Get the rest and exercise and proper diet that your body was designed by God
to have. Now that is not number one that’s number 11, but I will say it
because you all are embodied human beings. And God has ordained in his
strange providence that what we eat, how we rest, and how we exercise affects our
emotions. We can’t equate bodily feelings with spiritual emotions, but I have a
whole chapter on the mysteries of the interplay of body and soul in my book, in
which I wrestle — and all it is is a wrestling because these are mysteries to
me as to how a spiritual reality, which I will have in heaven when I don’t yet
have my body. So, like right now my mother is in heaven and her body is over at
Woodlawn Cemetery, but she’s filled with emotions toward
Jesus right now, without a body. So I know that bodily feelings, tremblings, and the
kind of excitements that you associate with the body, are not equal to spiritual
affections, but they are interwoven. You can hardly tear them apart.
I’ll give you an example: It’s the Fall of 1971. I’m sitting
in a pantry, which I turned into a study and the third floor of our apartment
in Munich, Germany, where I was studying
for three years. And I read the most obvious sentence in
Galatians: “The fruit of the Spirit is patience.”
“Okay, Holy Spirit please, I’m not a very patient person. Would you please grant me
to be more patient with Noël, more patient with bus drivers, and other
people?” And then I discovered this very paradoxical, contradictory, frustrating
reality: My patience level rises and falls with how much sleep I get.
And I got really scared. Well, which is it? A fruit of sleep or a fruit of the
Spirit? That’s a very profound question. If patience is a fruit of the Spirit how
come mine is going up and down with how much sleep I get? I’m crabby with no
sleep, and I’m a relatively easy-going, long-suffering person when I get enough
sleep. Now here’s my best shot at an answer: One of the ways that the Holy
Spirit works is by humbling me enough to realize I’m not God, and the world can
get along while I sleep.
You can make good enough grades with some sleep. You can be a good enough
husband with some sleep. You don’t need to stay awake and run the world. Just
become unconscious one-third of your life. That’s a very humbling reality that
God would ordain that human beings be unconscious a third of their life is
just mind-boggling to me. There’s got to be a strong theological meaning for that,
and the meaning is: “You’re not God. I’m God, and I never sleep (Psalm 121). And so
the Holy Spirit gets at my patience not just directly. And he can do that for a
doctor who has to say up three days in a row. He can make a doctor patient after two
nights with no sleep. He can do that, but ordinarily the Holy
Spirit says, “Quit playing God and playing fast and loose with your body. I made you
to need a certain number of hours of sleep, and I’m gonna humble you until you
acknowledge that.” So you can come at it indirectly as well as directly. That’s
the work of the Holy Spirit. Same thing with eating and the same thing
with exercising.