Good Health and Godliness

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the picture of good health.
I don’t exercise enough. I don’t always eat well. I don’t sleep as much as I should.

And yet, I’m increasingly convinced that there is a deep and often-ignored connection between good health and godliness.

We cannot hope to mature in Christ while neglecting or even abusing the very vessel He indwells.

Much of the Old Testament law wasn’t just about religious observance—it was profoundly practical. God was forming a people who could live well together: physically, socially, emotionally. A healthy community wasn’t the goal of faithfulness, but it was certainly a fruit of it. Israel’s life was meant to be a witness to the world, not only in what they believed, but in how they lived.

This time of year, many of us are already thinking about health. January has a way of doing that. We feel sluggish after too much Christmas food, too much drink, too little rest. Health clubs bank on January optimism that fades by early February.

With that in mind, I thought it might be worthwhile to spend the next few weeks reflecting on what good health looks like biblically. Not just physical health, but emotional, intellectual, social, and financial health as well. Maybe there are categories we haven’t named yet. Let’s see where this takes us.

Let’s be clear that this isn’t a new conversation either.

The early church had to confront a dangerous heresy—that holiness meant abandoning the body. That God was concerned with the soul, but largely indifferent to flesh and bone.

Two thousand years later, we’re still fighting the same lie—only now we often just call it faithfulness.

Much of modern church culture is functionally Gnostic, even if we’ve never heard the word. We spiritualize exhaustion. We glorify burnout. We minimize trauma. We ignore depression. We shame bodily limits. We treat rest, community, movement, and nutrition as optional extras—things that might be nice if you have time, but certainly not central to spiritual life.

And then we wonder why spiritual formation stalls.

At its core, Gnosticism taught a radical split:
the spiritual is good,
the physical is suspect,
and what happens in the body doesn’t really matter to God.

Sometimes that led to harsh self-denial and withdrawal. Other times it led to indulgence and disregard. But both paths came from the same lie: the body is irrelevant to God.

Scripture tells a very different story.

God created our bodies—and called them good.
We are not spirits trapped in meat suits; we are integrated beings.

Jesus was incarnated into a real body, for a reason. He lived in it, cared for it, suffered in it, and ultimately offered it for the glory of God.

Jesus was into healing bodies, not as a side project, but as a sign that God’s kingdom was reconciling all of humanity, not just the soul.

The early apostles and church fathers were unequivocal on this point: to downplay the connection between body and spirit is not maturity—it is heresy.

In fact, I could be said that the first great heresy of the church wasn’t immorality. It was the refusal to believe that God actually cares about the whole person.

You cannot mature in Christ while neglecting the vessel He indwells.

So over the coming weeks, I’d like to explore what it might look like to pursue health as a spiritual discipline—not motivated by guilt or some annual self-improvement ritual, but by invitation. I am definitely not chasing perfection, but I am embracing wholeness.

Because God’s invitation has never been to become less human in order to be holy—
but to become fully human, in His presence.