Our Temple

There were a couple of surprising statements by President Nelson to me in chapter 11 of his recent book Heart of the Matter. He discussed the importance of taking care of our bodies, and told of one of his favorite sports: “I skied for years with family and friends, and I grew to love the sport. I skied until the day I became President of the Church, at age ninety-three, when my security officers insisted that I stop. They said they were no longer willing to risk having an erratic snowboarder crash into me, but I secretly believe they were tired of trying to keep up with me on those Black Diamond runs.” I had heard that he was a skier, and it is amazing that he skied up until the age of 93. He also said this about one of his habits: “I have been blessed with good health, and I have been conscientious about taking care of my body. I have weighed myself every day for decades, and if I put on a pound or two, I cut back on my intake for a few days. Years of treating patients with heart maladies convinced me that the most important number to watch is one’s weight.” He weighs himself daily! I guess he has seen enough overweight people with heart diseases that he has wanted to avoid the same fate—and clearly whatever he has done has worked because he is now 99 years old and still, it would seem, very healthy! He quickly added this caveat to his statement, “As an aside, I am not advocating being model thin, going on extreme diets, or spending excessive amounts of time working out. A person’s worth is not measured by their appearance. ‘For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.’ I simply suggest that keeping your weight within a healthy range for your body type is important for long-term health.” I do not think that he is suggesting that we should all weigh ourselves frequently like him necessarily, but his message is that we should pay attention to our health and take care of our bodies with exercise and nutrition and common sense. For, as he highlighted, our bodies are a temple and the Lord wants us to care for them as best as we can.

               One of the interesting points that President Nelson made in this chapter was this: “Jesus Christ Himself was the first to refer to His mortal body as a temple. Later, the Apostle Paul asked the Corinthians, ‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?’ He then went on to declare that ‘if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’” I had never considered the implication of the fact that Jesus was referring to his body as a temple when he said this: “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The Jews of course thought that He was referring to the actual temple in Jerusalem, but He was referring to the temple of His own body. Many years later some Christians who tried to downplay the importance of the body and even go far as to saw that Christ didn’t really have one, but the gospel writers are clear: Jesus had a body. And when Jesus fulfilled this promise about His “temple,” He showed that indeed the body is of utmost importance: He raised it from the dead. When He came to visit His disciples, He wanted them to see that His body was real: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” When they struggled to believe what they saw, He asked for food. “And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them” (Luke 24:39-43). He ate not because He was hungry but because He wanted them to see that His body was no illusion; though He had indeed died on the cross, He lived again. I love this quote that President Nelson cited from the Prophet Joseph Smith: “We came to this earth that we might have a body and present it pure before God in the celestial kingdom. The great principle of happiness consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment. He is pleased when he can obtain the tabernacle of man.” Our body is central to the plan of the Father and vital to return back to His presence.