We Talk About Holiness, But Often Ignore the Body
The church has always been willing to speak strongly about certain sins. We will preach against drunkenness, sexual immorality, addiction, worldliness, pride, and many of the visible ways people rebel against God. In many of those areas, rightly so. Scripture speaks clearly, and the church should not shrink back from calling believers to holiness.
But there is another issue sitting in plain sight that often receives very little attention, and that is the stewardship of the body.
In many churches, people are deeply undisciplined in how they eat, how they move, how they rest, and how they care for the body God gave them. This is not only about visible size or outward appearance, though those things can sometimes reflect deeper habits. It is also about the person who lives carelessly, ignores restraint, avoids exertion, and gives little thought to whether their bodily habits are helping or hindering a faithful life. Over time, comfort, excess, and excuse can become so normal that bodily neglect no longer even registers as a problem.
That reality should concern the church more than it often does.
We tend to treat bodily stewardship as though it belongs in a separate category from spiritual seriousness, but Scripture does not let us divide life that way so easily. A believer does not belong to Christ only in soul and not in body. The Christian life is not merely about avoiding scandalous sins while quietly neglecting other areas of stewardship that reveal the same lack of discipline.
The Body Is Not Spiritually Irrelevant
One of the more damaging habits in Christian thinking is the quiet assumption that the body matters very little so long as the heart is supposedly in the right place. Physical neglect is often treated as a lifestyle choice, a personality issue, or a secondary concern compared to more obviously spiritual matters.
But the Bible does not treat the body as spiritually irrelevant.
1 Corinthians 6:19–20
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
That passage is often brought into conversations about sexual sin, and rightly so, but it says something broader as well. The believer is called to glorify God in the body. The body is not a disposable shell or an afterthought. It is not something we are free to neglect without reflection while claiming seriousness in other parts of discipleship.
This does not mean Christians are called to obsession with appearance. It does not mean every believer must look a certain way, reach a certain weight, or fit some cultural image of athleticism. It does mean the body should be received with gratitude and stewarded with seriousness, wisdom, and self-control rather than treated carelessly.
That point also requires humility. Some bodies are burdened by illness, disability, injury, aging, medication, exhaustion, or limits that other people cannot see. The issue is not whether every believer is equally strong or equally healthy. The issue is whether we are seeking to honor God faithfully with the body and circumstances we have been given, rather than excusing patterns of neglect that we know should be confronted.
Gluttony, Laziness, and the Culture of Excuse
One reason this conversation is difficult is because the church has become practiced at excusing what it would sharply confront in other categories. People will speak strongly about lust while making peace with gluttony. They will call for discipline in prayer while living with little discipline in appetite. They will talk about being set apart from the world while adopting the same comfort-driven habits that are weakening the culture around them.
And there is almost always an explanation ready. Fatigue, busyness, stress, age, soreness, family pressure, lack of routine, and years of inconsistency all become reasons not to change. Some of those pressures are real and should be treated with compassion. Still, a culture of constant explanation can hide a deeper unwillingness to practice restraint, accept discomfort, and take responsibility for habits that are slowly shaping the person.
A lot of people are not trapped by inability as much as they are trapped by long-practiced indulgence and passivity.
Proverbs 23:20–21
“Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags.”
That is strong language, and it should be. Scripture does not treat gluttony and laziness as harmless flaws or small lifestyle preferences. It treats them as forms of disorder. That does not mean every health struggle is caused by sin, but it does mean the church cannot keep pretending that overconsumption and neglect are spiritually neutral.
Stewardship Is Not Vanity
Part of the reason some Christians avoid this subject is because they associate bodily care entirely with vanity. They think of image worship, selfie culture, insecurity, and an industry that profits from appearance. To be fair, much of that world really is shaped by those distortions.
But abuse does not cancel right use.
Caring for the body is not worldly simply because the world has turned appearance into an idol. Movement is not pride. Strength is not arrogance. Eating with restraint is not legalism. Learning to care for the body with greater seriousness can be a sane and God-honoring act when done in the right spirit.
The problem is not bodily care. The problem is bodily worship. And the answer to bodily worship is not bodily neglect.
There is a real difference between making your body your god and refusing to care for it at all. One is vanity, and the other is carelessness. Neither reflects faithful stewardship.
The Church Has Been Selective About Self-Control
This is one of the deeper problems. The church has often been selective about where it expects self-control to appear. We want believers to show self-control with alcohol, sex, speech, finances, and the broader temptations of the world. But in many places, very little is said about self-control in appetite, routine, exertion, rest, and the ordinary stewardship of the body.
That selectiveness reveals something.
It suggests that we are sometimes more willing to confront sins that are easy to name than patterns that are deeply normalized among us. It is easier to preach against something that obviously looks worldly than to deal with comforts that have become part of church culture itself. Indulgence, overconsumption, chronic inactivity, and a joking acceptance of avoidable decline have become common enough that many people no longer think to question them.
But self-control is still self-control, even when the area is less dramatic.
Philippians 3:19
“Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
That verse is not just about food in the narrow sense, but it does speak clearly to appetite ruling the person. Once appetite becomes lord in one area, it often does not remain contained there. A life governed by comfort tends to weaken more than one part of a person.
Bodily Stewardship Requires Discipline
The body does not become well-stewarded by accident. Greater strength, better endurance, more energy, and wiser habits do not appear because someone vaguely wishes for them. Change requires discipline, and discipline requires repeated choices over time that often feel inconvenient and unimpressive in the moment.
That should sound familiar to believers, because the Christian life works in much the same way.
No one becomes spiritually mature by wishing for maturity. No one grows in holiness without repetition, surrender, patience, repentance, and deliberate obedience over time. There are no shortcuts in sanctification, and there are no shortcuts in bodily stewardship either. In both cases, people often want the fruit while resisting the slow process by which it grows.
1 Corinthians 9:27
“But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Paul’s concern in that passage is not modern fitness culture, of course, but he clearly understands that the body is not supposed to rule the person unchecked. Discipline matters. Control matters. Training matters. The body is meant to be governed, not simply indulged.
That kind of language should press the church to think more seriously about how it lives.
Transformation Takes Time
One reason many people stay stuck is because they want immediate change in areas that only respond to long obedience. They want to feel different before they start living differently. They want visible results without enduring the slow repetition that makes growth possible.
But real change is usually slower than people want.
Growth in bodily stewardship takes time. So does faithfulness. Progress in both areas can feel frustrating, repetitive, and humbling. There are setbacks and plateaus, days when progress feels invisible, and seasons where discipline feels lonely. None of that means the work is pointless. It simply means the work is real.
This is one of the more useful parallels between faith and bodily stewardship. In both cases, repeated practices shape the person. Not in a mechanical sense where effort earns grace, but in the ordinary sense that habits form lives, and the translation of what you repeatedly do matters in the long run.
A person who wants total transformation into the image of Christ cannot be satisfied with one polished corner of life while the rest remains untouched. In the same way, bodily stewardship cannot be reduced to wanting to look slightly better. It reaches into energy, endurance, mobility, discipline, usefulness, and the habits that shape everyday life.
Community Helps, but Personal Responsibility Remains
It is a gift to have people around you who will walk with you, encourage you, challenge you, and help you stay accountable. That is true in the Christian life, and it is true in any area of discipline. It is easier to keep going when others are helping you remember that growth is possible even when it feels slow.
But at the end of the day, no one can obey for you.
Your pastor cannot be a Christian for you. Your friend cannot repent for you. Your spouse cannot do push-ups for you. No one else can make your daily choices for you. Encouragement matters, but personal responsibility remains.
That is where many people get stuck. They want motivation from the outside without discipline on the inside. They want the environment to change them without taking ownership of the choices that need to be made each day. Whether the issue is prayer, repentance, eating, movement, rest, or routine, there comes a point where explanation has to give way to action.
The point is not to be harsh, but to be honest about where responsibility finally rests.
Why This Matters for Christian Witness
Some people will hear all of this and still think it sounds too practical or too secondary. But bodily stewardship affects witness more than many are willing to admit. A church that constantly speaks of discipline, self-control, obedience, and stewardship while visibly making peace with gluttony, passivity, and bodily neglect sends a confused message.
This does not mean the church should become obsessed with image. It does mean the church should stop acting as though physical stewardship has no place in discipleship. People get old, injured, and sick. Some weakness comes simply because we live in a fallen world. But some weakness is made worse by years of avoidable neglect, careless habits, and an unwillingness to take the body seriously.
That reality should invite humility, not cruelty. It should still be named.
A believer should want the body to be as ready as possible to serve, endure, care for others, and carry the ordinary burdens of life without being ruled by appetite and comfort. That’s not vanity, it’s usefulness.
Romans 12:1
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
That verse makes the body part of worship. Not in the shallow sense of performance, but in the deeper sense that what we do with our bodies belongs to God.
The Church Must Recover a Theology of Stewardship
The church needs a better theology of stewardship when it comes to the body. It needs to stop treating bodily care as though it belongs only to the world, vanity culture, or to people who care too much about appearance. We need to recover the truth that stewardship is holistic, and it reaches into appetite, movement, rest, routine, discipline, self-control, and the ordinary habits that either strengthen a life or weaken it.
This does not mean every believer will look the same. It does not mean there is no room for sickness, disability, aging, or limitation. It does mean there should be a seriousness about doing what we can with what we have, instead of baptizing neglect with excuses.
1 Timothy 4:8
“for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way…”
That verse does not dismiss bodily training. It affirms that it has value, even while placing godliness above it. That is the balance believers need. Bodily care is not everything. But it’s not nothing either.
The church has spent a long time pressing on some visible sins while saying very little about one of the most normalized forms of undisciplined living in its own midst. That needs to change. Not because bodily discipline is the Gospel, and not because appearance is righteousness, but because stewardship matters.
We are only given one body in this life. It should not be worshiped, and it should not be ignored. It should be offered to God with gratitude, discipline, and a growing seriousness about what it means to glorify Him in all of life.
