heart to soul to mind to strength (physical actions). To understand this, it will be helpful to define the terms Jesus uses:

• Our strength refers to our physical body.
• Our mind is our thought life and our ability to reason and think.
• Our soul is our settled convictions, core values, conscience, memory, and will, which together comprise the essence of who we are. The Greek word is psyche, the root word for psychology, and is often translated as an individual’s “life” (e.g. Mark 8:35). As C. S. Lewis put it, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” To be more precise, we are embodied souls.
• The heart is the even deeper levels of our being, the innermost core of who we are that is generally invisible to us. Scripture tells us that only God knows our heart, which means we don't even know it completely.

We live from the inside out: our hearts move our souls, which then choose what we think about and what we do.

This raises a problem, however: I don’t have direct control over my heart. I (that is, my soul) can control my body and mind, but I can’t will my heart to change because the heart is a deeper part of me than my will.

So how do I move my heart to love God completely?

We may live from the inside out, but we grow primarily from the outside in. In other words, what we choose to do and to think about consistently will mold our souls, which then shapes our hearts. If we are going to change and grow, we need to develop new patterns of action and thought, because this will change our internal lives.

I would take this further to argue that since God expects our best, it is important for us to work to grow ourselves on all levels, heart, soul, mind, and strength. Growing in love for God will inevitably put us on a journey of personal growth as well.

In practical terms, the same applies to loving our neighbors: we need to grow ourselves so that we have more to give to them. For example, the best thing we can do for the poor is not to be one of them ourselves. As John Wesley said, we should make as much as we can, save as much as we can, and give as much as we can. Growing ourselves enhances our ability to help others.

So how do we grow ourselves in such a way that we can love God completely, love ourselves correctly, and love our neighbor compassionately? This is the subject of the next post.