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Embodied Cognition: How the Mind Thinks Through Brain, Body, and World · Reformed Thinking

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  Welcome back to Reformed Thinking.
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  We're doing another deep dive, and today we're really shifting
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  our focus. We are, instead of looking at
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  the mind as this, you know, purely abstract thing, we're
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  going to ground our study in something much more, well,
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  physical. The body.
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  That's right, our listener sent in a fantastic set of sources on
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  a field called Embodied Cognition, or EC for short.
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  And this material, it really pushes back on that old idea
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  that thinking just happens between your ears, completely
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  separate from everything else. It does.
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  And so our mission here is really twofold.
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  First, we need to get into the science of EC.
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  What are its claims? What's the evidence?
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  OK. But then, and this is the core
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  of it for us, we have to test these scientific findings
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  against biblical anthropology. We need to see how they stack up
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  against a Reformed theological framework.
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  So is this connection between the mind and body just some kind
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  of evolutionary accident? Or is it a feature of
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  intelligent design, a common GRACE observation that science
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  is now catching up to? It really starts with things you
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  already intuitively get. I mean, why does walking around
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  a room help you solve a problem you're stuck on?
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  Exactly. Or why do you start using your
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  hands to explain something complicated, maybe sketching it
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  out right? The sources we're looking at
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  argue that those physical things you do, they aren't just little
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  helpers for your thoughts. They're saying the actions are
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  part of the thinking itself. That's the challenging claim we
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  need to unpack. So let's start with the
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  scientific backdrop. EC is reacting against
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  something. For a long time there was this
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  one powerful picture of how the mind works.
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  Oh yeah, the brain is computer model.
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  It was, and in some ways still is, incredibly influential.
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  And what was the basic idea behind that classical view?
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  It was very neat and tidy. You can think of it like a
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  production line. First, you have input the body's
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  senses perception bring in data from the world.
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  OK, that's step one. Then that data gets sent to a
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  central processor. The brain and this processor
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  works by shuffling around abstract symbols like software
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  running code. And these symbols are a modal,
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  right? They don't have any connection
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  to the sensory input they came from.
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  They're just pure information. Exactly.
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  Purely abstract. And only after all that internal
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  calculation is done, the processor sends a command, an
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  output and the body executes. It so in that model the body is
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  basically just a keyboard and a monitor.
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  A monitor. Perfect analogy.
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  It handles the input and the output.
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  But the real work, the thinking, happens in this sealed off
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  central unit, totally divorced from the physical machine.
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  But that model, as tidy as it is, it started showing some
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  cracks. The sources point out some
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  puzzles it just couldn't solve. It really did, and the biggest 1
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  is probably speed. Real world skillful action.
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  Think of a shortstop fielding a ground ball, or a jazz musician
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  improvising. Those actions are just too fast,
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  too fluid to be explained by some slow step by step internal
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  calculation. If your brain had to run a full
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  physics simulation before your body moved, you'd be hopelessly
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  behind reality. You'd miss the ball every time.
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  Every single time. And then there's the second
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  puzzle, the simple fact that our physical state effects how we
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  think. Right.
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  If the mind is just software, why does it matter if the
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  hardware is tired? That's the question.
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  Why does being exhausted make it harder to reason?
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  Why does stress mess with your memory?
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  The classical model kind of treats the processor as if it's
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  immune to things like blood sugar or hormones.
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  But it's not. It's a physical organ.
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  It's a physical organ in a physical body, and the third
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  puzzle is what the source is called the offloading problem.
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  Offloading. We are constantly using the
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  world around us to help us think.
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  We make lists, We draw diagrams. We use our fingers to count.
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  We gesture. We offload the mental work onto
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  the environment. Yes, why would we do that if our
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  brains were these all powerful internal computers?
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  It's like we instinctively know our internal memory is limited,
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  so we share the computational burden with the world.
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  And these puzzles taken together are what really opened the door
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  for embodied cognition. OK.
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  So that brings us to EC itself. You said it's a broad term, so
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  we need to break down the different claims.
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  We do. It's a spectrum, really.
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  The basic question is just how the body matters.
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  We can break it down into three main ideas, from the most
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  accepted to the most radical. Let's start with the mildest
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  one, the influence thesis. The influence thesis is pretty
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  straightforward. It just says that bodily states
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  reliably affect our thinking. They modulate.
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  It so the body doesn't do the thinking, but it changes the
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  conditions under which the thinking happens.
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  Perfect. If you have a rush of
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  adrenaline, your attention narrows.
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  If you adopt A slumped, defeated posture, it can actually change
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  how confidently you argue a point.
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  The body's Physiology sets the stage for the brain's
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  operations. That one seems pretty hard to
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  argue with. The brain is part of the
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  Organism, after all, it. Is it's the weakest claim, but
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  it's an important first step away from the old model.
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  So what's the next step up? The grounding thesis?
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  This sounds like it gets closer to the core of the problem.
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  It does. The grounding thesis is a much
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  bigger claim. Is the body actually contributes
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  to the content or the format of our thoughts?
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  What does that mean? The format of our thoughts.
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  It means our concepts, especially for concrete things
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  like push or heavy or near, aren't just abstract computer
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  code. They are anchored or grounded in
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  our sensory and motor systems. So when I think about grasping
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  an idea. Your brain isn't just
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  manipulating 2 abstract symbols for grasped an idea, it's
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  actually activating some of the same neural patterns you use
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  when you physically grasp an object like a cup.
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  OK, so the abstract meaning is built on the physical
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  experience. Exactly.
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  Abstraction is still possible, but it's built out of these
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  bodily resources. We use spatial metaphors and
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  motor programs as building blocks for higher thought.
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  The body gives our concepts their structure.
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  OK, that's a big step. But now for the really
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  controversial one, the Constitution thesis.
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  This is the one that really breaks down the boundary between
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  mind and body. The Constitution thesis says
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  that in some cases, the body's actions are not just influencing
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  or grounding thought, they are an ingredient in the cognitive
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  process itself. The body is part of the
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  thinking. It's partly realized by bodily
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  action. The sources talk about epistemic
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  actions. These are things you do with
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  your body to make thinking easier to solve a problem that
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  would be too hard to do just in your head.
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  And you give a classic example of this.
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  The go to example is mental rotation.
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  Imagine you're playing Tetris or maybe assembling some IKEA
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  furniture. You have a piece and you need to
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  see if it fits OK. You could try to mentally rotate
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  the image of that piece in your head.
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  That takes a lot of working memory.
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  It's difficult, very. Or you could just physically
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  pick up the piece and turn it with your hands.
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  Right, which is what everyone does.
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  Exactly. And the constitution thesis says
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  that physical act of rotating the object is a cognitive
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  operation. You're not thinking and then
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  moving. The moving is part of how you
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  think. You're using the world to
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  compute the answer. It's an ingredient, not just a
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  result. That's the.
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  Claim and it's controversial because it means the mind isn't
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  just in the skull. Which is a perfect lead in to
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  the Fourier family. These terms get used almost
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  interchangeably sometimes, so we need to separate them out.
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  Embodied, embedded and active and extended.
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  This is so important, especially when we get to the theology so
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  embodied is what we've been talking about.
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  The focus is on how the bodies own Sensorio motor capacities
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  and internal regulation shaped thought.
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  OK. And embedded.
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  Embedded cognition says that thinking is always situated.
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  It's adapted to a specific environment.
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  Knowing how to navigate a city is embedded in the city's
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  layout, but the key difference is the city itself isn't
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  literally part of your mind. Context is critical, but the
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  mind stays in the body. Got it.
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  What about inactive? The inactive view is it a bit
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  bolder. It says we don't just passively
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  receive information for the world, we actively construct our
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  experience through action. Perception and action are
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  inseparable. You don't see the world and then
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  decide how to act. Seeing is a form of acting.
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  You see the world in terms of what you can do in it.
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  Yes, that's a great way to put it.
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  Cognition is about skillfully managing that continuous loop
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  between Asian and world. And finally, the most radical of
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  the bunch, Extended cognition. This is the one that really
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  pushes the boundaries. The extended thesis claims that
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  external things, a notebook, a diagram, your smartphone can
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  literally become components of your cognitive system.
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  So my phone could be part of my memory.
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  If you reliably use it to store information, and you access that
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  information as seamlessly as you would your own biological memory
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  to complete a task, then yes, functionally that device has
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  become part of your memory system.
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  The mind actually extends beyond the skin.
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  And you said this distinction is vital for a reformed analysis.
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  Why? Because of where we draw the
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  line for human identity, for what is subject to sin and
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  redemption. OK if we say our body is an
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  ingredient in our thinking. The Constitution thesis that
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  lines up beautifully with a biblical view of psychosomatic
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  unity. But if we say the mind extends
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  into a non biological artifact like a smartphone.
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  Does that mean your phone is part of the self that fell?
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  Is your phone subject to SIN? Does it get redeemed?
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  You see the problem? Scripture is very clear that the
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  soma, the biological body, is the vessel created by God that
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  is subject to the fall and awaits resurrection.
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  Extending the mind beyond that biological unit risks diluting
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  the unique created nature of the human person.
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  So we can accept that our thinking is embodied and
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  grounded without having to agree that our minds are literally
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  spilling out into our technology.
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  That's the boundary. The architecture is designed for
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  coordination with the world, but the soul is tethered to the
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  biological person, God formed from the dust all.
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  Right, so let's dig into the science a bit more.
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  These ideas didn't just appear out of nowhere.
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  What are the historical roots here?
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  You can trace them back quite a way really, as a reaction
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  against that rigid computational view from the mid 20th century.
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  Where do we start? In America, you had the
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  pragmatists like William James and John Dewey.
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  For them, knowledge wasn't about having a perfect picture of the
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  world in your head, it was about being able to act successfully.
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  To know something was to know how to use it.
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  Thinking was tied to doing. And in Europe you had a
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  different stream of thought doing similar work, yes.
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  The phenomenologists Murillo Ponte is the key figure here.
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  He was fighting against Cartesian dualism, that idea of
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  a mind completely separate from the body.
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  His argument was that we're always already in the world,
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  right? Exactly.
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  Our perception is shaped by our body.
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  The world appears to us as a field of possible actions.
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  Our posture, our physical abilities, they all structure
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  how we see and understand the environment.
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  And then you have the developmental psychologist.
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  Right Piagia. He showed how an infant's
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  understanding of the world is built up through sensorimotor
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  activity, region grasping, moving.
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  As the baby's motor skills develop, their conceptual world
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  expands in lockstep. And Vygotsky with his idea of
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  scaffolding. Yes, Vygotsky stressed how much
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  we rely on external supports, language, gestures, cultural
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  tools to build up our internal mental functions.
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  But the biggest scientific push came from ecological psychology.
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  James Gibson. Gibson was a game changer.
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  He basically said the whole computational model was asking
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  the wrong question. The mind doesn't need to build a
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  complex internal model of the world from scratch.
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  Why not? Because the environment itself
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  is already full of rich information, and perception is
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  the active process of just picking up that information.
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  This is where he introduces the idea of affordances.
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  That's a central concept. An affordance is an opportunity
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  for action the environment offers to an Organism.
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  A chair affords sitting for a human, a wall of Ford's climbing
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  for an insect. So perception isn't neutral.
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  When I look at a cup, I'm not just seeing a cylinder, I'm
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  seeing its grasp ability for my hand.
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  You see what you can do with it. Perception is tuned to action,
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  and that makes cognition look a lot less like symbol crunching
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  and a lot more like skilled coordination with the world.
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  So let's get into the specific mechanisms that make this work.
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  There are five key ones in the sources.
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  The 1st is perception action coupling.
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  This is the bedrock. Cognition isn't a straight line
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  input process output, it's a continuous high speed feedback
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  loop. How does that loop work?
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  You make a move, that movement changes what you sense, that new
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  sensory information guide your next move, and on and on it goes
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  in real time. And the intelligence is in the
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  loop itself. It is.
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  It's in the constant coordination and adjustment.
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  Think about driving a car on an icy Rd.
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  You're not solving equations, You're in a tight dynamic loop,
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  making tiny adjustments with the wheel based on the feedback
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  you're feeling from the tires. The intelligence is distributed
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  across you and the car and the road.
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  OK, that makes sense. The second mechanism is sensori
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  motor simulation. Right.
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  This explains how we can think about things even when we're not
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  moving. The idea is that when you think
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  about an action, you recruit some of the same neural
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  machinery you'd use to actually perform that action.
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  So if I think about kicking a ball, my motor cortex lights up
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  a little. Bit it does, even if you're
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  sitting perfectly still, the brain runs a kind of low level
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  simulation of the physical experience.
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  This is what gives our concepts their feel.
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  Which really supports that grounding thesis we talked
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  about. It's the mechanism behind it.
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  It's why our abstract language is filled with physical
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  metaphors, like a heavy topic or a sharp critique.
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  We're using these Sensor My Motor simulations to structure
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  abstract ideas. Right mechanism 3 is epistemic
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  action. We touched on this already.
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  This is when you use your body to make thinking easier.
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  The actions main purpose isn't to change the world, but to
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  change your own cognitive state. Like spreading out all the
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  puzzle pieces on a table. Perfect example.
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  You're using the table as an external memory space.
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  It helps you see patterns and relationships that would be
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  impossible to hold in your head all at once.
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  You're outsourcing the cognitive load.
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  And sketching an idea on a napkin during a meeting would be
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  another 1A. Classic 1.
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  You take a fleeting internal idea and make it stable and
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  public so you and the other person can both work on it.
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  It's a hugely powerful strategy for complex problems.
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  OK, mechanism 4 gets internal interception and effective
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  modulation. This is a reminder that
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  cognition is regulated by our internal bodily state.
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  Interoception is just the technical term for sensing
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  what's going on inside your body, your heart rate, your gut
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  feelings, fatigue. And those internal signals shape
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  our emotions, our effective state.
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  Yes, and emotion isn't some messy distraction from pure
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  reason. It's a vital control system.
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  It tells us what's important. How does that work?
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  Well, if you feel a lot of anxiety in your stomach, that's
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  an interceptive signal. Your brain immediately
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  reallocates its resources. Your attention narrows to
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  potential threats. Your decisions become more risk
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  averse. That gut feeling is your body
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  biasing what your mind pays attention to and.
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  The final one, number 5, is morphological computation.
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  This one is fascinating. It's the idea that the body's
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  physical structure, its shape, its weight, the way it's joints
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  work, actually perform some of the computation for us.
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  The body's design simplifies the control problem for the brain.
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  It does. Think about how our tendons
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  store and release energy when we run.
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  That elastic property simplifies the work our muscles have to do.
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  The brain doesn't have to calculate and control every
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  single detail of the motion, because the body's physical form
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  is already doing part of the work.
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  The structure itself is smart. In a way, yes.
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  It reduces the number of things the nervous system has to
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  actively manage, making complex actions possible.
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  OK, those five mechanisms give a really solid picture.
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  Let's run through some of the evidence now, starting with
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  language. We already mentioned the
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  metaphors, but there's brain imaging evidence too.
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  When people read sentences about actions.
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  He hammered the nail. The motor parts of their brain
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  associated with hammering show activity.
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  Gesture. Gesture is huge.
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  People don't just wave their hands around randomly.
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  Their gestures often trace the structure of the idea they're
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  trying to explain. It suggests the thought itself
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  has a spatial motor like structure that they're
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  externalizing. What about evidence from
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  reasoning and working memory? Here you see that experts in
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  complex fields like engineering or surgery rely heavily on
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  practice physical actions. They point, they manipulate
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  models, they sketch. They use the physical world to
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  hold intermediate steps of a problem steady so their internal
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  working memory can focus on the bigger picture.
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  If you take away their ability to do that, their performance
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  plummets. Drastically.
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  Which confirms that this externalization isn't just a
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  helpful add on, it's a core part of their reasoning process.
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  And in development, we see this process from the very beginning.
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  Absolutely. An infant's world of concepts
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  changes as its motor abilities change.
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  When a baby learns to crawl, its understanding of space and
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  distance fundamentally reorganizes.
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  Doing comes first, and it shapes knowing.
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  The body is the minds first teacher.
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  Finally, what about tools and scaffolding?
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  This is about how we integrate objects into our cognitive
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  system. When a musician becomes an
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  expert, their instrument becomes transparent.
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  Their attention isn't other fingers, it's on the music
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  they're creating through the instrument.
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  The tool becomes part of them functionally.
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  It becomes integrated into that perception action loop, and the
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  same goes for things like lists and maps.
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  They act as external memory and workspaces, allowing us to
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  perform cognitive feats like planning a cross country trip
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  that would be completely impossible with our internal
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  memory alone. So the scientific picture is
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  pretty clear. The brain is essential, but it
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  doesn't work in isolation. Thinking is an activity that
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  involves the whole body and its environment.
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  OK, we've laid out the science. We see how the body matters.
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  Now we get to the really critical part for our deep dive.
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  Why does it matter this way? Let's put this into a
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  theological framework. This is the hinge.
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  You're right. The first step is to affirm that
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  what science is observing here is a facet of common grace.
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  The creator designed it this way.
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  The hand was designed to teach the mind.
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  Exactly. These are valid observations,
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  but we have to immediately filter the secular
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  interpretations that often come with these findings.
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  The big one being evolutionary materialism.
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  It is. If you start from the assumption
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  that there's no creator, then the human body is just a happy
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  accident of survival. It's cognitive design is only
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  for fitness, for passing on genes.
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  And in that view, an affordance is just an opportunity to
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  survive, not to fill a purpose. Right.
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  It removes any sense of higher purpose or moral significance.
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  But in a created framework, the body's design is for a purpose,
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  to exercise dominion, to commune with God.
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  This preserves the dignity and meaning behind our embodied
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  nature. And this brings us to the two
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  ancient errors that the biblical view of the person corrects.
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  Yes, and they keep popping up in new disguises.
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  The first is materialist mournism, the idea that you are
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  only your physical body with no soul.
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  And the second is the opposite error, Gnostic dualism.
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  Right. The Gnostic view that the body
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  is a prison, a piece of junk, that the real you, the Spirit,
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  wants to escape. The Christian worldview rejects
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  both of these and affirms what we call psychosomatic unity.
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  A soul body hole. Let's ground this in Genesis
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  2.7. That's the foundational text.
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  God forms the man from the afar in the dust of the ground, so
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  the physical body is an essential part from the very
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  start. Not an afterthought.
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  Not at all. Then he breathes into him the
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  nishma chayim, the breath of life, and the result is a
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  nephesh haya, a living soul or a living being.
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  The Hebrew mindset is clear. You don't have a body.
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  You are a body animated by God's breath.
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  Which is a perfect theological foundation for embodied
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  cognition. It is, and you see this unity
• 20:00
  all through the Old Testament's vocabulary for the inner life.
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  Right, they use physical organs to describe mental processes.
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  They do the LEB. The heart wasn't just the seat
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  of emotion like we think of it. It was the center of intellect,
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  will, decision making, the whole inner person.
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  That's so different from the Greek idea of reason in the head
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  and passion in the chest. Completely different, and it
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  goes even deeper. The killia, the kidneys or
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  loins, were seen as the seat of deep conscience and emotion.
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  The psalmist says his kidneys instruct him in the night.
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  So the biblical authors would not have been surprised at all
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  by the idea that gut feelings influence our decisions.
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  Not the slightest for them. Wisdom and thinking we're always
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  understood as deeply embodied, physically felt processes.
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  OK. So let's apply this to our
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  systematic framework. Creation.
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  Fall. Redemption.
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  What did this psychosomatic unity look like at creation?
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  In the beginning, Adam had perfect psychosomatic harmony.
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  His physical senses gave him a pure, undistorted knowledge of
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  God and creation, and the covenant of works itself was an
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  embodied command. Right, it required a physical
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  act of restraint. Don't eat from the tree.
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  Exactly. The integration of his mind and
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  his hands was a feature of his intelligent design for ruling
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  righteously. But then the fall shatters that
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  harmony. How does total depravity affect
• 21:15
  the system? The fall corrupts everything,
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  all parts and faculties of soul and body.
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  Sin didn't just infect the mind, it fundamentally disordered the
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  relationship between the mind and the body.
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  The hierarchy gets flipped upside down.
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  It does. Reason, which was meant to rule,
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  now becomes a slave to the body's appetites.
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  And this is where Paul's distinction between soma, the
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  body, and sarx, the flesh, is so critical.
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  The soma is the physical body itself, which is neutral created
• 21:42
  good. Yes, the body is for the Lord,
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  but the Sark's is the principle of rebellion, the sin nature
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  that has hijacked the body. Paul says in Romans 7 that sin
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  is at war in his mellows his physical members.
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  It's almost muscular. Sin gets embedded in our
• 21:58
  physical habits and cravings. The fallen mind, the fronematae
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  sarcos, is a mindset on the flesh.
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  Cognition gets twisted to serve and rationalize what the body
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  wants. Embodied cognition, which was a
• 22:11
  gift, becomes a liability under the curse.
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  So this beautiful system of coordination is now geared
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  towards rebellion until Christ intervenes.
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  And the incarnation is the ultimate statement on the
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  goodness of embodiment. The Son of God took on a human
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  nature, a physical body, but without sin.
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  He validates the physical. He validates it, and he lives
• 22:29
  out of perfect embodied obedience.
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  Hebrew says he learned obedience to what he suffered physically.
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  Hunger, thirst, the agony of the cross.
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  He subjected his physical experience to his father's will,
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  perfectly reversing Adam's embodied failure.
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  And our final hope is not to a spake the body, but to have it
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  redeemed. That's the key.
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  The hope is the resurrection. Christ rose with a physical,
• 22:51
  glorified body, and Paul says we eagerly await the redemption of
• 22:55
  our bodies. We're not waiting to become
• 22:57
  ghosts. We're waiting for the day when
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  our minds and bodies are in perfect, sinless sync again.
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  OK, this is where it gets incredibly practical.
• 23:05
  If our minds and bodies are disconnected, then
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  sanctification, our growth and holiness can't just be an
• 23:10
  intellectual exercise. It can't.
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  It has to involve training the body.
• 23:13
  Romans 12.1 present your bodies as a living sacrifice.
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  That's a physical command. So we apply the third use of the
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  law, which guides believers in how to live.
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  And that guidance involves physical habituation.
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  If thinking and doing are linked, then obeying means
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  training our physical habits. Physical actions are often the
• 23:32
  very means the spirit uses to shape the affections of our
• 23:35
  soul. So physical discipline isn't
• 23:36
  just a result of holiness, it can be a tool to achieve it.
• 23:40
  It often is. Look at Paul in First
• 23:42
  Corinthians 9. He says hypopiazo, I beat my
• 23:44
  body like a boxer. He recognizes that physical
• 23:47
  laziness or uncontrolled appetites can make the spiritual
• 23:50
  mind dull. So we train the body.
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  We train it. We physically get up and walk
• 23:55
  away from temptation. We intentionally sit up straight
• 23:58
  to pay attention. We kneel in prayer to fight at
• 24:01
  our own pride. These are physical acts that
• 24:03
  retrain our mental and spiritual states.
• 24:05
  Let's talk about the means of grace then.
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  Preaching, for a start. It's a very physical event.
• 24:10
  It is God chose a profoundly embodied means.
• 24:13
  Faith comes by hearing. It requires sound waves created
• 24:17
  by a human voice to travel through the air and strike a
• 24:19
  physical eardrum. It requires you to physically
• 24:22
  sit, attend, and submit your senses to the authority of the
• 24:26
  Word. God uses our biology to deliver
• 24:28
  spiritual truth. And the sacraments go even
• 24:30
  further, engaging the whole person.
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  They do. They're a defense against a
• 24:34
  hyper intellectual faith. They are, as Kelvin said,
• 24:37
  visible words in the Lord's Supper.
• 24:39
  The physical sensations, the taste, the texture, the act of
• 24:43
  eating and drinking engage our embodied cognition to seal the
• 24:47
  promise to our hearts in a way that just thinking about it
• 24:49
  can't. You taste and see that the Lord
• 24:51
  is good. Literally.
• 24:53
  This idea of habit formation of liturgy seems so relevant today
• 24:56
  with our digital habits. It's a direct battle of
• 24:59
  liturgies. Yeah, the sources would call the
• 25:01
  constant phone scrolling A cultural liturgy.
• 25:04
  It's a repeated physical habit that trains your mind for
• 25:06
  distraction, fragmentation and instant gratification.
• 25:10
  It trains the sarks. So the physical structure of a
• 25:13
  worship service is a counter formation.
• 25:15
  It's a counter liturgy, physically standing to sing,
• 25:18
  bowing for confession, sitting under the preached word.
• 25:22
  These are rhythms that train the body in reverence, humility, and
• 25:26
  attention. That bodily training helps
• 25:28
  sustain the mind's faith during the week.
• 25:30
  OK, let's bring this all together with the Head, Heart,
• 25:32
  Hands application. What does this mean for our
• 25:35
  head? For what we believe?
• 25:36
  For the head, this doctrine is a direct confrontation to the
• 25:40
  modern Gnostic idol of self creation.
• 25:42
  The idea that the real me is just a feeling inside and my
• 25:45
  physical body is irrelevant or even an obstacle.
• 25:48
  Exactly. This doctrine forces us to
• 25:50
  believe that our bodies, their specific gender limits and form,
• 25:54
  are a good gift and a divine appointment.
• 25:57
  They ground us in reality and prevent our minds from spinning
• 26:00
  off into the fantasy that we can be whoever we want to be.
• 26:03
  It's a call to accept the reality of our creativeness.
• 26:06
  It is OK for the heart, what we love.
• 26:09
  This addresses our affections. Here we have to confront the
• 26:13
  idol of comfort, that deep seated desire to keep the body
• 26:16
  undisturbed and satisfied at all times.
• 26:19
  Sins of the flesh, like gluttony and sloth, are physical acts
• 26:23
  that train the heart to love comfort more than Christ.
• 26:27
  They deaden our spiritual senses.
• 26:29
  And the antidote is somatic reverence.
• 26:31
  Deliberate physical acts of worship.
• 26:33
  Kneeling in prayer forces a physical posture of submission
• 26:37
  on a proud heart. Lifting your voice and song
• 26:40
  physically engages your body in the act of praise.
• 26:43
  These physical actions can help warm a cold heart.
• 26:45
  Finally, the hands. What we do?
• 26:47
  This demands physical presence. It's a strong argument against
• 26:51
  the idea of a purely virtual church being the norm.
• 26:54
  The ecclesia is a physical gathering of bodies.
• 26:56
  You can't want another a screen. You really can't.
• 26:58
  Bearing one another's burdens often means physically showing
• 27:01
  up. Serving the church means
• 27:02
  physical effort, cleaning up, sitting with someone who's
• 27:05
  grieving. This doctrine gives profound
• 27:07
  meaning to that simple physical work.
• 27:09
  And the most direct application of all this is fasting.
• 27:12
  Fasting is the ultimate practice of embodied sanctification.
• 27:16
  You are intentionally denying the body's most basic demand for
• 27:19
  food to physically enact a greater spiritual hunger for
• 27:24
  God. It breaks the loop.
• 27:26
  It breaks the mastery of the belly.
• 27:28
  It's a way of training your physical members to serve
• 27:30
  righteousness, not appetite. You are physically demonstrating
• 27:34
  to your own body and mind that you do not live by bread alone.
• 27:38
  It's working out your obedience in your own muscles and sinews.
• 27:41
  This has been an incredible deep dive.
• 27:44
  We've seen how the science of embodied cognition, when you
• 27:47
  look at it through a reformed lens, confirms that we're not
• 27:50
  ghosts in a machine. And we're not biological
• 27:52
  accidents either. We are psychosomatic unities
• 27:54
  designed for this incredible coordination between mind, body
• 27:57
  and world. And that design is something to
• 28:00
  be redeemed and sanctified. The resurrection of Christ gives
• 28:03
  our bodies an incredible dignity.
• 28:04
  The Gospel calls us out of a life where sin uses our bodies
• 28:08
  for rebellion. And into a life where we
• 28:10
  actively present those same bodies as living sacrifices, as
• 28:13
  our spiritual act of worship. So as we close, and as we wait
• 28:18
  for that day when our bodies of humiliation will be made like
• 28:21
  Christ's glorious body, here's a final thought for you to
• 28:24
  consider. How often do you treat your
• 28:26
  physical life, your posture as you listen to this, your daily
• 28:30
  habits, where you go, what you look at as if it's spiritually
• 28:33
  neutral? When in fact, the ground of your
• 28:35
  physical existence is the very training ground God is using to
• 28:39
  shape what you think, what you love, and what you do.
• 28:42
  Every physical habit is a spiritual discipline.
• 28:44
  It's either training your body to serve the Lord or allowing
• 28:47
  the flesh to rule. Our bodies are not our own.
• 28:50
  We are to glorify God in our body and in our spirit, which
• 28:53
  are Gods.