Your Body is Good by Amanda Martinez Beck

Day 1 of 5

Read Colossians 2:11-22 NKJV

Is diet culture Biblical? Do we need to look a certain way to glorify God? Some doctrines say that we do, but that feels incredibly false to me and here’s why: Catholic thinker Richard Rohr says that the holy pattern of Christianity evidenced in the cross is: order, disorder, reorder. “Order” is the status quo, how things are just done, like the religious and cultural practices of first-century Palestine. “Disorder” comes with an act of disruption, like the God of the universe becoming a victim of state violence. After the disruption and disorder comes a re-ordering of life around a new set of priorities, like having the law of Moses disrupted by Jesus’s ministry and death, resulting in the reordering of life around grace and mercy.

The apostle Paul writes about the cross this way in Colossians 2. Verses 11-14 speak of order being disrupted and disordered by the cross event: when we are joined with Christ, we are joined to the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Specifically, Paul tells us, the old rules are gone: “He has made [you] alive together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13b-14 NKJV).

What is this note of requirements that Paul is talking about? He answers in verse 16: “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ (2:16-17 NKJV). Paul is primarily talking about food rules. After he writes that Christ wants us to grow by clinging to him (see verses 18-19), Paul revisits the disruptive act: “Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why…do you subject yourself to regulations—‘Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle’…according to the commandments and doctrines of men?” (2:20-22).

Paul is telling us that we can get rid of food rules. We don’t have to conform to the food and body expectations of others, especially around the holidays (see verse 16)! We don’t have to eat in a certain way in order to please God, because through the cross, Jesus has set us free from the requirements written against us. In the same way that Jesus disrupted order to invite re-order, I believe that we must disrupt old patterns of church sanctioned body policing to re-order ourselves outside of diet culture.

The next four days, we will explore passages that will help us celebrate our bodies, just as they are today. By the end of this devotional series, you will be able to say with confidence that all bodies—including your own—are good bodies.

Make a list of food and body rules that you have tried to follow. Prayerfully offer them up to God and pray, “God, thank you that you have freed me from these food rules. Help me to see the goodness of my own body, today, just as it is.”

Day 1 of 5

Start reading this 5-day devotional in the app. Find it on the Featured shelf.