You Are Not What You Weigh Order Printed Copy

Author: Lisa Bevere
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About the Book

"You are Not What You Weigh" by Lisa Bevere is a book that challenges readers to redefine their self-worth beyond the number on the scale. Bevere encourages readers to focus on their inner beauty, strength, and purpose rather than comparing themselves to unrealistic beauty standards. She empowers individuals to cultivate a healthy relationship with their bodies and embrace their unique identity and worth.

St. Patrick

St. Patrick, (flourished 5th century, Britain and Ireland; feast day March 17), patron saint and national apostle of Ireland, credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland and probably responsible in part for the Christianization of the Picts and Anglo-Saxons. He is known only from two short works, the Confessio, a spiritual autobiography, and his Letter to Coroticus, a denunciation of British mistreatment of Irish Christians. Patrick was born in Britain of a Romanized family. At age 16 he was torn by Irish raiders from the villa of his father, Calpurnius, a deacon and minor local official, and carried into slavery in Ireland. He spent six bleak years there as a herdsman, during which he turned with fervour to his faith. Upon dreaming that the ship in which he was to escape was ready, he fled his master and found passage to Britain. There he came near to starvation and suffered a second brief captivity before he was reunited with his family. Thereafter, he may have paid a short visit to the Continent. The best known passage in the Confessio tells of a dream, after his return to Britain, in which one Victoricus delivered him a letter headed “The Voice of the Irish.” As he read it, he seemed to hear a certain company of Irish beseeching him to walk once more among them. “Deeply moved,” he says, “I could read no more.” Nevertheless, because of the shortcomings of his education, he was reluctant for a long time to respond to the call. Even on the eve of reembarkation for Ireland he was beset by doubts of his fitness for the task. Once in the field, however, his hesitations vanished. Utterly confident in the Lord, he journeyed far and wide, baptizing and confirming with untiring zeal. In diplomatic fashion he brought gifts to a kinglet here and a lawgiver there but accepted none from any. On at least one occasion, he was cast into chains. On another, he addressed with lyrical pathos a last farewell to his converts who had been slain or kidnapped by the soldiers of Coroticus. Careful to deal fairly with the non-Christian Irish, he nevertheless lived in constant danger of martyrdom. The evocation of such incidents of what he called his “laborious episcopate” was his reply to a charge, to his great grief endorsed by his ecclesiastical superiors in Britain, that he had originally sought office for the sake of office. In point of fact, he was a most humble-minded man, pouring forth a continuous paean of thanks to his Maker for having chosen him as the instrument whereby multitudes who had worshipped “idols and unclean things” had become “the people of God.” The phenomenal success of Patrick’s mission is not, however, the full measure of his personality. Since his writings have come to be better understood, it is increasingly recognized that, despite their occasional incoherence, they mirror a truth and a simplicity of the rarest quality. Not since St. Augustine of Hippo had any religious diarist bared his inmost soul as Patrick did in his writings. As D.A. Binchy, the most austerely critical of Patrician (i.e., of Patrick) scholars, put it, “The moral and spiritual greatness of the man shines through every stumbling sentence of his ‘rustic’ Latin.” It is not possible to say with any assurance when Patrick was born. There are, however, a number of pointers to his missionary career having lain within the second half of the 5th century. In the Coroticus letter, his mention of the Franks as still “heathen” indicates that the letter must have been written between 451, the date generally accepted as that of the Franks’ irruption into Gaul as far as the Somme River, and 496, when they were baptized en masse. Patrick, who speaks of himself as having evangelized heathen Ireland, is not to be confused with Palladius, sent by Pope Celestine I in 431 as “first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ.” Toward the end of his life, he retired to Saul, where he may have written his Confessio. It is said that an angel conveyed to him that he was to die at Saul, the site of his first church, despite his wishes to die within the ecclesiastical metropolis of Ireland. His last rites were administered by St. Tussach (also spelled Tassach or Tassac). Legends Before the end of the 7th century, Patrick had become a legendary figure, and the legends have continued to grow. One of these would have it that he drove the snakes of Ireland into the sea to their destruction. Patrick himself wrote that he raised people from the dead, and a 12th-century hagiography places this number at 33 men, some of whom are said to have been deceased for many years. He also reportedly prayed for the provision of food for hungry sailors traveling by land through a desolate area, and a herd of swine miraculously appeared. Another legend, probably the most popular, is that of the shamrock, which has him explain the concept of the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God, to an unbeliever by showing him the three-leaved plant with one stalk. Traditionally, Irishmen have worn shamrocks, the national flower of Ireland, in their lapels on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.

I Lay My Life in Your Hands

Down through church history, Christians have referred to the seven statements Jesus spoke from the cross as the “last words” of Christ. According to tradition, the very last of these last words, which Jesus cried out before giving himself over to death, were these: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). It was a powerful, heartbreaking, poetic moment. God prayed to his God by quoting God-breathed Scripture. The Word of God died with the word of God on his lips. And it was a word of poetry, the first half of Psalm 31:5. Most of those gathered on Golgotha that dark afternoon likely knew these words well. They were nearly a lullaby, a prayer Jewish parents taught their children to pray just before giving themselves over to sleep for the night. So, in Jesus’s cry, they likely heard a dying man’s last prayer of committal before his final “falling asleep.” And, of course, it was that. But that’s not all it was. And every Jewish religious leader present would have recognized this if he were paying attention. For these men would have known this psalm of David very well. All of it. They would have known this prayer was uttered by a persecuted king of the Jews, pleading with God for rescue from his enemies. They also would have known it as a declaration of faith-fueled confidence that God would, in fact, deliver him. For when Jesus had recited the first half of Psalm 31:5, they would have been able to finish the second half from memory: “You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.” What Was Jesus Thinking? The most maddening thing for the Jewish rulers had always been trying to get inside Jesus’s head. What was he thinking? Who was he making himself out to be (John 8:53)? “The Word of God died with the word of God on his lips.” Well, he had finally confirmed their suspicions at his trial: he believed himself to be Israel’s long-awaited Messiah (Matthew 26:63–64). It was true: he really did see himself as “the son of David” (Matthew 22:41–45). Now here he was, brutalized beyond recognition, quoting David with his last breath — a quote that, in context, seemed to make no sense in this moment: You are my rock and my fortress; and for your name’s sake you lead me and guide me; you take me out of the net they have hidden for me, for you are my refuge. Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God. (Psalm 31:3–5) What had Jesus been thinking? This should have been a moment of utter despair for him. David had prayed, “Let me never be put to shame” (Psalm 31:1), but there Jesus was, covered in nothing but shame. David had prayed, “In your righteousness deliver me!” (Psalm 31:1) But Jesus was dying a brutal death. In what possible way could he have believed at that moment that God was his refuge? David proved to be the Lord’s anointed because God had delivered him “out of the net” of death. David committed his spirit into God’s hand, and God had been faithful to him by redeeming him. But this so-called “son of David” received no such deliverance, no such redemption. King Who Became a Reproach Yet, as they looked at that wasted body hanging on the cross, with a sign posted above it that read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (Matthew 27:37), and pondered his final words, might some of them have perceived possible foreshadows of messianic suffering in this song of David? Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away. Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors, and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. (Psalm 31:9–11) This psalm recorded a moment when David, the most beloved king of the Jews in Israel’s history, had become a reproach. He had been accused, blamed, censured, charged. He had become an “object of dread” to all who knew him; people had wanted nothing to do with him. He had “been forgotten like one who is dead”; he had “become like a broken vessel” (Psalm 31:12). Had this at all been in Jesus’s mind as he uttered his last prayer? David, of course, hadn’t died. God delivered him and honored him. Surely he would do the same, and more, for the Messiah! After Death, Life Yet, there were those haunting words of the prophet Isaiah: “We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4–5). Pierced. Crushed. Indeed, It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. (Isaiah 53:10) It would have been unnerving to recall that Isaiah’s “suffering servant” is first “slaughtered” like a sacrificial lamb (Isaiah 53:7) and then afterward “prolong[s] his days.” After death, life. Not only that, but God himself commends and promises to glorify him for his sacrifice: “Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted” (Isaiah 52:13). Had Jesus really believed, even as his life drained away, that he was the King of the Jews bearing reproach, the Suffering Servant? Was this woven into the fabric of his final cry? ‘My Times Are in Your Hand’ This self-understanding would make sense of Jesus’s physically agonizing yet spiritually peaceful resignation to the will of God as he died. Even more, it also would fit with his previous foretelling of his death and resurrection — something these leaders were quite cognizant of at that moment (Matthew 27:62–64). All this again aligned with the childlike faith and hope David had expressed in Psalm 31: I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors! Make your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love! Oh, how abundant is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you, in the sight of the children of mankind! (Psalm 31:14–16, 19) If any of the Jewish leaders (and others) had been paying careful attention to where Jesus’s words were drawn from, they would have heard more than a desperate man’s prayer before falling into deathly sleep. They also would have heard a faithful man’s expression of trust that his God held all his times in his hands, including that most terrible of times, and that his God had stored up abundant goodness for him, despite how circumstances appeared in the moment. Let Your Heart Take Courage I can only speculate what may have passed through the minds of the Jewish leaders as they heard the very last of Jesus’s last words. But I have no doubt that the words, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” were pregnant with meaning from the entire psalm when the Word cried them out. “God can be acting most faithfully in the very moments when it appears he’s not being faithful at all.” Which makes Jesus’s quotation of half of Psalm 31:5 the most profound and powerful commentary on this psalm ever made. We now read it through the lens of the crucified and risen Christ. And one crucial dimension we must not miss is this: at that moment of his death, no one but Jesus perceived the faithfulness of God at work. He shows us that God can be acting most faithfully in the very moments when it appears he’s not being faithful at all. We all experience such moments when we must, like Jesus, sit in the first half of Psalm 31:5 (“Into your hand I commit my spirit”). As we sit, we can lean into the faithfulness of God to keep his word, trusting that he who holds all our times will bring to pass the second half of the verse when the time is right (“You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God”). We can also, with David, sing the psalm all the way to the end: Love the Lord, all you his saints! The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord! (Psalm 31:23–24) Article by Jon Bloom