Loving the whole person

Thank you to those who commented both publicly and privately to yesterday’s Catch. Bottom line is: I probably could have been better informed about what I was trying to say, but I do believe most of you got it anyway. I was simply trying to say that the whole person is important. People are important. The planet is important. Animals are important. Life is important. It’s all important. Care about it all if you love God, because God created it and He is in the process of restoring all that He made to its intended glory.

We used to care only about people’s souls, as if their physical reality didn’t matter. It’s going back to dust anyway. And what about the earth? It’s going to burn up. So let’s just get people saved and get the heck out of here. That used to be a very prevalent way of thinking among Christians which kept us from having to deal with poverty, hunger, or anyone’s physical condition. 

But Jesus healed lots of people without saving their souls. If they’d been following Him around for a while without anything to eat, He cared that they should eat something and not faint from exhaustion. Of course, He did something about saving their souls on the cross, but as He walked through His human existence, He touched a lot of people and made their lives better without discrimination. Not all of these people accepted Him as their Lord or Messiah, but that was never a prerequisite to Him caring for them. He loved them because He is love. It’s His nature to love.

The best way to handle this is not to divide people up into parts. Jim is not a spirit walking around in a body. Jim is Jim. He is a human being made in God’s image and loved by Him. The complexity of the inner workings of Jim’s body, soul and spirit is something only God can understand and we can marvel at. But we can love him, just as God does, because God is in us.