21 Grams
My full time job is in the Medical Industry. We sell all sorts of equipment to various health organisations all around the country. My previous role was selling all kinds of pharmaceuticals to various doctors and specialists.
The Health Industry in Australia is worth billions of dollars every year – and growing at an alarming rate. Oddly enough, the Australian Medical Industry makes up only 1% of the entire global spend on the Medical Industry.
We are blessed that in our culture, the human body is worth a lot. I know some people have it tough but when you compare our existence to the existence in places like Sudan, we have it pretty good here. The value of a human body is quite high.
Many of us exercise and keep in shape to optimise the functioning of our bodies – and rightly so. But what about the real you and me? Our soul and spirit. Our body without the soul and spirit would be meta-physically challenged – dead. I have heard of many reports that some people actually weigh a person while they are dying and at the moment of death, they weigh them again and they lose 21 grams.
This 21 grams is far more important then any human body could possibly be. The 21 grams of a persons soul and spirit enter a human carcass, much the same way as a pair of hands enter the gloves of an incubator and there is life in the incubator. Take the hands out of the gloves and out of the incubator, and the rubber flops. Take the 21 grams out of a human – and it dies.
So if we go into so much effort to maintain our physical bodies, what steps can we take to maintain our 21 grams? Lucky for you and me, we have the ultimate guru in these matters – Jesus. One day, He was having one of His lively discussions with the “Religious Freaks.” These “teachers” freaked out at the disciples cause they didn’t wash up before they ate.
Mind you, this was just a custom the high and lofty did because it was the thing the high and lofty do. Looking down at the disciples from their lofty mental domain, they accused them of wrong doing. Jesus in His typically, non-politically correct, in your face method of public speaking verbally trashed them out and accused them of breaking the law in order to simply follow tradition.
He then nails the point with His thoughts on what was a very important them back then – unclean foods:
“Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’”
His disciples were a few sandwiches short of a picnic by what He meant about this so Jesus had to given them a Bible study about it. Another translation says it like this:
“Jesus said, “Are you being willfully stupid? Don’t you see that what you swallow can’t contaminate you? It doesn’t enter your heart but your stomach, works its way through the intestines, and is finally flushed.” (That took care of dietary quibbling; Jesus was saying that all foods are fit to eat.)
He went on:
“It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution.”
I’ll paraphrase it for our context. You don’t become a better or worse person, by what you eat. Rather it’s what you say and think that could make your 21 grams sick. Think of it for a second. Look at the list of rubbish that comes out from us – from our 21 grams – and look how they all originate in the mind, soul and spirit.
“It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution.”
We may have a few kilos extra – we feel bad about, we train our butts off and hopefully we get rid of them. We get sick. We go to the doctor, get a script and we get better. We have a headache, pop some Panadol and we get better. But these are all for our physical selves.
What about our 21 grams? All the negativity we have. All the greed harboring inside us. All the malice. The desire for gossip. The slander. This is pollution inside our 21 grams. And instead of dealing with it, we indulge in our appetite for more. The equivalent would be to lick up the green phlegm from a chesty cough! Yuck I hear you say. But we all do it.
The net effect of this is that our 21 grams gets sick and remains sick. This blocks us of from enjoying all that our generous God would have us enjoy. Jesus says that He has come to give us life – abundantly! How many of us want that so badly? I know I do. The key then is to watch what we say and think and put it all into context that it’s for those 21 grams that God became a man and died a horrific death. That He was buried and then was resurrected to show everyone that He is God.
His resurrection is a historic fact recorded by Christian, Jewish and secular historians. This is fact. He did this so that one day your 21 grams will be put into a body so glorious that it will be eternal. We’ll all get a new body. But it’s in this life that your 21 grams are being tested, shaped and molded. It’s now that we all need to understand that the things we say and the things we do have an enormous effect on our hearts, minds, souls and spirit.
So why not place careful attention to these matters and allow God to work wonders with your 21 grams.
