Embodied Worship

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Romans 12:1

My whole life has been marked with a disdain for the mundane.

To be honest, I really dislike the reality of needing to shower and brush my teeth and cook meals and pair socks. As a teenager in the early 2000s, I loved finding little electronics that promised to free me from the bondage of having to do things the “normal” way. I remember buying my first electric toothbrush, and battery powered, spinning facial cleansing brush. And that silly digital dictionary (pre-smartphone era!) I got for Christmas one year. I was so proud of that thing! I can’t even remember most of the gadgets I collected over the years at garage sales, but I clearly remember being known as “the gadget girl”.

Does anyone else remember these?!

Perhaps as a visionary type, my dislike for my physicality is more pronounced than it is for others. As a visionary type, I love my ideas. I love few things more than a good brainstorming sesh. And when you love ideas—when you live in your head, build businesses, write content, and dream big Kingdom dreams—it’s easy to start resenting your body. It feels like the slow, needy thing holding you back from the “real” work of spiritual growth. Why do I need to eat (again), clean (again), sleep (again)? Why can’t I just be productive?

But Scripture gives us no category for a spiritual life that is separate from our physical one.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Romans 12:1

Romans 12:1 couldn’t be clearer. Notice that our spiritual worship is offering our bodies as a living sacrifice. Worship isn’t just something we do with our mouths or our minds—it’s something we do with our actual lives. Embodied lives. Ordinary lives. Limited, messy, physical lives.

Your body matters to God. Not just as something to tolerate or drag along for the ride, but as the very vessel through which you serve God. It is your temple - your place of worship. You’re not a soul trapped in a body. The fact that you’re an embodied person is an pivotal aspect of you being made in the image of God.

What a reversal of what we think “spiritual” means.

We tend to think that the spiritual life happens when we escape our bodies. But Scripture says the opposite: the offering of our actual, physical lives—our literal bodies—is what constitutes our spiritual worship. The two are not enemies. They are inseparable.

The modern world has taught us to divide body and spirit. We’ve learned to treat our physical life as either a necessary evil to be tolerated or a machine to be optimized. And as Christian women trying to steward a calling, this hits especially hard. We begin to resent our limits. We chafe against slow growth. We scold our bodies for needing sleep, food, and rest. We long for more output, more productivity, more mental space… and less of the human realities that tether us to earth.

I’ve been convicted lately about how much I try to escape my body in the name of efficiency. It’s what our culture teaches us to do. If the old saying “cleanliness is next to godliness” was the cry of the 18th and 19th century, “efficiency is next to godliness” has been the cry of ours. We believe that we ARE what we output. In our post-industrial age, we are reaping the fruit of treating ourselves as cogs of a big machine, simply made for the bottom line. We try to run on pure ambition, as if we were a machine. But we’re not a machine—we’re a temple.

It should not be a surprise that we struggle so much with this idea. After all, we humans are a beautiful and complex paradox. On the one hand, we were made from the dust. That’s a very humble thing. We aren’t impressive creatures in that way. We are rather frail, even compared to some of the animals God has made, and definitely compared to the angelic beings. But we were made in the image of God Himself, and through dominion, invited into partnering with Him in His mission in the world. In Christ, we are actually elevated to co-heirs with Christ, reigning with Him and sharing in His glory. Someday, we will even judge the angels (1 Cor 6:3). And isn’t that just like God? It’s so His character to use the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. He loves using weak things like creatures made of dust to display His glory and character - and share with Him in His reign.

But while we marvel at the goodness of God and perhaps even chuckle a little bit at God’s ironic sense of humor, there is someone who does not. This being looks at our humanity and he loathes us. He resents that these creatures made of mud should be glorified. Our enemy- the devil - hates our humanity with such bitter loathing that He works tirelessly to make us hate it, too. Instead of seeing our limits and our neediness and our physicality as beautiful realities designed on purpose for our good, he whispers in our ear that we would be far better off without them. Sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? It’s very reminiscent of the garden of Eden and the temptation he placed before our first parents, Adam and Eve. We have the same choice in so many little decisions that faced them then - will we trust in our wise Creator for our wisdom? Or will we trust the wisdom of this world?

Unfortunately, Christendom in America has been weak on teaching us the importance of stewarding our bodies as living sacrifices. I can’t help but think that this is why the Scriptures take the sins of gluttony and other indulgences so seriously, but we don’t. We consider these “respectable sins” as Jerry Bridges once wrote. We’ve separated the physical body from our understanding of spirituality. We don’t see the connection. But as Danielle Pulu says in her video “Gluttony Is The Poverty Spirit in Disguise”:

“Gluttony isn't about food. It's about what you turn to and what you run to when obedience feels hard… There is a direct connection between how you treat your body and the kind of abundance that you are entrusted with. And I'm not even just talking about wealth, but abundance in any area of life. If you cannot even be responsible with what the Lord has given you in your temple, how could you be responsible with anything else? A woman who has mastered her cravings can be trusted with kingdom currency. But one who bows to impulse, she is still loved by God, but he's not going to fund disobedience or put large responsibilities in the hands of someone who has shown that they lack self-control.”

Convicting, right? "Whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much." - Luke 16:10 I know for myself, I have decieved myself into thinking that faithfulness in the small, physical realities doesn’t matter. Because I would do well with the big responsibilities. But Scripture calls that a lie.

We all deceive ourselves this way, it just manifests in different ways. We have been tutored by a culture of indulgence. Gluttony doesn’t only show up on our scale through over eating. It’s anything we excessively partake in to numb, soothe, and escape. It can show up in screen time or mindlessly scrolling. In over-spending. In consuming spiritual content endlessly without ever walking it out. In constantly reorganizing or cleaning as a way to control what feels chaotic inside. In binge-purchasing business tools, coaches, or courses.

The air we breathe in our culture teaches us that comfort is our highest good. And like Rome of old, that craving for comfort is a cover up for the deep emptiness of our culture that has forsaken God. But as believers, we don’t need to be in bondage to our cravings. We aren’t empty inside. We have the fullness of Jesus. We are set free in Christ to exercise dominion over our physical bodies.

What we eat, how we rest, how we move—it all matters. Not because we’re trying to earn God’s love through self-discipline, but because our bodies are the stage upon which our worship plays out. Our bodies are a temple, a physical place for our worship to be displayed to a watching world. Your body isn’t a nuisance. It’s the arena in which you are being trained, in which your sanctification is becoming mature. What if counting calories, sleeping 8 hours, brushing your teeth, strength training, and drinking water—all the things that feel like “a waste of time”—were actually the front lines of your sanctification?

And now you get to reframe every act of physical care as training in reality. God’s reality. Embodied worship.

Your embodiment is not your enemy. It’s the boundary line of God’s kindness.

“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” (Psalm 16:6)

It’s time that you and I stopped resisting the daily cost of obedience. It’s time for me to stop asking for a shortcut to God’s best.

So if you’re brushing your teeth, prepping meals, moving your body, or choosing to go to bed instead of scrolling... that is worship. It may not feel “spiritual,” but it is.

We are not disembodied souls just waiting for heaven. We are temples of the Living God. He chose to dwell in us—not just in our minds or emotions—but in our bodies, too.

And He’s forming us through those daily, physical choices. Through our hunger, our energy, our weariness, our strength. We become more like Christ not by escaping our embodiment, but by submitting to it. Christ Himself took on flesh and lived among us. He chose embodiment. And He redeemed it.

So what if we stopped resisting it?

What if we saw brushing our teeth, going on a walk, preparing lunch, or going to sleep on time—not as distractions from Kingdom work, but as sacred acts of embodied worship?

Because that’s exactly what they are.