A few weeks ago I started a new preaching series at our church called "Why Me, Lord? A Journey through the Book of Job." We're only 3 sermons in, and already I'm finding it one of the most challenging, and most edifying series I've done in a long time. In hopes it will challenge and/or edify others, I thought I'd post the messages here on my blog as we go. Here's sermon number one: "Not for Nothing..."
Going to the Gym with God (Part 4): Holding our Health in Trust
Translation: physical exercise can reduce the negative effects of aging on the brain, helping us to maintain our minds, our memories, and our moods well into old age. Among other things, the researchers found that
aerobic fitness has also been associated with hippocampal volume in both children and older adults. For example, in one study with 165 older adults without dementia, greater aerobic fitness levels were associated with larger hippocampal volumes even after controlling for potentially confounding factors including age, sex, and years of education. Furthermore, hippocampal volume mediated fitness-related performance on a spatial memory task. These results … suggest that aerobic exercise might be an effective method for enhancing or reversing hippocampal volume in late adulthood.
Loads of other scientific studies that have found a similar connection between physical fitness and healthy brain function. The positive effects of regular physical exercise on our grey matter include: “improvements in certain cognitive functions, beneficial forms of neuroplasticity, … increased neuron growth, increased neurological activity, … improved stress coping, enhanced cognitive control of behavior, improved declarative, spatial, and working memory…”*
The list goes on. It turns out there is a deeply-wired link between our body’s fitness and our brain’s health, and taking care of the first seems naturally to improve the later.
I find this theologically fascinating.
On the one hand, it bears out everything I said in previous posts about the indivisible link between the mind, body, and spirit that we find in the Bible’s description of the human being. On the other hand, though, and more to the point for today, it suggests a crucial theme for building a “theology of exercise.”
I’m thinking here about the biblical concept of “stewardship.” It’s an idea woven into the creation story right at from the start, and it shows up again and again whenever the Bible wants to speak about the way human beings are related tot he rest of creation.
We were created to be good stewards of God’s creation.
In Genesis 1:28, it says it like this:
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
It’s a foundational text for all sorts of things that will come later in Scripture. It explains why the environment presently is groaning in agony (because humans have fallen short in this calling; see Genesis 3). It explains why Christ’s work on the cross brings about New Creation (because it restores human beings back to this calling; see Romans 8). It explains why God rightly pronounces judgement on those who “destroy the earth” at the end of all things (because the earth is not ours to destroy, it is Gods, and we are simply stewards of it; see Revelation 11).
Many biblical scholars have taken pains to show that the idea in Genesis 1 of “subduing” the creation, and “ruling” the animals, and so on, is meant to communicate not a self-interested, tyrannical reign over the earth (as humans often have exercised it), but rather a loving, brotherly care of the creation, on God’s behalf. I don’t have time to review all the arguments, but suffice it to say that this is certainly how I read Genesis 1.
As we acknowledge our role as God’s stewards, suddenly all that talk about exercise and brain function a second ago comes into sharp focus. In his book The Stewart Leader, Scott Rodin argues that the theme of “stewardship” applies not just in our relationship to the rest of the creation, but to all aspects of human life. If it’s true that all we have and all we are comes from God, then we are called, actually, to hold everything in life as though we were simply stewards of it.
This is true of our money, of course. This is the classic Christian perspective on money. All our money is really God’s and everything we do with it ought to be done as his stewards. But it doesn’t stop with money. It’s also true of our talents. Whatever we “have” that we “do well,” is not really our talent in the end; rather it’s God’s “talent,” and it’s given us simply to use for his glory.
It’s true of our relationships. It’s true of our resources. It’s true of our time. None of these things are really “ours”; they’re God’s. We are simply holding them in trust and we'll give an account to their true owner, for how we used them and what we did with them.
Maybe you can see where all of this is pointing us, as we try to build a “theology of exercise.” Because we’re not just stewards of our money, possessions, resources, talents, time, and relationships.
We are stewards, too, of our very bodies. This bit of flesh and bone that I "possess” is not really “mine” after all. It is God’s. I am simply a steward of it; and as God’s steward, I find I am called to “use my body,” and “care for my body,” and “maintain the health of my body,” as though it were actually the Lord's body.
This isn’t just a theological leap in the dark here, from Genesis 1 to stewarding our health; this is specifically what the Scriptures say. In 1 Corinthians 6:20, Paul is reviewing the reasons why Christians ought to flee any kind of sexual activity outside the bounds of the Creator’s intent for us, and he makes this mysterious claim. It’s because (among other things), “you are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
More on that in a later post. Today just notice that Paul insists that even our bodies are the rightful property of God, and as such we ought to “use” our bodies as though we were holding them in trust.
This brings me, at last to the point of this post. When I take care of my physical health through exercise, I am being a good steward. Not because God necessarily cares about our physiques per se; again, we all have different body types and different constitutions, and the diversity of the human form is one of God’s great gifts to us. It’s not that God only has one ideal physical form and it’s up to us to get into “that shape” specifically.
Far from it.
Rather it’s because when I exercise, I benefit not only my physical health, but also my mental health, my emotional health, my spiritual health. This is true even if my exercise of choice is a simple ten-minute stroll at the end of the day (see my previous post for that). It is still good exercise with all kinds of health benefits. And the plain fact is that I will be able to serve God more fully, more effectively, and for longer than I could do if I weren’t stewarding my physical health in this way.
And as we do, whether it's though a leisurely stroll or a 10k run, a simple stretching routine or a P90X workout regime—whatever your stewardship method of choice—we'll may discover the joy of taking care of a body that belongs to the Lord.
The Power of Love, a devotional thought on Psalm 62
The other day I was reading Psalm 62 in my devotional time, and a line at the end really stuck with me. The whole Psalm is this effusive ode to the salvation that is found in the Lord—how our souls find rest in him (v.1), how our hope comes from him (v.5), how our honor depends on him (v.7), and how he alone is our refuge (v.8).
It’s edifying and inspiring throughout, but in the last two lines we come to the heart of the matter, the reason why we rest so secure in God, and the reason why salvation is truly found in him alone: it is because in him alone, absolute power is coupled with perfect love (v.11b-12a).
The verse is actually worded in an ear-catching way. “One thing God has spoken,” it says, and “two things I have heard.” Well: which is it (we might be tempted to wonder), one thing or two? It’s a bit of a riddle, I think: God has spoken “one thing” but we’ve heard “two…”
Reading on, though, the riddle is quite easily solved. It is only one thing that God has spoken, one single truth he’s revealed about himself, but it’s a truth with two equally balanced halves that together make a whole: Power belongs to God (11.b), and with the Lord is unfailing love.”
These two aspects of the Lord’s character, it seems, must be held together for us to fully grasp the truth about who he is.
He is all-powerful and all-loving at the same time. Miss one or the other of these truths, and we haven’t heard the truth about him.
Suddenly, the reason we depend on him and rest secure in him and all the rest of the things the Psalm said in verses 1-10 come into sharp focus. It’s because he is not only able to accomplish his purposes perfectly (power belongs to him), but his purposes are always loving (with him is unfailing love). And vice versa: not only is he gracious and compassionate, but that love is coupled with the power to realize his compassion towards us.
This becomes especially profound if we compare the Lord, in this, to the way humans usually hold love and power. Some human beings are powerful, but obviously, when that power is not coupled with faithful love, it becomes monstrous in them. Some humans are loving, but when that love has no power, it devolves into weak sentimentalism. There is something about love that it needs actually to do what it says in order to be loving, and there is something about power that it needs to flow from a place of self-giving for it to be truly powerful.
Thanks be to God, then, that in him we find these two things bound together as one; and because of this we can do exactly what Psalm 62 invites us to do: to trust in him at all times and pour our hearts out to him, knowing that as we do we will be enfolded in an embrace of almighty love and ever-loving power.
Going to the Gym with God (Part 3): On Walking with the Lord
In the three years of his public ministry Jesus visited Jerusalem at least four times, and perhaps as many as seven. Assuming these were round trips, this could mean that he logged as many as 984 kilometres on the road, by foot, in three years. And that’s just counting his trips between Galilee and Jerusalem. He also travelled from town to town in the region of Galilee while he was ministering there.
He did a lot of walking, is my point.
Living as we do in the automobile age, we tend to forget the fact that every time one of the Gospel writers tells us Jesus journeyed up to Jerusalem, it would have taken him 3 straight days of walking to get there. And from what we can tell, he did this as naturally as you or I might nip on down to the corner store for a carton of milk on a Saturday morning.
During the covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been doing far more walking than I’ve ever done before. This is partly because there’s not much else to do, but mostly because, what with all the gyms being closed, I’ve needed to find some other way to get exercise and stay healthy.
Walking, incidentally, is a great way to do both these things. Even at a mere 30 minutes a day, it will boost your immune system, increase your levels of vitamin D, reduce your risk of cancer, alleviate symptoms of depression, lower your blood pressure, tone your abdominal muscles, strengthen your back, and improve your blood circulation. The list of walking's health benefits, in fact, is so long that you’d almost think our bodies were especially designed to do it.
If Jesus’s ministry is anything to judge by, it looks like they were.
This is certainly what I’ve been learning as I’ve increased the amount of time I spend on foot these days, anyways. Sometimes I can almost sense the joy in my muscles as I put them to this particular use, as if they were each individually happy to be doing the thing they were so clearly made to do.
And for all I know, they are. They say that heavy muscle work (like walking) releases serotonin into your system, a feel-good hormone that boosts your mood and reduces your stress levels. Not only this, but I’ve also noticed I’m far more aware of my neighbors than I ever was when I just zipped past them in the car; I’m more in tune to the trees and birds and bunnies I share the neighborhood with (we have a lot of wild bunnies in my neighborhood); and I’m generally more at peace inside whenever I get back from a long walk. Add to this the fact that it’s about as cheap a workout as you can possibly get, and it may be that walking is, in fact, the perfect exercise.
It certainly was in Jesus’s day; and this brings me at last to the real point of this post. Jesus couldn’t have covered as much ground as he did in the three short years he had to proclaim the Kingdom of God, unless he was in relatively good physical condition. And the flipside of that point is equally true, that all the walking he did would have had to have kept him that way.
Centuries of seeing Jesus depicted as a “Swedish Supermodel” has maybe influenced the way we think of him so strongly that it’s hard to imagine him like this, but the Gospels suggest that whatever else was true of him, Christ must have had calloused feet and strong sinews.
He was physically fit, I mean. He would have had to have been to do the ministry God had called him to do. I don’t mean, in making this point, that there is something intrinsically Christ-like in physical exercise, or that if you’re not physically fit then you’re not Christ-like. Far from it. As I’ve said in previous posts, everyone has different temperaments and constitutions, with different body types and different movement needs.
But that’s why it’s so wonderful that Jesus’s exercise of choice, it seems, was walking. Except for those of us in very specific situations that make walking impossible (and the Gospel reminds us, too, that Christ had boundless compassion for people in such circumstances), we can all do it. Regardless our present level of fitness, regardless our athleticism, regardless our body-type, a 10-minute stroll out of doors is in reach of us all.
We could start today. If we did, who knows, but we might find ourselves getting in shape for the ministry God has called us to do; and we may just discover that it was no accident the Bible chose the metaphor of “walking,” in particular, to describe a life lived fully for Jesus, when it told us that we should “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”
On Getting Something Good from God, a Devotional Thought on Psalm 67
The other day I was praying through Psalm 67 and it struck me how closely this psalm ties together the blessing of God and the mission of God. It starts with verse 1, where the psalmist prays that God would “be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us,” a prayer that is redolent with echoes of Numbers 6, and the traditional priestly blessing that Aaron was to pronounce over the people. Here we have the same invocation of blessing, that God would provide for and prosper his people. The very next verse, however, gives the motive for this prayer, and the purpose behind God’s blessing: “so that [his] ways may be known on earth and salvation among all the nations.”
This is not a connection that usually gets emphasized now adays when we talk about the blessing of God. At least, I don’t often hear these two things brought together as tightly as Psalm 67 brings them together. Usually we think about God’s blessing—and hear I mean his material blessing, because as we’ll see, that’s what’s in view in this Psalm—in terms of our own personal security, prosperity, and needs. God gives us the things we need, we think, so that we’ll have the things we need.
Certainly our Heavenly Father loves us more dearly than even the most perfect earthly father ever loved his children, so no doubt there’s something to this simple one-to-one correlation. Jesus himself said as much in Luke 11:13.
But Psalm 67 points to a deeper, and more profound purpose underlying the blessing of God: when he blesses us, it is so that his salvation will be known to all the nations of the earth (v.2). If and when God provides for his people, it’s because he wants them to content for their witness—specific, concrete, glorious acts of God they can point to as they bear witness to him among the nations. This is underlined by the next three verses (3-5), where the focus is completely on the psalmist’s desire to see “all the peoples praise God.” He’s on a mission, this Psalmist is, and the blessing of God is simply fodder for the canon of that mission, fuel for the engine, as it were.
Verses 6 and 7 make the connection clear again, just in case it was missed the first time. Verse 6 describes the results of God’s blessing—the land is yielding its bounty, the crops coming in and the grain bins full—because God has blessed his people. And then verse 7 reminds us one final time why He’s done so: so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.
The application here, I hope, is obvious. When we pray for God’s blessing in our lives—and we can think here of the specific blessings we’ve been praying for lately—if we want to pray with hearts in tune with Psalm 67, we should be praying not simply that God will give us what we need just so that we have what we need; rather we should be praying that God would give us what we need, so we have more, and richer opportunities to bear witness to him among our neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, and friends.
And when he answers those prayers, if we want to receive his blessing with hearts in tune to Psalm 67, we should receive it with hearts ready and willing to make known among the nations what he has done.
Going to the Gym with God (Part 2): On Being Some Body
As a child growing up they used to tease me by calling me “fat.” Today I weigh all of 175 lbs, so this might strike some you as odd, but it’s true. Apparently I was chubbier than your average baby and it took a bit longer than usual for me to lose all that padding. Add to that the fact that, as I mentioned in a previous post, I was never especially interested in sports as a kid, and suffice it to say I had a "pudgy" reputation that dogged me well into my middle school years.
In every photo of my childhood I've ever come across, it's clear I was actually just an average kid with a normal BMI. Even so, back in those days everyone knew that if you wanted to set Dale off, all you had to do was call him fat.
It’s interesting for me to realize how the slings and arrows of early childhood stick deep and linger long. As I young adult, I never really felt at peace in my own body. I always had this lurking fear that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about it. As a result, I never felt at home in the gym, at the ball diamond, on the basketball court.
It was probably both a blessing and a burden, this distorted self-image. Looking back, I expect one of the reasons I’ve learned to enjoy sports, and movement, and exercise the way I do today, is precisely because I was haunted by this desire to prove all the name-calling ghosts in my past that they were wrong. Whatever may have been true of my body type as a baby (I probably thought subconsciously) that didn’t have to be true of me now.
Of course, this is a blog post about the theology of exercise, not a therapy session. The only reason I’m sharing all this here is that, if we’re going to talk about the theology of exercise we’re going to have to talk at some point about the bodies we exercise with. And truth be told, I grew up with a sort of love-hate relationship with my body. I loved it, in so far as I fed it, took care of it, kept it from harm. But I hated it, to the extent that it never seemed to look or feel the way I thought it should.
I have a sense that I am not alone in this experience. We live in a world where idealized images of beautiful bodies are flung at us from every corner. From the click-bait on our newsfeed, to the magazine rack in the grocery store, from the posters in the shop windows down at the mall, to the billboards lining the freeway, we are bombarded with messages about what a body “should” look like, and continually asked to measure our own bodies against that ideal.
No wonder if we find it hard to be at ease in our bodies, what with the world screaming at us that they don’t measure up.
This is probably why struck me so profoundly the day I realized that I don’t have a body; I am a body.
That sentence may sound strange to some readers. Indeed, throughout this post I’ve described my body as a “thing” that was other than me. I said that I’ve never been at ease “in my body,” as though the body were just the casing for my “self,” and I described myself “taking care of my body,” as though it were something distinct from who I actually was. This is how we usually speak about the body. It’s a vessel that “contains us” in some way, but whatever else it is, it’s not “us.”
So imagine my surprise when, a number of years back while studying for my Masters of Divinity, I came across this line in a book by theologian Marianne Hicks, in which she argues that theologically, our embodiment is essential to our human nature.
“My physical reality is both the matrix and communicator of my psychic life,” she writes. “I do not have a body; I am one. I do not have a soul or psyche, I am one. ‘I’ come into being and live and grow in the process we call life, in the inextricable interconnection of matter and spirit.”
Hicks is touching here on a deeply biblical idea. When Genesis 2:6-7 describes the creation of human beings, it uses the Hebrew word nephesh: “the man became a living being (nephesh).” Genesis uses the same word to describe sea life (1:20), the great sea creatures (1:21), land animals (1:24), birds (1:30), and human beings. What all these things share in common is that they are all living bodies brought to life by the creator. Unfortunately, the closest Greek term we have to nephesh is psyche, which often translates as “soul,” and so nephesh is often misread as though it only referred to the “spiritual” aspect of human life. When read in context, however, it’s pretty clear that the word actually denotes both the living matter that is your body, and the spirit that animates it.
The point here is that, from a biblical perspective, we are not just “souls” contained “in a body.” Rather we are the very flesh and bone that stares back at us when we look in the mirror. We are more than just bodies, to be sure, but we whatever else we are, we are those bodies.
There is potential healing here, I think, for those of us who, like me, have struggled with a vague dis-ease about our bodies. A biblical understanding of the body assures us that the creator actually intended for us to be embodied like this. More than that, it reminds us that when we say “God loves you,” we mean he loves your stubby toes, too (if you happen to have stubby toes), and your gangly arms (if they happen to be gangly), your knobby knees (mine are particularly knobby), or whatever it is that makes your body so distinctly you.
Like it does for all our relationships, the love of God has life-giving power to heal even our relationship with our own bodies.
And in that healing, we can take our next step towards a robust theology of exercise, which is, after all, why I started this blog post in the first place. Because you don’t have a body, you are a body. And as bodies, all the movement and play, the stretching and lifting, the sweating and running and breathing hard—all the things our bodies do when we’re exercising well—these things remind us of this fundamental fact of our human nature. We are the bodies we use to do those things. In that remembrance we may start to discover (at least in part), what God had in mind when he made us of the dust of the earth in the first place and breathed into us the breath of life.
Giving Something Good to God, a devotional thought on Psalm 51
This morning I was reading Psalm 51 as part of my time with the Lord. It’s a very well-loved Psalm, and the central verse, “Create in me a pure heart O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” has found its way into songs and sermons alike.
Reading it this morning, however, I saw something towards the end that I’d never really thought about before. In verse 16, the Psalmist asserts that the Lord does not delight in sacrifice or take pleasure in burnt offerings. He’s referring to the system of animal sacrifice we find in the Old Testament Law—a system that the Lord himself instituted—and his point is not that the Lord rejects these offerings, only that they are meaningless unless there is a genuine heart transformation behind them. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” In other words, God’s not interested in phoney-baloney shows of empty religious devotion that have nothing to do with the real condition of our heart. He’d rather, actually, we didn’t sacrifice anything, and give him a repentant heart, than have us put a flashy gift on the altar while our hearts are still miles from him.
Well: so far, so good. But here’s the part I noticed anew this morning. Because in the very last verse of the psalm it calls on God to bless Zion and rebuild Jerusalem, and then, it says, if God does that, then (and presumably only then) “burnt offerings will delight Him and bulls will be offered on the altar.” It’s strange because verse 16 seemed to imply that God didn’t really want this kind of sacrifice, but then here, in verse 19, we see the Lord truly delighting in it again.
What’s changed, I wondered this morning, from verse 16 to verse 19? Well: the only change I can see is that in verse 18, the Lord acted decisively to bless and restore his people. He healed them, and only after doing so did he delight in their offerings. The reason that stood out to me is because it suggests our acceptable offering depends entirely on God to make it acceptable. Only if he moves in us, and among us, to restore us and heal us—only then could we ever offer any sacrifice to him that he would be pleased in—and when he does that, he actually enables us to make the pleasing sacrifice to him.
Anyone who has been following Jesus for a while will probably see where I’m going with this. Because if you’ve come to know Jesus, you will know how, before his Spirit came upon you and got to work on you, you didn’t really know how to offer anything pleasing to God, and how it’s only been as the Spirit of God has been restoring you that you’ve become able to make any kind of offering that does please him.
The whole Christian life, in other words, beginning to end, every sacrifice and offering and gift and act of service we ever make, if it’s going to be pleasing to God, it has to come from God first, and go back to God, through God. We are, in this sense, merely conduits of the life of God, giving back to him only what we’ve already received from him, and—thanks be to God—because it came from him in the first place, we can rest assured that as we give it back, it will truly be pleasing in his sight.
Going to the Gym with God (Part 1): An Introduction to the Theology of Exercise
All this is to say that signing up for a membership at the Y was about as unlikely a thing I could have imagined myself doing back in 2010. However, besides the fact that my kids needed the recreational activities it provided, I had just completed a 5-year intensive masters program in theology, which involved a lot of sedentary reading and writing, and I had just started an intense job as a new pastor at an up-and-coming church plant, which involved a lot of mental and emotional energy. Whether I realized it or not, I really needed the regular workout and low-key social interaction I got each week at the gym.
Some ten years later, I have come to see how important it is for me as a pastor, as a Christian, and as a growing disciple, to maintain a regular routine of weekly exercise. I try to start and end each weekday with a good half hour of physical exercise and try to fit in a 5 mile run on the weekend. If my schedule is disrupted and I happen to go more than a week or two without a good workout, it doesn’t take long before I start to feel it mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The YMCA has taught me, in other words, that for me there is a mysterious connection between getting physical exercise and staying spiritually healthy.
It may strike some readers as odd, connecting my growth as a Christian to a regular discipline of physical exercise the way I did just now. Certainly, in the pre-YMCA days, I would have found it an odd combination. Christianity is something that happens in the head and the heart, isn’t it? What does Gold’s Gym to do with Jerusalem?
I want to be careful in what I say here. There’s a danger I might be misunderstood as saying that unless you’re shredded like Arnie you’re not a good Christian; or that pumping iron somehow makes you a better one. If it sounds like I’m saying that, I’m not communicating well here at all. God in his wisdom gave us all unique body types, unique constitutions, and unique temperaments. Throughout this post, you can feel free to substitute whatever form of physical exercise works for your constitution and body type—whether it’s running a Tough Mudder race or taking the dog on a leisurely walk through the park.
When I say there’s a connection between getting regular exercise and growing as a Christian, I don’t really have any specific kind of exercise in mind. It could be tossing a soft ball with the kids; it could be tossing a 90-pound medicine ball at the gym. The point is just that there is something about physical movement and heavy muscle work that’s good for you, and the “good” it does you is spiritual as well as physical.
In saying this I don’t’ think I’m saying anything radical, or new, or unbiblical. There’s a verse I think about often when I’m exercising. In 1 Timothy 4:8, Paul is giving his young protégé Timothy some advice for being an effective pastor, and he says, “Train yourself to be godly, for physical training is of some value, but goodliness has value for all things.”
Paul’s point here, of course, is that godliness is the preeminent goal of the Christian life, and he uses physical training as an analogy for what it takes to grow in godliness (i.e. just like you have to work out to get buff, so too you have to work at it to get “buff” in holiness….). Because of this, it’s common to gloss over what Paul actually says about “physical training” here; or even to misread it, as though he is suggesting that physical exercise doesn’t matter, because godliness is the most important thing.
But that’s not, strictly speaking, what he says. Strictly speaking, he says that physical training is of some value. Presumably, he means that it has intrinsic value—it’s better to be in good shape physically than not to be—but it also has analogical value, in that it reminds us of the importance of godliness (which, unlike physical fitness, has value both for this life and the life to come).
That’s my quick Coles notes on the verse, anyways.
And if my reading holds water, then notice two things. A) 1 Timothy 4:8 affirms the value of physical exercise (though it places a clear limit on that value. It’s very possible to be a thriving, growing, holy Christian without being in physical shape); and B) the primary value physical exercise has is in helping us understand, on an analogical level, what it means to get ourselves into spiritual shape. In a mysterious way, physical exercise can serve as a “lived object lesson” in spiritual formation, helping us to grasp and to grow in the disciplines necessary for a thriving spiritual life.
I grew up in a “read-your-Bible-pray-every-day” evangelical tradition; so even as I write this, I have to admit that it all feels a bit strange. Does physical exercise really have something to do with spiritual formation?
Of course, there are branches of Christian tradition where there is nothing at all radical about connecting these two dots, where the link between physical training and spiritual growth is self evident. The YMCA itself was founded by a Christian, a guy named Sir George Williams, who believed, among other things, that developing a healthy body was an important part of the Christian life.
If you grew up in a faith tradition something like mine, however, where the connection between the physical and the spiritual were minimized—or if you grew up with no faith tradition, and never really considered the possibility that physical exercise might have something to do with your spirituality—I hope you will join me here at terra incognita over the next few weeks. We will be taking some time to develop a theology of physical exercise, so to speak, in a blog series that I’m calling, “Going to the Gym with God.”
This post is, after all, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the myriad connections between physical training and training in godliness, and my hope is that, when it’s all said and done, we’ll all find that next stroll through the park, or that next session of jazzercise, or that next game of golf—or whatever your exercise of choice—more spiritually edifying than we ever would have imagined.
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