Does God Care About My Body? What the Old Books Say

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Does God care about my body, or only about my soul? Most people arrive at that question sideways — through a back that will not let them kneel, through the tiredness that turns the evening reading into three lines and sleep, through the quiet suspicion that a serious Christian ought to be able to pray straight past all of it. Somewhere between the desert fathers and the modern self-help shelf, a rumour settled in: that serious prayer means getting free of the body. That the flesh is the drag on the line. That the point of devotion is to leave the aching back, the tired eyes and the restless legs outside the door, and go in without them.

It is a rumour worth checking against the books themselves. Stilling Waves keeps a working library of public-domain devotional writing — E.M. Bounds, Andrew Murray, John Wesley, Johann Arndt, Thomas Traherne, the Prayer Book — and when the passages about the body are read side by side, what comes out is not contempt. It is something closer to careful attention, and in places a flat refusal to separate the two.

Does God care about the body, or only the soul?

Bounds, whose entire subject was prayer, stated it as doctrine rather than as advice:

Soul, spirit and body are to unite in all things pertaining to life and godliness.

— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer

That is not a concession to human weakness. It is a description of what a person is. Traherne, writing two centuries earlier in a very different key, put the same thought as a couplet — the soul is what makes us great, and the body is what finishes the sentence:

A Soul it is that makes us truly great, Whose little bodies make us more complete.

— Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

The word to notice is more complete. Not less spiritual. The body is not the tax paid on being alive; it is part of what there is to give.

What does “your body is a temple” mean?

The line that recurs most often in these writers is the one about the body as a temple. Wesley uses it as a rebuke, and expects the reader to feel it:

Knowest thou not that “thy body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which thou hast of God”?

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

Murray turns the same verse inward and confesses that he had held it too loosely:

I have too little understood that my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, that there is nothing in it that can be matter of indifference, that its every state and function is to be holiness to the Lord.

— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ

The phrases carry the weight. Nothing in it that can be matter of indifference. Its every state and function. The claim is not that the body is neutral scaffolding for a soul that does the real work. It is that the state of the body — tiredness, hunger, tension, breath, the hour of the day — is not spiritually inert. Murray presses it further, into a conclusion he seems reluctant to reach:

And yet it must be, if the body is to be holy, as God’s temple, and we are to glorify Him in our body and our spirit.

— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ

That is not a technique on offer. It is an escape route being closed.

Romans 12:1 and presenting your body as a living sacrifice

Romans 12:1 sits under most of this. It arrives in the Prayer Book in the form countless readers first met it:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

— The Book of Common Prayer

Murray restates it as something the worshipper says rather than something the worshipper reads:

Let us offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto God, that His will might be done through us, as it is done in heaven.

— Andrew Murray, Love to the Uttermost

And Mary Wilder Tileston, compiling the daily readings that sat on a great many bedside tables, kept a verse of it in her collection in three-part form:

My spirit, soul, and flesh receive, A holy, living sacrifice.

— Mary Wilder Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs

Three words, in order, with the flesh at the end but not left out. A sacrifice, whatever else it is, is a physical thing. The metaphor does not work otherwise.

Does God care what you eat and drink?

Murray was willing to take the argument into territory most devotional writing avoids as beneath it:

The body has been redeemed to be a temple of the Holy Spirit; it is in body as well as spirit, it is very specially, Scripture says, in eating and drinking, we are to glorify God.

— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer

Arndt, writing more than two centuries before him, had already ruled out the tidy hierarchy in which God attends to souls and leaves bodies to fend for themselves:

For God took not less care of the soul, than he did of the body.

— Johann Arndt, True Christianity

That is plainly not the sentiment of men who thought the body a nuisance to be escaped.

Is the body a burden to the soul? Where the tradition disagrees

Honesty requires the other half. Wesley, who wrote the temple line above, also kept company with the older complaint that the body burdens the soul and hinders it — a strain of thought running from Paul through the whole ascetic tradition, and one Wesley did not disown. He did not pretend the body is always an ally. Anyone who has tried to pray through a migraine can see the case.

But notice what Wesley does not conclude. He never treats the body as separable, or the difficulty as a reason to ignore it:

You surely believe you have a body, together with your soul, and that each is dependent on the other.

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

And, more strikingly, in a passage where he is reasoning about what he is:

Indeed at present this body is so intimately connected with the soul. that I seem to consist of both.

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

So the tradition disagrees with itself, and it is better to say so than to tidy it. One strand finds the body a burden; another finds it a temple. What neither strand does is treat the body as irrelevant. Even the complaint is an admission: a thing that can press the soul down is a thing that affects prayer.

Did the old writers teach breathing exercises or body prayer?

It should be said plainly, because the claim is often overstated in the other direction. These writers did not teach breathing exercises. They had no body-scan, no somatic practice, no theory of the nervous system, and nothing that would sit comfortably in a wellness app. Reading such things back into them is dishonest.

What they did prescribe were physical conditions. A place. A shut door. A posture. An hour set aside. Time that has not been hurried. Bounds, who insisted that the whole man prays, was equally insistent that bending the knee is not itself prayer; a bent knee can sit under a haughty heart. The condition is not the thing. But the condition is not nothing either, and no one in this library wrote as though it were.

What the conditions are for is a rest that is not merely physical. Arndt, characteristically, gives that end its quietest form:

For as it is never better for our bodies than when they are at home; so it is ever best with the soul, when it is at rest in its own habitation, which is God himself; from whom it derives life and being.

— Johann Arndt, True Christianity

How to treat your body as a temple, practically

If the phrase is going to mean anything on an ordinary Tuesday, it has to come down to small things. Sleep, because a body kept short of it cannot hold attention for long. Food and water at ordinary hours rather than forgotten until the afternoon, and a posture you can hold without hurting. None of that is prayer and none of it earns anything; it is the plain care of something God has already claimed, so that when you sit down you are not spending the first ten minutes fighting your own body for quiet.

Where to start: one pause before you pray

This is the whole reason a Stilling Waves journal opens each day with one short pause before the reading, rather than dropping the reader straight into the text. It is not a technique and it does nothing by itself. It is the old, unglamorous instruction — sit down, stop moving, arrive before you begin — kept because the writers this press draws on, Murray chief among them, never asked the soul to turn up without the body. For more of where that instruction comes from, the Andrew Murray reader’s guide is the place to start.

This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.