Introduction
One day, while I sat in a coffee shop and worked on a weekend sermon, the waiter saw what I was working on and looked at me excitedly,
“Pastor, I have a problem,” he said. “I accepted Jesus into my heart a few months ago and it is wonderful. I go to church every Sunday morning. But in the evenings I have wild promiscuous sex.” He looked at me to gauge my reaction. Then he asked something that I will never forget. “I have accepted Jesus into my heart, but how do I get him into my penis?”
I have had many of these impromptu pastoral conversations, but I must confess that this was a first for me. Although his question was unconventional it showed the deep desire of a man who wants to be formed into Christlikeness in every part of his body.
You might find his statement shocking or even offensive, but I am convinced that if we are going to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus we will have to talk about every detail of our lives.
The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God” (Romans 6:13NLT).
In this book we will explore a raw spirituality through which we become instruments doing “what is right for the glory of God.” As we learn to use our bodies to the glory of God, this embodied faith extends into the world—making it a better place. This is raw spirituality.
How Disembodied Faith Wrecks Our World
I grew up in a church culture where it was all about “having Jesus in your heart.” Churches were interested in getting Jesus into hearts and populating heaven with people who have Jesus in their hearts. There wasn’t a lot of emphasis on the Jesus life through the rest of my anatomy and into everyday life. The Jesus life was disembodied.
It was this version of the Jesus story that allowed a gross system like apartheid to form in my home country, South Africa. We accepted Jesus into our hearts and worshiped him on Sunday, but during the rest of the week we used our bodies and the rest of our complex lives in ways that oppressed other people. We segregated Jesus from the raw material of our everyday life.
Many people have been hurt by versions of a disembodied Jesus story. Some have been oppressed by it, like the millions of people in South Africa. In other places this distortion led to genocide. In Rwanda, where a majority of the people “accepted Jesus into their hearts,” people used their bodies to kill one another.1
Some of the hurts are not as obvious as the South African or Rwanda stories, but they are also deadly. I know a lot of people who have become bored with a disembodied version of Christianity; they have already accepted Jesus into their hearts, but what now? While I lived in the United States for three years I saw how this disembodied version got mixed with a consumerism wherein the temptation became to use Jesus like a product. Every Sunday people came to the church like they were shopping at a mall. The rawness of Christ’s humanity morphed into a plastic consumer product.
I regularly meet people who feel sad about current versions of Christianity. Some of them say the Christian life is just a lot of chat, that the church suffers from verbal diarrhea, that it is all a head trip. Some of their sadness siphons into bitter anger or cynicism. They seek embodiment in other places.
Several of my friends feel the growing