It Starts with a Square

Sunday on Monday: Health Goals

BY Regan Hewitt

Main and Mulberry presents Sunday On Monday, a new series with Grace Hill Church’s Pastor Jason Stockdale. On each episode, Stockdale joins Anna Bell to share a brief word of faith, encouragement and hope. Each morning’s reflection reminds us of what’s really important. During this episode, Stockdale discusses the relationship between faith and physical health – listen here or read the interview below. Listen to all past episodes of Sunday On Monday here.

Sunday On Monday

May 10, 2021

Anna Bell:

Good morning and thank you for joining us for this episode of Sunday on Monday. I’m your host, Anna Bell, and I’m really excited to be with the lead pastor over at Grace Hill Church in Collierville, Tennessee, Jason Stockdale. Jason, how are you this morning?

Jason Stockdale: Good morning, Anna Bell. How are you today?

AB: I’m good, I’m really ready to kick off the week

JS: Good, good, I am too.

AB: Tell us, what message do you have to share with us? We’re still on our health series, aren’t we?

JS: Yeah, we’re in the second part of our health goal series, and really the whole idea behind this series is, I wanna give everybody a new way, a new reason to pursue physical health. 2020 coming into 2021, all the statistics show that one of the ways that 2020 impact in our lives was there was a negative impact on many of our health or our physical health, and so we’re talking about that over the next few weeks, and really the goal in this short series is to help create a new motivation, a broader biblical understanding for why we should pursue physical health, and the question that we wanna wrestle with today is this: Why is caring for our bodies so difficult? It doesn’t take long for us to figure out that there is something really working against our bodies and our health, and it’s not just Taco Tuesday, there is something really working against our bodies and working against our health, and so here’s what I wanna come around today, just in the next couple of minutes that we have together is I want to understand this is that sin broke our bodies, you go back to the very beginning of the genesis of account of creation.

JS: You see God and He creates heaven. And He creates Earth and He creates man, and he separates the waters from all the things. It all happens. And the Genesis writer says it was good. And then the fall happened, sin entered the world, and in Genesis Chapter 3, starting in verse 7, we see this picture, then the eyes of both of them, that’s Adam and Eve, were opened and they knew they were naked. So what did they do? They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man is why I’ve heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord called out to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. So I had one commentator in writing about this passage of Scripture said This, sin’s proper fruit is shame, and what do they have shame over… Well, certainly there’s the shame over the disobedience to God’s commands, but the shame that they directly felt was the shame over their bodies, they realized they were naked and something was broken in that moment, and isn’t an interesting that humanity’s first response back to God was not, I’m sorry, but I’m ashamed or I’m afraid, and that shame throughout all of human history has been passed on to us, this brokenness as it relates to our bodies has been passed down, it’s in our genes.

JS: Why? Well, because sin broke our bodies, the thing about all the areas in our lives that this brokenness has touched on just this last week, I had the funeral for my 89-year-old grandfather, and his body, he had been finding cancer for a couple of years, and his body at the very end of his life was just so broken, but you know the brokenness of our bodies isn’t just an inner shame that we may feel, we experience this pain of living in this earthly body, really only outside of our bodies, our bodies here to Paul, the Apostle Paul, a very vivid language in Second Corinthians 4 16 says this, that our outer person is being destroyed, maybe you have shame due to a chronic illness in your life, you just feel that shame, think to yourself, You know I’m as useful to my family anymore. My grandfather really wrestled with that the last couple of years of his life, he’d been the primary caretaker for my grandmother who’s been battling Alzheimer’s for 17 years, and then my grandfather was so active and so vibrant in his life, and he really wrestled with that and my family had to really help him through that and help them understand, No, you’re here, you’re valuable, you matter to our family, maybe some of you, you feel like you’ve just been on this ongoing battle with mental health, maybe you’ve got some type of disease that you battle on an ongoing life, in an ongoing battle in your life a year ago, we all had a front row seat to this, didn’t we win? Coronavirus showed up and it put the fragile nature of our bodies of humanity just on full display for everybody to see, why is this all very real for us? It’s because sin broke our bodies.

JS: And so we say, Well, where’s the hope in this? What’s the hope for the shame that we carry for any number of reasons in our lives about our bodies and maybe the brokenness of them, Where is the hope and the fact that our body is a decaying and… Oh my gosh, we’re all gonna die. Where is the hope in that… Well, we go back to Genesis and we see that there’s grace even in the midst of the fall, in verse 9. We see this in Genesis Chapter 3, so the Lord called out to the man and said to him, Where are you? God asked this so powerful question, he says, Where are you… Here’s Adam and a perfect Garden, the perfect relationship with each other in God, and they break this perfect union with God and each other and creation, and they put their own desires ahead of their own obedience towards God. This is the creator of everything. He knew exactly where Adam and Eve were, and yet he calls out to them and he says, Where are you? He meets them with grace, and yes, there were consequences from their disobedience, that God meets them, he meets them right in their shame and their fear and their embarrassment, and their brokenness with grace.

JS: Another commentator worded it this way, God’s first words to fall in, man has all the marks of grace, it is a question since to help him, he must draw rather than drive him out of hiding. Only a voice penetrates his consumer, and I want you to know that God calls out to you, he says, Where are you? And God will meet us in the shame of our brokenness of our bodies, God meets us and are hiding, God meets us in the shame of… Many of us, we try to stitch things together, just like Adam and Eve, to cover ourselves or cover our brokenness in our own way, God meets us with grace by saying, Where are you and how has he done that? Well, Jesus has taken on our shame, Jesus has taken on our hiring, Jesus has taken on the bitter fruit of decay of our bodies, Isaiah 53 is, He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was, he was like Someone… People turned away from, He was despised and we didn’t value him, yet he himself bore our sickness and he carried our pains. One final quote from one of my favorite commentators, Warren Weir, but he’s the pastor to pastor, he says this, one day the Savior would die so that frightened sinners could come to the Lord and find forgiveness.

AB: What a message, thank you for reminding us that there is grace and hope despite the brokenness of our physical body, so Jason, Will you close us in prayer?

JS: Would love to. Father, thank you so much, and I would ask that anybody who’s listening to this today would hear your call, the call to say, Where are you in that whatever shame, whatever brokenness they feel they care in their bodies, afraid that you would let them know that you meet them with grace. I pray for anybody who’s really wrestling through this after a year like 2020, that you would give them hope, encouragement and people are… Surround them in their lives that can encourage them and help them get to a place that they wanna be, how we love you, we thank you. Amen.

AB:We hope you enjoyed today’s message. I’m Anna Bell and we’ll see you next Monday for Sunday On Monday. Take care. 

 

September/October 2021 Tour Collierville Magazine