How do you keep fit?

I heard the other day that someone from our church spent an hour on the living-room floor recovering because he had worked too hard in the gym!

As I’ve reflected on how to keep fit this is what I have discovered – – calorie counting and exercise are important but the road to health starts a lot deeper. Real health begins in the soul, and if you want to be fit for life you have to begin by building your spiritual muscles. To do that we must first understand that there are three levels of living and that everyone chooses at which level they will live. What are these three levels of living? That´s what I´m going to be sharing in my next few blogs, so keep your eyes open…

Level 1. At the lowest end of the scale is a life that is shaped by everything and anything.

The apostle Paul in the New Testament in 1 Timothy 4:7a writes: “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales …”
You know as well as I do that you can’t build a healthy body by eating junk-food. If you want to be physically healthy there are certain foods that you just have to refuse – there are certain things that you just should never allow your body to take in.

Just like an athlete can’t build a healthy body by eating anything and everything in sight, you can’t build spiritual muscle if your life is being shaped by everything and anything.

If you want to grow faster as a Christian and if you want to accomplish more for God, then you have to reject lies; you have to say good-bye to fairy-tales; You have to decide to ditch unhealthy thinking.

I’m not saying you have to check your brain at the door. But we do need to be very discerning about who we listen to and what we take on board as our life principles.

It’s important for us to know the lies of the devil – but it’s quite another thing to allow those lies to influence us.

No-one can keep fit unless they have their eyes on what they take into their body. The same is true for us spiritually. We’ve got to monitor what we take into our mind and perhaps more importantly, what we take into our heart.

You will grow if you are spiritually healthy. You will overcome more if you have spiritual muscle. And you will accomplish great things for God if you are spiritually strong and healthy.

Being spiritually healthy – whether as a church or as an individual – is not about adjusting God to fit in with our lives, it’s about you and me adjusting our lives to fit in with God however uncomfortable that may be.

If you want to grow faster and accomplish more for God, if you want to keep fit for life, then you have to build some spiritual muscle and you’re just not going to do that if your first level of living is all about allowing in everything and anything. That´s just an undisciplined life.

So this week I encourage us all to do what Paul encourages us to do in 1 Timothy 4:16: Watch your life and keep fit!

Have a great one!

/Mark