Finding balance

Our bodies are temples, and ought to be treated as such. This requires a focus on learning about them and being good stewards of them.

But there is a need to balance worship of God through appropriately treating your body and worshiping of the body itself.

The challenge is the balance. Most people who treat their bodies poorly (and I currently am treating my body poorly) tend to think that people who are fit and advocate fitness are preaching and are over-tuned to focus on their bodies. Thus they lean toward doing less as use for their justification of poorly treating bodies “I don’t want to be led into bodily idolatry. I will do nothing and better worship God.”

In a BYU devotional, Elder Tad Callister taught,

One’s capacity to honor and worship is magnified with one’s intellectual, emotional, cultural, and spiritual enlightenment. Accordingly, the more we become like God, the greater our ability to pay Him homage. In that process of lifting men heavenward, God simultaneously multiplies His own honor and glory and thus is glorified more, not less.

Our identity and our destiny, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/tad-r-callister/our-identity-and-our-destiny/

Also Elder Callister did not mention physical nature, he well could have. God has a perfected body. A perfect God could not have become so without first learning to understand and master how the body works.

Thus as we learn to master and be good stewards our bodies, focusing on the worship of God in the meantime, we can more dutifully honor and worship than we could if we gave our bodies no attention at all.

We can pay greater homage, because we are like God in one more (crucial) way.