This morning I start with sad news: Twenty-twenty-two saw the largest number of suicides in recorded history. Nearly 50,000 people ended their lives last year. Many more tried to and failed.

We’re in the middle of a three-part series called the Embodied Soul The Importance of the Body In the Age of Revolution. We are talking about our physical bodies. In a tragic way this news this week demonstrates that there is a fundamental connection between body and soul, between the spirit and body.

Spiritual depression and the darkness that comes with it has destructive consequences on the body, the most destructive consequences on the body, as we see here.

This series seeks to engage this cultural revolution that we find ourselves in and engage it with the Word of God. That’s the way we try to engage all of our lives and the culture and all of our days with the Word of God, with this truth.

We said last week that we are in the midst of a crisis of anthropology. Anthropology is the way that we see ourselves in our bodies. The way that we look at humanity in general. This crisis lies underneath the polarizing worldview divide that we find ourselves in. I don’t know if you notice but there’s quite a divide out there in the culture. Some people on this side, some on the other side—staunch in their ways.

Today we will see that the denigration of the body is at the heart of major destructive cultural practices. That’s what I aim to show today.

My desire is that we would have greater understandings of the times in which we live and how God speaks truth and love in the midst of those times into our world.

It’s true that we live in a confused and chaotic culture. This culture has profound effects on real people in their real lives

The suicide rate is one tragic example of the effects that our culture has on people. So, I want to engage the heart with a heart of compassion and humility, knowing that if you have seen the light of truth and you know some of the answers to this that it was by the grace and the love of God that you came to know those things.

We always have to back up and say, okay, that humbles us to know that we didn’t figure these things out on our own because we are wise. No, we did that because God is a gracious God and has revealed things to us.

So, we are then to engage others graciously with truth.

Our passages are: Romans 1, Psalm 139, and 1 Corinthians 6.

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