Pastor Rick Warren explores ‘God’s Prescription for Health’, urging listeners to rethink how they manage their bodies. Through scriptural insights, he demystifies common health misconceptions and emphasizes the significance of body stewardship. This episode not only challenges cultural views but also empowers through the Daniel Plan, a blueprint for achieving your health goals with divine guidance.
Hey there, everybody, and welcome to Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. And whether today is your first time tuning in or if you’re a regular listener, we’re really excited that you’re here. Well, today, Pastor Rick is continuing his series called Discover Your Destiny. So get ready to explore the practical steps to grow in all areas of your life. spirit, mind, body, relationships, and even your career. So stick with us as we uncover God’s incredible plan for your future. So let’s get right to Rick with part one of a message called God’s Prescription for Health.
SPEAKER 01 :
This week, I want us to look at your physical health. And we’re going to look at God’s prescription for physical health. Now, before we look at this, I need to begin with a confession. I grew up in a family where we were taught you don’t drink, smoke, cuss, chew, or run around with girls that do. So in my lifetime, I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I’ve never tasted alcohol. I’ve never taken an illicit drug. But I love pasta. And that’s why they call me Pasta Rick. All right? Now, we all have our drug of choice, and my drug of choice has been food. Now, I grew up in a family where the centerpiece that literally dominated all the other furniture in our house was the dining room table. Now I’m not just talking about a little kitchenette. This thing was 12, maybe 14 feet long. It was at least five feet wide. I’m not making this up. It was a four inch thick slab of a single piece of redwood. I grew up in Northern California in the Redwoods in a little town called Redwood Valley. And we had a lumber man who actually milled this from a single tree. The dining room table at the Warren home dominated not just the dining room, but the living room and every other room of the house. And every major function of our house revolved around that table. Every happy memory in my life growing up was connected to food. Every sad memory in my life was connected to food. Everything between those two extremes was connected to food. And so while we didn’t drink, smoke, cuss too, we certainly did enjoy a lot of food. My mom liked to cook. My dad grew at least an acre in garden. We raised our own cattle and there was always plenty on the table. And I have to be honest with you, I’ve never really paid much attention to my health until my mid-20s. I was as skinny as a beanpole. I mean, I was one of those guys you hate who you could literally eat everything and not gain an ounce. And that’s the way I was. And then I got married. Now I’m not blaming Kay, she has no responsibility for this. She’s an incredible cook. But I don’t know, something slowed down in me and I started packing on the pounds. And I honestly never really did pay much attention to my health until this year I had a little epiphany, a Damascus Road experience, the light kind of finally clicked on in my mind, and it happened the day that a few months ago, I baptized on a single day over 800 of you. Now, By the way, at the end of that day, I was thinking, shoot, I think I’m going to become a Catholic. I like this thing about the sprinkle a little water. This thing about dipping them under water. Methodist, Presbyterian, I like that. Forget what Jesus did. Let’s just do it the easy way, okay? Let’s just throw a little water on them. Let me get a fire hydrant. Maybe we’ll throw in a car wash with it. No, we’re not gonna do that. But after baptizing 800 people in our church by immersion, I realized we’re all getting heavy. This isn’t your father’s saddleback. And so I started doing a little research on this and I discovered that nearly seven in 10 Americans, 69% of Americans are overweight. Overweight. I discovered that diabetes and heart disease have exploded as pandemic diseases because of weight-related issues. We now have 80 million people in America who are diabetic or pre-diabetic. That’s a phenomenally large number compared to even just 10 years ago. I studied some CDC, Center for Disease Control Statistics and learned that in 1995, there was not a single state in all 50 states that had more than 20% obese in their state. Today, there’s not a single state that doesn’t have at least 20% obese in their state. We are packing on the pounds. And then as I thought about globally, as we’ve traveled around the world in these 195 nations in the last seven years, and you know, peace stands for plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, educate the next generation. And the C in care for the sick, we have focused almost exclusively on infectious diseases for the past seven years in the peace plan. And so we’ve helped people with measles and mumps and malaria. and yellow fever and typhus and polio and AIDS and other infectious diseases, waterborne eye diseases and things like that. And I discovered that actually infectious diseases in the world are actually going down and chronic diseases are going up. In other words, by the end of this decade, 20 million people a year will die from infectious diseases in the world. Now that’s unacceptable. but 50 million a year will die from weight-related diseases. More people are gonna die from diabetes and from heart disease than from infectious diseases. A totally manageable problem. And then I discovered another amazing statistic. that right now, globally in the world, as many people are dying from obesity as are dying from malnutrition. First time in history. 1.1 billion in each category. As many people today are dying from being overweight as are dying from malnutrition in the world today. So I’m thinking, I cannot ask our church to get healthy if I don’t get serious about this. If I don’t do something about it myself. I’ve never asked you to do anything that I haven’t already modeled. Now, the truth is you already know what to do. This is not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery. To get healthy, you gotta eat healthy and you’ve gotta eat less. You’ve got to get moving, you’ve got to move it, move it, okay? Okay, you’ve got to get proper sleep and you’ve got to lower the stress and get more rest in your life. This is not rocket science, you know this. So there’s nothing I can teach you on that today. But what I wanna do today is to focus on the motivation, the why. Why do you not stick and why do I not stick with get in shape programs, get healthy programs, diets, exercise, and whatever? How many times have you set a resolution to get in shape and a month later it’s out the window? And the reason why is if you don’t have the right motivation, you will not stick with it. You’ve gotta have the reason. When you figure out the why in your life, God will always show you how. So what I want us to do today is three things. I want us to look at what God says about the importance of your body, that’s the first thing. And then I wanna share with you a couple of areas for health that you may have never thought of that you won’t find in a nutrition book and some things like that. All right, first, let’s look at what God says about the importance of your physical health. And the Bible says this. First Corinthians chapter six is the classic passage on the body. Here it is on the screen. Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me. In other words, I got the freedom to do anything, but I will not be mastered by anything. What is God saying here? He’s saying, you know, some things in life, they’re just not necessarily wrong. They’re just not necessary. Does that make sense? Okay, you’re free to do whatever you want, but not everything is beneficial, and I’m not gonna be mastered by anything. I’m not gonna let it dominate me. I’m not gonna be addicted to anything. Food is for the stomach, and the stomach for food, but God’s gonna destroy both. In other words, they’re not gonna last forever, so that’s not the real reason you’re here. Then he says, the body’s not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power, God raised the Lord from the dead, and he’s gonna raise us up. Remember, he’s gonna physically raise up your body. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Now, flee, the Bible says, from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. It’s a different class. Do you not know that your body is a temple? This is where that phrase comes from. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Jesus paid for you. Therefore, honor God with your body. Now, this passage teaches us six radical counterculture things about your body. You need to write these down. This is the exact opposite of what culture teaches you today, what the media teaches you today about your body. Okay, here they are. Number one, the first thing is that God expects me to manage my body. God expects me to manage my body. Now, I’m not the owner. I’m the manager. God is the owner of my body, but I am the manager. The Bible word is the word steward. Stewardship is the old English word for management. And we’re talking about the stewardship of health today. In other words, I cannot blame other people for how I use or misuse or abuse my body. I can’t blame anybody else. I’m the manager. My body is a gift from God on loan. God owns it and then he loans it to me. And one day I’m gonna give an account. One day I’m gonna stand before God and he’s gonna say, what did you do with what I gave you? Okay, we’ve talked about this many times that life is a test. It is preparation for eternity. And God is seeing what he can trust you with. What did you do with the help I gave you? What did you do with the mind I gave you? What did you do with the opportunities, the abilities, the freedom, the wealth, all the things? What did you do with what I gave you? And one of the things he’s gonna say is, what did you do with the body that I gave you? And God is watching to see what you do. So I’m a caretaker of my body. God expects me to manage it. Number two, my body is God’s property. Now that’s fighting words here in America because all of us were taught growing up, my body is my own body and it’s my body and I’ll do what I want to with it. And God says, no, you won’t. It’s not your body. It’s my body. I just loaned it to you. It’s not yours because you didn’t create it. Everything that you see was created by God and the Creator owns it all. You don’t own anything. It’s loaned to you, just like we talked about your money last week. You don’t own your money. It’s loaned to you for about 80 years. It was somebody else before you were born. It’s gonna be somebody else after you die. You just use it while you’re here. He owns it and he loans it. And my body is God’s property. The body, the Bible says, is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord. Why? Because it’s his. And the Lord for the body. In other words, I don’t have the right to just share my body with anybody and neither do you. Now that’s a radical concept. See, what Americans do today, they make the common mistakes that the Greeks did, which is called dualism. Back in the days of Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, the Greeks believed in dualism, which was we separate the mind and the body. And they said, you know, really what matters is just that your spirit or your mind, your spirit is right with God, and if your spirit is right with God, Doesn’t really matter what you do with your body. They devalued the body. In fact, they taught the body is evil. So it really doesn’t matter if you mess up your body because it’s just evil. What only really matters is your spirit. And the Bible says that’s absolutely false. Your body’s not evil, your body is holy. Because God made it, and everything God makes, he makes for a purpose. God has never made anything else without a purpose. And so don’t compartmentalize, so you know, all that really matters is my spirit, not my body. It both matters. That’s a myth. Now, I have to admit that growing up in a church home, I never in my entire life heard a single sermon on the body. Not one, I’ve never heard one. I’ve heard him talk about the importance of your spirit, the importance of your soul, the importance of your mind, the importance of your character, the importance of your values. I had never heard a single sermon on the importance of your body. So most Christians have no theology of health. But the fact is, God owns your bod. He’s the boss of your body. You may not like it, but it’s the truth. God owns it and expects you to manage it well. Number three. The third thing this passage teaches is that my body will be resurrected after I die. My body will be resurrected after I die. Now, God never wastes anything. He never wastes the hurt. If you’ll give it to him, he’ll take even the hurtful things in your life and turn them around and use them for good. He doesn’t waste anything. God recycles. And God says, you think that body I gave you, that’s just it? No, no, we’re gonna recycle it. Right now you’re living in version 1.0. In heaven you’re gonna get version 2.0 but you will have a body. Some people think that when you get to heaven you’re just gonna be this amorphous spirit just kind of floating around like may the force be with you. Other people think they’re gonna be angels. You’re not gonna be an angel. Angels are angels, people are people. A lot of times people, their idea of heaven is white robe, wings, playing a harp, sitting on a cloud. Friends, to me, that would be hell. I can’t think of anything more boring than that. And why is heaven all white? Now, who do you think created color? God did. Who do you think created taste buds? God did. Who do you think created all the sights and sounds and gave us music? God did. Who do you think created all of beauty and gave us eyes to see it? God did. And if the world is broken and it’s this beautiful, what do you think heaven’s gonna be like? multi-color extravaganza like you can’t believe. Not some white cloud thing. Okay? All right. Now, the Bible says this, 1 Corinthians 6, 14. By his power, God raised the Lord from the dead and he will raise us up also. Do you see how important your body is? God says, I’m not through with this. You know, I’m gonna resurrect your body. You say, well, isn’t it gonna get all decayed in the ground? Well, yeah, or you might be cremated, but God says, I’m still gonna resurrect it. I’m gonna put it together in version 2.0. And he can do anything if you created a universe. What is that? He said, what’s my resurrected body gonna be like? Well, we don’t really know. We do know that after Jesus was resurrected and he walked around Jerusalem for 40 days, one time was seen by 500 people and talked to them, different people, that he could actually, his body had some kind of capability to dematerialize because he could appear in a room without walking through the door. That’d be kind of cool, okay? Kind of like Star Trek, you know, dematerialize. But everybody recognized him. They recognized him. And so that gives us a clue that when you get to heaven, you’re gonna have a different kind of body than you’ve got right now, but everybody’s gonna know who you are. You’re still gonna be you. You’re just gonna be you version 2.0 with no blemishes. Perfect in every form. You’re gonna be you in perfect format. Now, I want you to circle on this phrase, the phrase by his power. By his power, God raised the Lord from the dead. See, this is one of the three reasons why we don’t stick with diets. One of the three reasons we don’t stick with our get healthy programs. And the first reason is we use willpower instead of God power. Now, willpower, friends, works for about three weeks. and then you get tired and you go off the diet, you start smoking again, because willpower is not enough to change. Willpower is fantastic in the short term, but the entire time you’re doing something by willpower, you are forcing yourself to do that your natural brain does not wanna do, and pretty soon you’re gonna get tired, you’re gonna let go of the steering wheel, and the autopilot in the boat’s gonna take it back the other direction. And that’s why resolutions by themselves don’t last. You need more than willpower, you need God power. Because willpower alone is exhausting, you get tired. Now, whatever your weakness is, you’re gonna probably struggle with it the rest of your life. And so you’re gonna need more than simply your own energy, you gotta plug into God’s power.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us today on Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. You know, just a short time back, God put it on Pastor Rick’s heart to connect with a team of leading health experts, and they created the Daniel Plan. Meet Joel.
SPEAKER 03 :
I tried to lose weight. I tried to make the changes, and nothing seemed to work because it was all based on my willpower. When I started with the program, I immediately noticed changes, mainly because I wanted to be healthy. I had the tools to eat properly. I understood exercise, and I had motivation. I saw that I could get healthy finally, that I could make the changes that I’d tried my whole life to make.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, more than 180,000 people are following the Daniel Plan. Yeah, to lose weight, increase their energy, and improve their relationships, and all while growing closer to the Lord. And they’re doing it with the Daniel Plan.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’ve lost 75 pounds and I’ve reached what I think is my ideal weight where I feel healthy. In fact, I just recently competed in an Ironman triathlon competition. That’s 140.6 miles of racing. When I found the Daniel plan and its principles, I was given the tools to finally make the changes.
SPEAKER 02 :
I sure hope you’ll let Pastor Rick send you a hardcover copy of his bestselling book, The Daniel Plan, today. It’s his way of saying thanks so much for your financial gift to this listener-supported ministry. Just go to PastorRick.com to get your copy of this great resource. That’s PastorRick.com. Or you can just text the word HOPE to 70309. That’s the word HOPE to 70309. And thank you so much for your support. Your gift to Daily Hope really helps us share the hope of Christ with people all over the world. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God’s Word for our Daily Hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope and your generous financial support.
