My Body & My Self (Psalm 139:13-16‪)‬ Cityview Community Church - Sermons

PODCAST


My Body & My Self
April 7, 2024 | Brandon Cooper
Brandon Cooper preached about embracing our identity as embodied beings created by God. He argued that we should accept our physical bodies instead of trying to change them. Cooper also discussed lovingly counseling those struggling with gender dysphoria to accept the bodies God gave them. The sermon encouraged gratitude for our bodies and living according to God's design rather than our desires.



TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Good morning church. You want to go ahead and grab your Bibles, you can open up to Psalm 139. Psalm 139, will be in verses 13 to 16. This morning, as you're turning there, I remember reading in an article, it's probably about a year ago, and I could not track it back down. So I don't have specifics for you. But I'm someone who struggled with gender dysmorphia, I had said, and then I'm quoting here, during puberty, you know, my body began to go through changes that I did not consent to. I thought that that was a very interesting phrase, because there's some assumptions underneath that expression. One, of course, and maybe most importantly, is that my body is separate from the real meaning non physical me that I am something more than my body. And so then my body might be out of whack with who I really am. And kind of a second assumption baked into that, of course, is that we have every right and every reason to make physical reality conform to our desires. And of course, we do this all the time. By the way, when you're too hot, you turn on the air conditioning, there's a physical reality of heat. And then through technology or technique, we try and make reality conform to what we want to experience. So we see these two impulses these these two assumptions all over the place today, of course, gender and sexuality, one of the big ones technology as well, so that we can control the physical world, especially with the rise of things like artificial intelligence, where there's this idea that there's kind of a mind separate from the physical. We've got body image issues, of course, like eating disorders, and what this is a real thing. You can look it up by the way, selfie dysmorphia, or at the more philosophical level, you see things like the rise of transhumanism, which is the idea that the next stage in evolution is that we actually unshackle ourselves from the constraints of the material world and become pure consciousness. You see this and of course, sci fi movies like The Matrix Ready Player One, the framework and Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. We bring a lot of this into the church as well. I mean, think of some of our language, even when we will say things like, oh, you know, we're all about winning souls. Not bodies don't care about those. We're just here to win souls. And of course, we see this how technology is shaping our approach to church as well with things like live stream and whatnot. You know, a lot of us can tell stories to our kids who almost don't believe us. On Friday nights, we used to drive to a physical building, with a blue and yellow sign out front, and pick our way through a limited selection of VHS tapes to rent and bring home right? And that just almost seems unbelievable. Now, what if 20 3050 years from now we're trying to tell our kids or our grandkids or whatnot, that on Sunday mornings we used to drive to a physical building, in order to gather physically with God's people for church. What's the point of this catalogue? Why are we going through all of this you can see we've got body issues. We got body issues today, like we need a sound Theology of the Body and a solid foundation on which to stand today, because we exist as our new series says, in the flesh, we exist in the flesh, we are embodied people,