Wellness His Way: Learn to Steward Your Body with God, His Way and for His Glory

By Caren Fehr

Have you ever thought about what it would look like to take care of your body with God, His way and for His glory? Our bodies do matter. The problem is that so often we make our bodies the main thing when they are simply meant to help us do the main thing, which is to love God and love others.

For so long I took care of my body as though I was the owner of it rather than as the steward of it. I got stuck in either idolizing my body or neglecting it all together. My health was a tangled mess and the enemy tried to convince me it was hopeless. But God gently drew near to me and whispered, “I can untangle it if you let Me.” I let Him and He did. Are you ready to let Him? Are you ready to learn and live His way?
This book is for:

- The friend who obsesses about their body, neglects it, or is anywhere in between!
- The friend who is ready to surrender this area of their life to Christ.
- The friend who wants to be both strong in their spirit and healthy in body.
- The friend who feels they’ve been given a “problem body,” so why bother?
- The friend who wants to learn how to steward their health with God, His way and for His glory.
Friend, you can steward your body with joy, peace and as an extension of your worship. I am cheering you on as you say "yes" to discovering why God's way is not only greater but is ultimately the Way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662929410

Book preview

His Way > My Way

We are daily encouraged to follow our hearts, feelings and understandings. While God did give us emotions and a brain, until those things are submitted under the authority of Christ, they will be faulty sources of wisdom and lead us astray.

I want you to think about the last time you were sold the message of living your way. Maybe it went something like this:

You are in control of your destiny, so you do you!

Find your truth.

Happiness is the highest level of success.

It’s your life, so live it your way.

Do what’s right for you.

Do whatever makes you happy.

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and admit that I have fallen for these messages. So much of my life, especially my health journey, was filled with the determination to achieve my definition of happiness and success. I even found ways to read God’s Word in a way where my will, way and preferences could still lead.

I’ve discovered that the temptation to live our way grows when there is still a desire (no matter how small) to serve ourselves. But when we set our hearts and minds on knowing God, living His way, and glorifying Him only, He brings real meaning and significance to every detail of our lives. While the world will continue to daily offer attractive substitutes, nothing can ever compare to the value of a genuine, intimate and growing relationship with Jesus Christ. May we have the desire to be led and choose to radically follow Jesus and choose His way completely and without reservation.

STRONG IN SPIRIT

Choosing God’s way is ultimately choosing life. In order to follow His way, we must know it. To know it, we must know Him. To know Him, we must know His Word. As we come to know Him as He truly is, there is greater joy in denying ourselves so we can wholly follow Him.

Know God

I don’t know that there is anything more important than knowing God. God longs for you and me to know His voice, His truth, and His love.

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth!

—Psalm 46:10

We read this verse often and focus most on the aspect of being still, so we miss the reason behind our stillness: knowledge of who God is. The direction of our lives is most influenced by what we know and believe about God. It is our greatest privilege in life, and it’s what drives our delight in glorifying Him. Knowing Him is the foundation of living His way.

I want you to think about how sheep follow their shepherd. Have you ever looked up how sheep come to know their shepherd’s voice? If not, this might be the coolest Google search you do today! The point is, sheep don’t just follow anyone. Once they come to know their true shepherd, they will not follow anyone else’s voice or guidance. Because they know their shepherd, they grow to trust and follow the shepherd’s way wherever, whenever, whatever.

Trust is the fruit of our relationship with God and our experiential knowledge of Him and His trustworthiness. Think about this with me. The God who formed you, cares for you, and sent His Son to die for you, desires to have a real relationship with you. He longs to be known by you. Through the amazing sacrifice of Jesus, we can truly know Him like any other person we encounter on a daily basis.

Knowing God is also so much more than simply knowing about Him. For example, I may know all about the mechanics of how rollercoasters work, but I won’t know the full experience of a rollercoaster until I actually ride one. In the same way, while it is wonderful to know about God’s character and attributes, wouldn’t you say there is a difference between knowing about God’s love and experiencing His love for yourself?

When we believe and receive each truth regarding who God is, meditate on it, and allow the meditation to lead us to praise and prayer, we can then fully experience and know Him. There is a more intimate sense of oneness when we know God and embrace just how loved and known we are by Him.

As we seek to know God, the Bible is clear that we begin to experience all He is. We can hear His voice (John 10:27), experience His love (2 Thessalonians 3:5), and receive His peace (John 16:33). We can experience His freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17), partner in His purposes (1 Corinthians 3:9), and fully rest in His presence (Psalm 91:1).

Know His Word

The best way we can know God’s way is by knowing and growing to love His Word. The Bible provides us with various principles for walking successfully with the Lord and in His way.

Blessed are those whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart—they do no wrong but follow his ways. You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed.

—Psalm 119:1–4

In May 2020, I made the decision to intensively study the Psalms. When I reached Psalm 119, I noticed how often Scripture was referred to. Out of the one hundred and seventy-six verses, God’s Word is mentioned one hundred and seventy-one times and always in connection to God Himself.

I admired how the psalmists yearned, meditated and loved God’s Word. I realized that while love cannot be forced, it can be cultivated. God’s Word is worth cultivating love for, simply because God’s Word is God’s heart.

How do we cultivate such love? By making it our highest priority. Once something becomes a priority, we make time for it and give it our attention and care. We cultivate love for God’s Word by reading it, meditating on it, bending our minds to it, honoring it, obeying it, and thanking God every day for it! I have seen firsthand how being in God’s Word daily positively influences every other decision I make.

I always loved my dad’s encouragement to me when I was cultivating my own love for God’s Word. He encouraged me to ask three questions while reading scripture:

1. What does it teach me about who God is?

2. What does it teach me about who I am?

3. What does it teach me about my enemy (Satan)?

These three questions help me make sure that when I am reading God’s Word, I never forget that its primary purpose is to reveal God’s character and way to me. We never want to be so focused on how the Bible applies to our circumstances that we miss how it displays the character and heart of God. The more that God Himself is our greatest desire, the less we will misinterpret or twist Scripture to meet our needs.

Denial of Self

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

—Matthew 16:24–25

The path of self-denial is paved with humility and ultimately addresses who is on the throne of our hearts. I love how Greg Ogden describes self-denial in his book Discipleship Essentials as not a denial of our brain or feelings but a denial of self-lordship.¹ God will not share the throne of our hearts with any other lowercase god. Not even a little.

When He is on the throne, we do everything for His glory. When we are on the throne, we do everything for our gain. To put it plainly, when we follow Jesus, we turn from our way, which represents our old life, and follow Jesus and His way, which represents our new life in Christ. Faith is the only way we can do this. It is by faith that we come to believe that God is who He says He is and will do what He promised. This leads us to surrender our will entirely, including our thoughts about how our lives should be. As we surrender, our lives become about so much more than a checklist of our accomplishments and instead are a reflection of His life, love and grace. True fulfillment comes when we decide to love God more than anything else and give Him all of ourselves.

Unfortunately, we’ve warped Jesus’s command to deny ourselves a more comfortable and less sacrificial experience. Rather than radical obedience, we’ve chosen conditional obedience. We read deny yourself and in our minds twist it to deny some of yourself.

This was me. I denied some parts of me, while other parts I kept my way. It was easier to make Jesus an add-on—a part of my life—rather than the point of it. Or, as my friend Michelle Myers once said, Jesus was never meant to be an addition to our lives but the foundation of our lives.² Yes and amen.

When we search His Word, we discover that our heart was created wholly by Him and wholly for Him (Colossians 1:16). We cannot find true meaning apart from Him. Therefore, fighting to gain the world without Jesus will lead to a life of restlessness, anxious striving and emptiness (hello, Ecclesiastes). Yet, when we deny our old life entirely and come to a deeper knowledge of who He is, we will joyfully deny anything that hinders us from choosing Him as our supreme treasure.

Follow Him

As we come to know God, know His Word, and deny ourselves, we begin to see how following Jesus cannot be a casual thing we choose when it’s convenient or comfortable for us. Jesus is no longer just one important thing in our lives; He is most important. Following Jesus means we turn from our way to follow His way completely.

Sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking that we can follow Jesus with zero surrender, zero cost, zero self-denial, zero pain and zero repentance. Friend, this is not following Jesus. This is us following ourselves and trying to convince Jesus to follow us.

Following Jesus with wholehearted devotion means we no longer attempt to live our way and His way. It means we’ve counted the cost of following Him because He doesn’t hide the cost from us. It means we accept the cost with joy because He also doesn’t hide the eternal reward from us.

Jesus is the only way! He is the way to the Father, the way of life, and the way to salvation. Jesus lived on earth to show us the way. He gave us His Spirit to continue reminding and teaching us of His way. I love how Greg Ogden reminds us that the Holy Spirit is radically Christ-centered, and His ultimate mission is to make us radically Christ-centered too.³ May we grow to love Him and count everything else (including weight loss) as loss compared to knowing Him.

HEALTHY IN BODY

Let’s pause here for a moment. Are you by any chance already thinking, Wait a minute! I thought this was a book about exercise and eating! I’m thinking you skipped the intro where I explained a few important housekeeping matters? Caught you! I encourage you to go back to look over the intro (it’s not long, but it’s very important!). But if not, here is the CliffsNotes version: we need to lay some groundwork rooted in Christ before we can start talking about approaching wellness with Him.

I am tempted to say trust the process, but I’m sure this is a phrase you’ve heard a million times and may leave you wanting to chuck this book across the room. So I’ll say this: Lean into the whole journey. We need to address the heart, mind and spirit first in order to get to the body with a healthy mindset. Give each one fair care. Can we agree on that together?

In addition, there’s a purposeful reason why in each chapter we always begin with Strong in Spirit before we get to Healthy in Body. God’s Word and Truth should saturate our very being and change how we do everything, including taking care of our body!

Now that we’ve cleared that up and covered what God’s way means and looks like in our Strong in Spirit section, we can now approach the topic of wellness together with greater wisdom. Total commitment to Christ influences how we redeem our time, abilities, relationships, and, yes, our health.

When we know God, know His Word, deny our flesh, and follow Him, we become Spirit-led, not self-led. This changes what we do and how we do it. I can’t help but think of Paul’s words in Philippians 3:8: What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.

This is a picture of someone who is so devoted to knowing God that everything else is less than. What would it mean to consider weight loss or specific body image compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ? What does it mean to consider them garbage so we may gain Christ?

It doesn’t mean we neglect our bodies; it means we do all things with a spirit of excellence to gain more of Christ, be more like Christ, and for the glory of Christ.

Compartmentalized Devotion

I think we can all agree that the fitness world is a dark place. If not surrendered to the Lord, the journey of wellness can quickly go from Christ-centered to self-centered. As I shared in the introduction, for many years I thought I could compartmentalize the Holy Spirit and choose what areas He could transform, heal, and make me more like Jesus. Can you guess what area I refused to surrender? Health. The two main reasons were pride and fear.

My lack of knowing God on an intimate and reverent level left me convinced that I knew my body better than the maker of it (oof). I didn’t think God wanted to be in those tiny details. Besides, fitness was a good thing. It couldn’t possibly become an idol, right? Wrong. Through a long self-inflicted valley, I learned that the moment we decide to control something and remove God as the foundation of it, we step into idolatry territory. In Exodus 20:3, God says, "You must not have any other god but me." If we aren’t seeking first His Kingdom, we will start building our own kingdoms. We were made to be followers, but not followers of our dreams, desires or the next fad diet. We were made to be followers of Jesus.

Fear was the second reason I struggled to surrender my health to the Lord. I didn’t want to face the possibility that I had made fitness my idol. Satan loves to magnify our mess, minimize God’s grace, and use accusation to leave us in a pit chained by guilt and shame. In contrast, God lovingly convicts our hearts so we have an opportunity to humbly repent so He can restore. Again, a deeper knowledge of God’s character and what His Word says enables us to disarm those lies and fears.

I tried doing it the world’s way for God’s glory, and doing it my way and His way. Neither worked in the long term. In fact, those other ways only took me on a path of deeper bondage. We simply cannot run two races. We either choose His way or our way, but we cannot choose both. We will either be loyal to honoring the Lord with our bodies or loyal to honoring our flesh and preferences.

His Way vs. the World’s Way

Here are some examples of how God’s way is starkly different from the world’s way and why you cannot choose both:

The world says, Depend on yourself.

God says, Depend on Me.

The world says, Do whatever you please.

God says, Do what pleases Me.

The world says, "Worship your