Exercise daily in God – no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever. 1 Timothy 4:8 MSG
Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come. 1 Timothy 4:8 NLT
Have you ever done anything like this? You work hard and get in shape for vacation. You work out, eat right, and you’re proud of the results. So you go on vacation and have a wonderful time. Of course, you eat out and indulge in late night snacks. You’re active, but the workout schedule is not part of vacation. Then you get back home and you plan to start back again. But not today. There’s much to do and you need to get groceries, so you’ll get back on schedule next week. But then you have a birthday celebration with friends, and you push it back another day or two. Before you know it, the summer is over, and you suddenly realize that at the start of the summer you were in the best shape of your life. Now? Not so much. You are disappointed in how quickly you can go from fit to flabby.
Paul makes the comparison between physical fitness and spiritual fitness. Just as a person must train his physical body to be healthy, a Jesus follower must train daily to be strong in spiritual health. There’s no room for neglect. It’s amazing how quickly our souls can get out of shape.
Think about a football player. If he just goes to the game on Friday night and plays, is it reasonable to think he’ll make any impact on himself or the team? If he eats whatever he wants, sleeps whenever he wants, and never works out, he will never be in shape for a win. It would be ridiculous to expect greatness. If a crisis comes, your faith and strength may fail because you are weak, lazy, and are not building strength.
For you and me spiritually, we can’t expect to simply go about our daily lives doing exactly as we wish, even if maybe we spend an hour or even two hours on Sunday connecting with God. We rarely ever pray or read anything from the Bible to help us. We aren’t regularly serving and giving. But somehow, we expect God to work in and through us. We do no preparation at all and expect greatness. It won’t happen. Our salvation is a gift of grace, but becoming all God has planned for us to be requires our willing participation. Paul says our spiritual growth and transformation comes from discipline and benefits us more than anything right now and in the future.
- Take a look at your spiritual training effort. Are you getting flabby or fit?