Your Body is Not Your Own // Healthy Living to a Ripe Old Age, Part 4

You have been given the most amazing body. Complex. Intricate. Beautiful. Totally amazing! It’s God’s gift to you – and it’s been purchased with a price. So what makes us think that God’s not interested in how we treat it? Huh?

Don’t Smoke

It’s something I understand really well because I used to be a very heavy smoker. It’s just over 30 years since I gave it up, but I remember it as though it were yesterday and still today, there are some times when I feel as though I could have a smoke. Frightening – the grip of that addiction, and depending on where you live, you may have seen a reduction in smoking recently. We certainly have here in Australia, but let’s just stand back. This is a global radio program, heard in over 160 countries around the world, and so let’s look at the global statistics. Here they are.

About one-third of the adult male population smokes, with smoking-related diseases killing one in ten adults globally. Today, that means smoking causes four million deaths a year, but if current trends continue, by 2030, it’s going to be killing one in six people. Today, one person dies every eight seconds from smoking, and why wouldn’t they? About fifteen billion cigarettes are sold daily. That, believe it or not, is about ten million every minute, and to put all that into perspective, about twelve times more British people have died from smoking than died as a result of World War II.

Now I could continue to rattle off the statistics ad infinitum, but you’re getting the point. Right? These days in most countries, every cigarette-packet sold comes with a warning. Here in Australia, we have some of the toughest plain packaging and warning laws in the world, with grim photos of cancerous lungs and feet with toes rotted off them, and by the way, those cigarettes are hellishly expensive.

So, why do people start smoking? It’s mostly psychological. Peer pressure for young women; people are seduced to try a smoke by its glamorisation, and once they’re hooked, the physical and mental addiction makes it really hard to quit. If you’re a smoker, the single-biggest thing that you can do to improve your health, extend your life-expectancy, and increase your sense of wellbeing is quite simply to give up smoking.

As I said, it’s just over 30 years ago that I gave up smoking. It was around 7 pm on 24 January 1983, and this is the story of how I quit smoking. It was an early evening; I was in a hospital-room as I watched someone die of cancer. She’d been a smoker earlier on in her life. The cancer had spread right throughout her body; she’d left a note, ‘Make this the end’, so they withdrew the treatment, food and fluids, and I watched her take her last breath.

As I walked out of that hospital-room, I threw a half-packet of cigarettes (Benson and Hedges extra-mild) into the grey metal bin outside the room. Cold turkey. I haven’t smoked since. It’s a pretty dramatic way of giving up cigarettes, but then smoking has a very dramatic outcome.

I had started just a few years earlier, in my late teens. I was in the army, at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in the Australian officer’s training academy. We went on an exercise and a huge, cold, wet storm had blown in. Young, incredibly fit men were dropping from exposure. Our packs were miles away; the trucks couldn’t get through on the treacherous roads, so we had no wet-weather gear; no cold-weather gear; no tents (or hutchies, as we called them for some reason back then). We were at the mercy of the elements.

One of the blokes generously offered me a durry (that’s what we called cigarettes back then in the army); it was the only warm thing going, so I took it. Of course I coughed and spluttered as the smoke invaded my body, but that was it. That’s all it took. I was hooked, and in a few weeks, I was smoking three packets of twenty-five cigarettes a day. That’s seventy-five smokes every day! This was back in the day when you could smoke at your desk; I could easily go through a packet on a night on the town; between that and the alcohol, I’d wake up in the morning with my mouth feeling like the bottom of a cocky’s cage, as we used to say. Charming.

I was a chain-smoker. I tried to give it up, but to no avail. As bad as it was for me, as much as it made me cough and splutter and wheeze, as much money as it cost me, and as antisocial and disgusting as smoking is, I just couldn’t give it up, until I watched that woman die. The days, weeks, months and years that followed weren’t easy. The cravings were huge. For years later, I would still reach into the top drawer of my desk to pull out a packet of cigarettes. I’d check to make sure my lighter was in my pocket before I went out, but the thing that did it for me, one craving at a time, was the memory of watching that woman breathe her last breath, and the grief that it wrought in a husband, in a family ... In a very real sense, her death saved my life.

Of course, I could get run over by a bus tomorrow, and despite my level of health and fitness, I could prove to be a statistical aberration and drop dead of a heart attack or stroke or cancer; that’s always possible, but it’s far less likely today than if I was still an obese smoker.

What’s the lesson I learnt? Simple. I actually like my body. I like feeling incredibly well. I like sleeping well at night and being alert during the day. I love being able to exercise, and it’s a great feeling to know that, all things being equal, I have a long and healthy life ahead of me. I’m now in my mid-fifties. To put it bluntly, I would never, ever want to go back to smoking.

So, given that I’ve made it through exactly 30 years without a cigarette, you know what? I’m thinking I can probably make it through one more day. Smoking hastened my father to an early grave, and I had a good friend, Tom Curran, who died in his early fifties, and another work-colleague, Russell Abbott, who died in his late fifties.

Perhaps you’re a smoker. If you’re listening to this, it’s time to quit. These days your local doctor can help you; there are patches and sprays and lozenges, that can be deployed to ease you out of your dependency, and I know how tough that is, both physically and psychologically, but it’s time to take the plunge. There are government programs; there’s all sorts of help available, no matter how young or old you are. I had a very simple message for you today: Don’t smoke. Do whatever you have to do to give it up, craving by craving.

Now perhaps you have a loved one or a friend or a colleague who smokes, and perhaps today God’s speaking to you through what I’m saying, and convicting you to get involved, and to help them and to encourage them. I know as a non-smoker, you think it’s a filthy habit, and you wonder, "How can they possibly smoke?" Hey; I used to smoke three packets of fags a day and I see someone smoking today, and I’m asking myself exactly the same question. How did I ever do that? But understand that they are seriously addicted. It’s tough. It’s really tough to give up smoking, but having the understanding and the support, and the help of a family-member or a friend or a work-colleague is so powerful.

The alternative for that smoker, whether it’s you or someone else, is a massive heart attack at a young age, or lung cancer or gangrene, or any number of other horrible things, that will lead to a really grim and ugly death. Hey; God has a plan for your life, and for my life, and for everyone’s life. I know that ‘cos that’s what He says in His Word – the Bible. It’s a good plan: Sure, with ups and downs; sure, with challenges and trials, but it’s a good plan – a plan that for all too many is cut tragically short by this horrible smoking thing.

I remember thinking to myself when I was a smoker, "Oh, it’d never happen to me". Folks, the research is clear. The facts are in. It absolutely will happen to every smoker. Smoking on average shortens a life by around (wait for this, it’s staggering) twenty-five years. That’s rather a lot. The message is simple: Don’t smoke.

Sweet Dreams

Sleep. It’s something that we don’t give much thought to, isn’t it? We simply take for granted that we get tired, we go to bed, we wake up, we get going again, and that’s the next day. But have you ever been so tired that you can’t keep your eyes open? Have you ever been sitting through a meeting or sitting on the lounge at home, and you just can’t stay awake? At that point, sleep’s the only thing that matters. Our body is telling us it’s time for bed, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that. We just have to sleep.

The record for the longest period without sleep is (wait for it) 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes during a rocking-chair marathon of all things. The person who holds that record reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech, memory and concentration loss. In fact, so important is sleep to us, many of us take cat-naps with our eyes open even. People around us, we ourselves, are often not even aware of it.

Now, new parents will know that feeling because the birth of a child typically results in somewhere between 400 and 750 lost hours of sleep for those parents in the first year of a child’s life. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and I know how tough it is when children come along. I remember sitting at my desk at the office nodding off, because I simply hadn’t had enough sleep.

Now a normal person takes somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to fall to sleep in bed at night. If you fall asleep in less than 5 minutes, then that’s a good indication that you’re being sleep-deprived, and dreams – that’s a whole different thing. We could talk for hours about dreams – the ones we have during rim sleep, that’s rapid eye movement sleep, are typically characterised by bizarre plots, whilst non-rim dreams are repetitive and thoughtless with very little imagery. And by the time the average person dies, they will have spent around 25 years of their life asleep. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet, even though 99% of what medical science knows about sleep has been discovered just in the last 25 years, did you know that even today, science can’t tell us what sleep is for? Why we have to sleep? Sure; there are theories, but there’s no one scientifically proven reason for sleep. The amount of sleep we need? That varies from person to person, but pretty much, is somewhere between the 6 to 8 hours a night range, and we all know that our sleep is something like a cheque account with an overdraft facility.

This is something I experience a lot. During the week, because I’m an early starter, I can be sitting at my desk at 4 am, preparing these radio messages. Sometimes I don’t get to bed till 10 or 10:30 at night, so I could end up with as little as 5-and-a-half to 6 hours’ sleep. If I do that for a few days running, I end up with a sleep deficit, and then on Friday night, I’ll sleep for maybe 10 or 11 or even 12 hours to catch up. If it’s been a particularly hectic week, Saturday night might be a longer sleep-night as well so that by Sunday, I’m caught up and I’m feeling fine again. I’m sure you’ve experienced that too.

But here’s the thing: Some people live in a constant sleep deficit. That’s what I’d like to chat with you about today. Because if you’re not getting the sleep you need, then there’s every chance that your life isn’t all that it should or could be. You know that feeling of constant tiredness? And some of that is caused by some of the things that we’ve been talking about these last few weeks on the program. If your diet is stuffed full of refined carbohydrates, then you are going to be carrying a bunch of extra weight.

If you’ve been able to join me on the program, you might have heard me telling you about the large amount of weight that I’ve lost over the past few years (25 kgs, or around 55 lbs.), so I can tell you there is a huge difference between the quality of sleep that you get when you’re a healthy weight as compared to being overweight or obese, as I was. I sleep so well these days. It makes a huge difference to my life. Back when I was carrying around all that extra weight, I was always tired. I didn’t sleep well, and life was a misery.

With all my heart, I believe (in fact, I know) that you and I have been put here on this earth by God with a purpose, and part of that purpose is to live the abundant life that Jesus promised to bring us. That doesn’t mean that each day’s going to be a sensational experience and that nothing bad’s going to happen to us, but overall God’s plan for you and for me is for us to live an abundant life – a life overflowing with God’s goodness; a life when the overflow of His goodness to us has a huge impact on the people round us.

Well, let me tell you, abundance and exhaustion simply don’t go together. You can’t live an abundant life when you’re tired. God knows that. Psalm 127:2 says that God gives sleep to those whom He loves. God gets it, but sometimes we don’t. We think that we can burn the candle at both ends – staying up late; getting up early in the morning, to do all the things we have to do.

You know, 18 hours without sleep has the same impact on you as a blood-alcohol reading of .05, which in many places is the legal limit for driving a vehicle, and today I guess I just wanted to give you (pardon the pun) a bit of a wakeup call about your sleep. If you’re not getting enough of it, enough good-quality uninterrupted sleep, then you’re not living the life that you could be living because you’re always tired, and from a health perspective, that’s not a good thing either.

Not only does a lack of sleep lead to more accidents and a far lower level of mental alertness, it can put you at a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease (that’s heart attack and stroke), high blood pressure, and Diabetes. Your sleep matters to your health and to the quality of your life, even if the scientists can’t tell you exactly why that is, so here are some practical tips for getting a good night’s sleep. I’m sure some of them will be familiar to you, but here we go.

Firstly, make sure that the room where you sleep is dark and quiet and well-ventilated because your body temperature needs to drop by about a third of a degree for you to be able to sleep well.

Next, get rid of all the distractions. Do you sleep with your mobile phone by your bedside with E-mails coming through and SMSs, or do you leave the TV on in the bedroom all night? Don’t! Those things disrupt your sleep, and they affect you during the day.

Then try to go to bed at pretty much the same time every night, and get up around the same time in the morning. The more your sleep patterns are in a regular routine, the better you’re going to sleep.

If you find that snoring or discomfort interrupts your sleep, then lose some weight. Just 3 or 4 kg can make the world of difference to the quality of your sleep.

If you have some ache or pain that wakes you in the night – a bad knee, a sore hip, a shoulder pain, get it seen to. All too often we let those niggling things linger on, not realising how much sleep they’re actually robbing us of.

Try to have some kind of routine – something that you do each night before you go to bed, to train your body that it’s sleep time. For me, it’s a cup of hot tea. I do that most nights, and it's funny how the body goes, "Whoop! Must be bedtime". That should include a wind-down period, especially for men. There needs to be a clear separation between using your mind for something complex like work, and winding down to the point where you can rest. In that last hour before I go to bed, I won’t let anyone get me to use my mind for something complex, otherwise I simply won’t be able to sleep.

And the last one is to lay the cares of the world aside. I do that by praying. Many-a time I’ve gone to bed with worries and burdens – things you could end up turning over in your mind for hours and you toss and turn and you have a restless night ... I always just lay them down in prayer. I give them to the LORD my God for Him to deal with overnight, and those things (99 times out of 100) give me a great night’s sleep.

Remember: You can’t live an abundant life when you’re tired all the time. Sweet dreams.

Your Body is not Your Own

If you’ve been able to join me over this teaching series, either here on radio or online at Christianityworks.com, you’ll know that we’ve rattled through some amazing statistics about how complex, how powerful, how intricate and amazing our bodies really are, but we don’t need statistics to tell us that. Just stop and think about all the things that your body does for you, and that you’re able to do using your body, without even having to think about it.

Just the right amount of oxygen is what you take in. You expel the waste products, CO2 and all the other stuff without even thinking about it. You can see millions of colours, and your mind interprets what you see in an instant. You move without thinking. You have such an amazing body. You can recall billions of bits of information in an instant, and why wouldn’t you have an amazing body? God gave it to you. It’s His design; it’s His hand-crafted exquisite gift to you, and it’s the only body that He’s going to give you in this lifetime. My favourite Old Testament Scripture is this. Psalm 139:13-18. The Psalmist’s writing to God. He’s saying:

For it was You who formed me in my inward parts. God, You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works; that I know very well. My frame wasn’t hidden from You when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In Your book was written all of the days that were ever formed for me when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are Your thoughts, o God, how vast is the sum of them! I try to count them; they are more than the sand. I come to the end, and I am still with You.

Your beautiful body, hand-made by God Himself. He was there; He saw it; He made it happen; He chose the genes to lay down to make you who you are. You are so beautiful in God’s eyes, and though some of us (me included for much of my life) don’t treat our body with the respect that it deserves, it still is a beautiful creation.

Let me ask you something: If Jesus knocked on your door today, and showed up with the most amazing present for you, would you just toss it in the corner and treat it with neglect? I hope not. And yet when we abuse our bodies by eating the wrong foods, by not exercising; not resting; by doing all the things we know we shouldn’t be doing, that is in effect exactly what we’re doing. We’re tossing this amazing gift that Jesus has given us, our beautiful bodies on which our very lives depend, we’re tossing them in the corner and treating them with neglect, and that my friend eventually comes back to haunt us.

If you’re pumping lots of sugary and refined foods down your gullet, if you’ve become (sad to say) a couch potato and you’re not working up a sweat once a day or at least every other day, I can tell you this one thing for certain: The statistics tell us that you’re going to die young, and that’s no way to treat your beautiful body, this gift from God. Listen to what the apostle Paul says about how we treat our bodies to his friends in Corinth. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:

Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

Okay. In this context, Paul’s talking about sexual immorality, but the principle of glorifying God in our bodies applies equally to how we treat our bodies from a diet, exercise and rest perspective. The Bible doesn’t talk much, if at all, about obesity or cardiovascular disease or Diabetes ‘cos none of those diseases existed way back then. They were lobbed in on us as we started eating the so-called western diet high in sugars and refined carbohydrates, somewhere along the way, in the 20^th century. See, this is why we’ve been talking about this stuff. It’s really important, but by and large, it’s not in the Bible except for this reference where God tells us to look after our bodies – to glorify Him in our bodies.

Friend, with all I am, I want to implore you today to take your body seriously; to respect it; to look after it. Because in doing so, not only are you going to be feeling a whole bunch better, not only are you going to be living a whole bunch longer, but you’ll be honouring God – glorifying God in your body, this body of yours that was purchased at the most amazing price, by the death of Jesus Christ on that cross. And that, my friend – honouring God, hey; that’s not such a bad thing to do.