Appreciating God's Design for the Human Body (Part 1 of 2)

Hi this is Jim Daly with Focus on the Family. I want to let you know about an online experience called sea life, 20, 21 in the six episode video series were sharing stories and encouragement that will inspire and empower you to live out your pro-life views. You also discover valuable resources to help you step up and get involved in the cause. This is a digital experience, you and your family won't want to miss all the details are Focus on the Family.com/sea life today on Focus on the Family work we do explore what is too many very familiar passage from the Bible in the Old Testament book of Psalms Psalm 139, which was written as a response to God expressing under creativity. David wrote for you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's will. I praise you for your fully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works in my soul knows it very well.

Thanks for joining us today your hostess focus Pres. and Dr. Jim Daly I'm John Fuller, John, those are familiar words that are often heard in the church, but maybe not fully understood and were going to delve into that today with one of the world's greatest Christian authors Philip Yancey, it was more than 30 years ago when two men collaborated to write a pair of landmark books fearfully and wonderfully made, and in his image.

They revealed some of the most profound wonders of the human body and how these wonders can also be reflected in the body of Christ. It's a wonderful concept, and that one of those men a Dr. Paul Brand was a world-renowned orthopedic surgeon and missionary doctor who had spent a great deal of his career caring for leprosy patients in India and also in the US, Dr. Paul Brand passed away in 2003 of the other author is as you said, well-known, very well known Philip Yancey and that he's been here in the broadcast before he's written at least 25 books, including disappointment with God where is God when it hurts the Jesus I never knew and what's so amazing about Grace.

Well Philip the most wonderful author, welcome back to Focus on the Family. Thank you very much that's amazing that you have had an amazing career communicating through the written word to ever step back and think while Lord, thank you for this ride. I do indeed and it's funny because you done writing yourself and it's an isolating paranoia as you do it in isolation have no idea whether anyone is going to read it. Whether it's even meant to become a block and then years later somebody will come up to you and say I read this book and this is how it affected my life so the longer I live the more that I get A retrospective view but it's also hard work. Now it is and I you know it is so rewarding when people come up and express how you helped shape their thinking or their spiritual journey is a very humbling thing really and profound.

Let's start with Genesis 1 where God decided to make mankind in his image. We now use this so often with people, even people that don't agree with us about eternal life. They're not Christian. All talk to them about being made in the image of God.

They always are intrigued by that. They don't necessarily agree with it but what's the power in that statement, what are you saying when that great phrase is used made in the image of God.

God is Spirit and you can't take somebody say a spiritual searcher and say let me show you God.

Here's what is like an we are not spirits. We, I mean we have a spiritual carpet. We are people of flesh and we have bodies around us and being in the image of God is a way of showing the rest of the world. What God is like making God visible. I was with a wonderful woman in South Africa one time who have a prison ministry and it had an enormous effect on the president went from one of the most violent prisons in Africa 21 where things are called there only to acts of violence next year and I said to her, what was your secret into civil Philip God was already there and that pulls more prison. I just had to make an visible and that's what were called to do so that when somebody is made in your image you say oh that reminds me, he's a spitting image of his dad now because when I look at him, his nose, his ears or whatever they remind me of his dad and I think that's what we followers of Jesus are supposed to do, so that when people look at us they say all that's unusual caring for those kind people. Most people want to ignore them.

Most people are interested in climbing the ladder and there interested in Canada climbing down the ladder and caring for the outcast, as Jesus did. That is what Jesus is like.

That's what God is like, and we are to reflected image to make visible Philip you made a statement in the book and it said all of us are like mirrors with the potential to summon up than the others. The spark of God likeness in the human spirit that that's one of those things and I think it's why so many people love your writing. You get it, but it even goes deeper explained that yes that actually came from an experience that Dr. Brandt had Dr. Brand was British surgeon.

He was being trained during the blitz of London during World War II, which is a great time to be trained in medicine but not a good time living in London and the hero is the true heroes of Britain were RAF fighters because every day. These German bombers would come over and drop bombs 3000 people a day were dying think that a World Trade Center capacity day every day for a couple months there and it looked like there is going completely destroy the city will then these heroic Air Force guys Royal Air Force got in their little spitfires in the they took on these bombers and, eventually, Hitler had to call off the bombing campaign. So these are heroic guys. Well, the spitfire had one flaw and that was the, the gasoline tube went from the propeller and the front through the cockpit back to the fuel tank so the line ran right live right by.

So if they got hit the entire cockpit would explode on the had an ejection seat but it was too late by the time the cockpit exploded in other there burned beyond recognition and Dr. Randall in his rotation would visit some of these airmen and hear these guys their top of the class, then these handsome figures people in the street you know salute the little kids want to be like them. Now they look like Quasimodo and their faces are all twisted and burned and one of them said to him, the people that we love who love us become our mirrors will I hear and I know you doctors will do everything that you can to make us look as normal as possible, but we know what you do won't restore the person that we are before we go out and face that world and he said my fiancé became my mirror so that when I looked at her. When I look in the mirror I see this misshapen chard face when I look at her I see somebody who loves me and Dr. Brand goes on to say, we can be that mirror for other people. There a lot of people around us who don't feel beautiful Shinto who feel like losers who are deformed or just depressed, discouraged, and we can be the mirror that reflects back to them. There is something of beauty and worth in you. That's what we can do as Christians in so many ways you're illustrating the call of Christ in us. That's what the Lord did right.

He met with the malformed whether it was physical, emotional, spiritual, he encountered and restored them. It could be transforming, and it doesn't have to be physical defects. Think of the story of Zacchaeus. He was just disliked person despise person in the community because he would attack a tax collector, working for the occupying Romans and nobody would have anything to do with them and seek.

He climbed a tree when you're in Sunday school year. We little man named Zacchaeus.

I think he climbed a tree because he was scared of the townspeople wanted to be in a safe place so he's up there, and Jesus stops the procession and says secularists. I like to come to your house for dinner tonight, he became that mirror you know nobody had treated Zacchaeus like that before and it transformed him that night.

He's giving away. Anybody have cheated all all restore four times what I cheated them up right and amazing turn one night. Again, it takes interaction takes relationship. In that regard Philip during this past COBIT pandemic. We restricted you know, for medical reasons interaction with people and you made the statement. I believe that that one of the most meaningful things we can do as human beings is to hug into time to interact with one another. Why do you believe that touch is so essential to the expression of God's love. I find it interesting. If you look at Jesus miracles. He didn't wave a magic wand. You know he didn't say the front of a group and say okay all of you with over 19 over on the left all of you are having trouble walking over on the right and I'll take a you you didn't do that. It was individual was one by one. It was touch.

Dr. Brand worked with leprosy patients and in those days in the 1950s when he restarted it was still a very fear disease any. He would tell stories of a patient who would come often walking because it would be kicked off the bus.

People were so afraid of leprosy anything he told the story of one man who showed up at his at his house and he invited them up to the porch and he was telling a story and Dr. Brand reached over and touched his shoulder and patient just started crying and he said did I say something to offend you, and he's a no-no is just that in many years no one has ever touched me think of that and from birth on, you know you the studies of babies who aren't touched shrivel up.

They don't really develop as they should mentally in other ways and that's been proven touches. Maybe our most reliable sensibly. You think back Thomas the disciple you know he was doubting until Jesus and touch me what you what proof do you need Thomas that's the only time when in the New Testament. Somebody called Jesus, God, my Lord and my God.

Thomas said touch was the decisive thing it was approved. Oh, you really are the Messiah, the wounded Messiah. It's interesting. I had thought about it in this way, but you think of touch. It's probably the greatest act of intimacy and I'm not talking in the sexual context. Of course that's true but you see someone and you see someone right but when you touch someone hand on the shoulder, a hug, something like that. It's a very intimate act on the part of human being. And that's one of the great tragedies of over 19 tonight I interviewed a chaplain who works in Denver at memory facility with dementia and Alzheimer's and and for a year.

It was under lockdown where nobody was allowed in. So these patients were already confused and are used to having their relatives, and hug them and touch them. And now they just stop and they can't really understand it when you explained to them what we have this disease going on and are not allowed in anymore, and how difficult it is for these people. You hear the stories of people who die in isolation. Nobody around them and she was a chaplain. She was one of them who would be with those people and sometimes she would just reach out and touch them because we need that is part of humanity.

We do we do this is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and today were talking with Philip Yancey who, along with the late Dr. Paul Brand has written a terrific resource. It's fearfully and wonderfully.

The subtitle is the marvel of bearing God's image and this is an updated and combined addition of a couple of really classic books. We do have that here at Focus on the Family. I just stop by the episode notes or give us a call 800 K in the word family Philip I do want to kinda paint the picture of how you and Dr. Brand worked together because that was you know rather interesting that you spent 10 years together. I'm sure that was often on to describe how you connected and sure my very first book is a book called where is God when it hurts and I was spending a lot of time in libraries, reading books on the problem of paying the curse of pain. God's one mistake can't help books with titles like that and my wife was working in a medical supply house. They would ship medicines to mission hospitals and she came across a little book book lot actually based on the speech Dr. Paul Brand had given called the gift of pain and I've never heard anybody call the gift before you ever thought of pain as a gift to be fire so I found out he was now in Louisiana at a hospital, public health service Hospital treating leprosy and I called them up out of the blue and said can I come interview about pain and on. Kinda busy. Well this thing out in the hallway and if you have a lunch hour something like that. I've got a lot of questions, issues that I make it painful help. It wasn't but we were kind of an odd couple. I was in my 20s, my hair was wild and crazy you know is cut, it was right after the 60s and there was this distinguished silver haired British surgeon who had spent 1/3 of his life in Britain in the third of his life in India. He became like a father figure to me and and I could take him all my questions and all my doubts. He was so important to my forming my faith really, because I had come from an unhealthy church background and here I saw a person who was who is made better in every way by his faith. He was brilliant surgeon. He had gotten no being awarded the command of the British Empire award from the Queen got all these medical awards but he was a humble, gracious.

He made God visible for me to have and over the years we kept coming up with more material that was back and then I think the first book came out in 1979 and I did not want the legacy of Dr. Moran to disappear.

Medicine is changed a lot in four years. They just barely discovered DNA when we were first writing and so I wanted to go back and I took the best of two books fearfully and wonderfully made, and in his image, combined them and updated the science updated the medicine and just to have wanted to keep alive the memory and the example of Paul Frank something he said I really have to punch there because it just caught me when you said he was a man whose faith made him better. What a litmus test is not the point.

I mean really, we should each reflect on that to say, does my faith make me a better person and if it's not, you may want to reconsider how your displaying your faith, and when I go around Jim. That's one of my concerns sitting in an airplane often ask when I say the word Christian. What's the first thing that comes to mind, and often no savings, well-built bill say oh, those are moral people are upright people, but sometimes they'll say there bigots there self-righteous. You know what it that's a condemnation because we are as Christians were not self-righteous hold of her righteousness comes from God and if you find a person who really is that humble servant but yet is using all of his gifts. As Dr. printed for some of the lowliest people on the planet. You just stand back and say oh that's what Jesus was like Olympians to you know he turned down the prerogatives of God and became one of us, and washed our feet and was a servant and if we can show that that's something that is cut so much a against the grain of a successful laboratory oriented culture that it get your attention.

You say oh that's what I was, let me let me get in to the book. Specifically, some of the systems of the body which you and Dr. Brand talked about is so beautiful so often. Philip and feeling like God is making it so simple.

Of course, the word says you could look at his creation and see him and that's really the essence of what you've done here. Talk to us about the bone.

The skeletal system and what does that depict spiritually for us. Well, Dr. Brand tell stories of people who are missing parts of their bone and like out a section of the bondsman removed because of cancer and arm and then nothing works the way it's supposed to anymore you because are so intricately connected with muscles and tendons and all that and they work on a fulcrum triangulation of different sinews and ligaments working together.

You have to have a hard skeleton to hang on. Look at an octopus octopus. This kind of squishes around right can't climb stairs can do a lot of things and it takes an internal skeleton structure to allow us to do things like walking or for a bird to fly. You need those hard bones and it's easy to say I was here. For example, it is easy to say, a lot of people break their bones and skiing. If only God would had made loans bigger and thicker and harder. Well actually beautifully proportioned. If God did that. There a lot of things that we couldn't do, we wouldn't have the ability to do other athletics.

I love hearing Dr. Brandt talk about the wonders of the human body.

In fact, even the things that are a little bit repulsive to us at any time. I would bring something up like vomiting.

He was at all what a wonderful thing here is you cut young children as nozzles and structures that are all designed to push food down.

But when you have the wrong kind of food and you want to get rid of it. They find a way to reverse and do the opposite and then sneezing the same thing, coughing, diarrhea, anything I would bring up is all what a wonderful mechanism we have to protect the human body and engineers when they look at the human body. They think I see how it could be improved.

Doctors get used to doctors assume that if you put two muscles back together. Somehow, though, the fibers will go like this and grow together. They assume that the heart will repair itself a minute. That's is what organs do engineers look at and how does that happen right my robots can prepare repair themselves and they're not nearly as a smoothly functioning.

Yeah, you mentioned the spiritual parallel I guess is the best way to say it with the bone structure that when bone breaks. You know what it does and you're describing that damage relay that to the spiritual parallel that you and Dr. Brand talked about the book that the skeletal system is like the core truth right well I would say probably the closest parallel would be the 10 Commandments.

Those of the 10 things that God came up with two for society to work and for society to work if everybody told the truth, you know, if we didn't have to worry about somebody stealing my password and robbing my bank account and if if companies didn't have to worry about people stealing things from them and if we could trust people. What a wonderful society that would be in God laid out. Here's how society should work the way works best not coveting don't go around resenting other people have more than you do to be content with what you have and if you go through those are kind of the hard-core skeleton of faith. But then you get to the New Testament, Jesus is you can actually sum up the entire 10 Commandments in this love God, love your neighbor as yourself. So it's the internal skeleton of faith on the outside. You don't see the skeleton but it makes possible the love that were supposed to give in the world is really again.

I think nature screams.

God is there and that's what you're uncovering as I understand it, we have about 35 trillion blood cells in our body but we don't think much of healthy cells in our body until we start maybe losing them and drastic rate or whatever. However, they get outta kilter from the blood he noticed is some kind of a cut where the platelets do their job to block that cut for those of us who don't remember their biology class. Explain how our blood is also such a spiritual dimension. There's a lot of blood in the Bible.

A lot of uses of the word blood. One of the most interesting and new thoughts to me, that I heard from Dr. Brand was we tend to think of the communion service is a time to commemorate death because we reflect back on Jesus death. He said actually look at the Bible all the way through the Old Testament, especially blood stands for life. The life of the flesh is in the blood. It says in Leviticus and when Jesus gave the.

The instructions on at the Last Supper. He used the image of the vine and the branches and he said you need to be connected to me. If you're connected to the vine, then you can produce fruit. If you're not connected. It's like these branches up there that do shrivel and die there no longer connected and that blood is really a symbol of God's life flowing through us. We are participating that he also goes on to say.

Blood cleanses and when I first heard that I thought how does blood cleanse when I get blood.

I want to immediately find some spot cleaner and tied and clean it off my clothes. He said no. Here's how blood cleanses as a goes through your body. Not only is it providing oxygen and nutrients and things like that but every one of yourselves is producing this waste material in the blood cells that are going through those trillions you mentioned the blood cells are taking a cargo load of those toxic chemicals and waste of waste in getting rid of them and he said you can get out very quickly take a blood pressure cuff, put it around your arm and make it tight and for a while there, you don't feel anything, but after a few minutes you feel excruciating pain. Why because you block the blood from going down into the rest of your arm and taking way those toxic chemicals and what is a cleansing agent and so Dr. Brand who is a medical doctor found ways that I would never have thought of that show the spiritual parallel how blood is is the living connection to the source of life and the blood is also a cleansing agent in your eat. I think you're aiming in this direction, but I want to be very specific in the book you speak to the issue of communion that the bread represents the body of Christ and the juice represents the blood of Christ speak at the end here were to come back if you stick with this talk and talk more about the subject.

But let's end on this good note of what it means.

The communion service and what it's getting at.

It's a tough one to convey to people that don't get it, and they don't even understand why why you pretending to eat Jesus's body and why are you pretending to drink his blood. It's great juice. There so I want to get it down to a very elementary level here give us the communion, theology. I think it's intentional that Jesus chose two of the most common elements of the day bread. Bread is everywhere. Every culture and then wine in those days, and said, these can symbolize the life that I have that will energize you. In fact, he can scandalize followers in his day was when he said eat my flesh drink my blood. He didn't mean literally obviously because he standing there as a complete human being, but what he said was the most basic ordinary things in life can be a symbol that reminds you that your strength comes not from yourself but from something outside and you can take it into yourself and you can metabolize that and I can give you energy and cleansing cleansing from sin very clearly and then the nutrient that you need to be part of me to live like me that is so good and I hope our viewers and listeners are catching that in your book fearfully and wonderfully. The marvel of bearing God's image man felt this is fascinating stuff. It's a great read and I so appreciate Dr. Paul Brand whose pastor Wayne now. He had some amazing insights about our physical nature and how it shows the spiritual nature of how we are made in God's image. Philip, I hope. Like I said we can stick with it and continue to talk about this content.

We do that, let's do it all right then let me encourage you to get Phillips book. We can make that available when you make a monthly pledge of any amount to Focus on the Family were counting on friends like you to join our ongoing support team. The pledge means you're committed each month to strengthening marriages and equipping parents and helping us spread the good news of Jesus Christ. So together we can help families thrive and if the monthly pledge is too much. We get it one time gift is also very helpful and it will allow us to send you this book as our way of saying thank you for partnering with us in touch today. Donate.

As you can and I request your copy of Phillips book fearfully and wonderfully that's available when you stop by the episode not to find the link there or call 800 K in the word family and one more thing I want to mention is Focus on the Family celebrate life live experience which is coming up next month. August 28. Would love to have you join us in person at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. This is our main pro-life event of the year with inspirational speakers and musicians and other believers. All networking together to change hearts and minds in today's culture about abortion and there are several ways to get involved. We have a prayer guide in a series of videos that we've been releasing this summer and all the details are on our website. I really want to encourage you to check it out. Please join us in Dallas on August 28, and once more link is in the episode notes or call one 800 K and on behalf of Jim Daly, and the entire team here. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family I'm John Fuller inviting you back your more insights about God's design of the human body and once again help your family thrive in Christ