Every Body Matters Quotes

“Our battle is today. Because of God’s grace, yesterday doesn’t count. Because of God’s hope, worry about tomorrow is inappropriate.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Let us become intentional to use personal slights, inconveniences, acts of gossip and slander, times of difficulty, and even sickness as opportunities to grow in patience and understanding and humility instead of bitterly resenting each one.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“The renowned Puritan Ralph Venning once wrote, “They who avoid suffering by sinning, sin themselves into worse suffering.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Spiritual laziness leads to resentment; spiritual diligence spawns insight and transformation from the exact same events. Let us become intentional to use personal slights, inconveniences, acts of gossip and slander, times of difficulty, and even sickness as opportunities to grow in patience and understanding and humility instead of bitterly resenting each one.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Our battle is today. Because of God’s grace, yesterday doesn’t count. Because of God’s hope, worry about tomorrow is inappropriate. This moment, this day, this hour, are we being faithful toward God, honoring him with what we eat and don’t eat, and taking care of our bodies accordingly?”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Each day provides “a multitude of ways to improve the way we shelter the Holy Spirit of God.”
― Gary Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Though undoubtedly deplorable sexism existed in this movement, astute women supporters picked up the truth behind muscular Christianity and challenged women as much as men. Fitness advocate Helen McKinstry asked what man contemplating marriage would choose a “delicate, anaemic, hothouse plant type of girl” over a “strong, full-blooded, physically courageous woman, a companion for her husband on the golf links and a playmate with her children? “2 Of course, even this sounds sexist to contemporary ears (getting in shape because otherwise men won’t want you), but some, such as YWCA secretary Mary Dunn, called women to fitness for the sake of the spiritual challenge that lay before them: Muscular women wanted, young women. What kind? Those to whom the Lord can say, “Do this or that for me,” and who can respond to the hardest command, the carrying out of which will mean endurance, a knowledge of the principles of the conservation of energy and the putting forth of will power through bodily power. It will mean the clear shining of a flowing soul through a transparent medium, instead of the cloudy glass of an … ill-used body.3”
― Gary Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Eventually, I found that hunger* is just a sensation — nothing more. It needn’t be a tyrant. It’s like lust or anger. Just because I feel lust doesn’t mean I need to act on it. Just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I need to raise my voice or clench my fists. And just because I’m hungry doesn’t mean I need to eat. There is a subtle and dangerous spiritual mechanism that arises when we always obey our hunger. It becomes a veritable steering wheel in Satan’s hand. He can turn us in any direction he wants, and we become accustomed to letting this one sensation rule us. It affects what we eat, when we eat, and how we eat. It may take precedence over other things in our lives.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Getting fit can be an arduous, even painful process; living fit is filled with much joy.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“What we can control is where we’re going. If we’ve been less than healthy, we can commit ourselves, as a spiritual exercise, to deal with the spiritual issues behind the physical problem.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“In the end, I found that physical fitness offered to God, surrendered to God, pursued in cooperation with God has enormous spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“What if exercise and discipline in eating isn’t as much about physical health as about honoring the God who made us?”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Just as viewing my marriage through the lens of a pathway toward holiness more than happiness gave me renewed motivation to grow in union with my wife and ongoing motivation to keep pursuing deeper intimacy with her, so understanding my body as an instrument of service to God is giving me renewed motivation to take better care of it in the face of my cravings and laziness.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul

“Soft people who frequently complain about the smallest annoyances, who give in to laziness and excess, who expect others to work so that they can rest, who collapse into passive entertainment instead of active exercise — these are souls custom-made to become all but irrelevant in kingdom warfare. They are no threat to anyone — least of all to Satan.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul