There’s one thing that I know I need more of: physical exercise. I regularly attend an exercise class, usually three times a week. And have taken up swimming ½ to ¾ mile before the class. It’s hard to keep the body in shape. (I should say, “in a healthy shape.” After all, round is a shape.) Paul acknowledged the importance of physical exercise in his first letter to Timothy: “For physical training is of some value.”1
Paul adds that “godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”2 Our spiritual well-being is much more important than our physical well-being. (Although, the two are very closely linked and neglect of either one will have an effect on the other.) As I observe my own life and talk to others about their spiritual well-being, it appears to me that the physical aspect gets a lot more attention than the spiritual.
One thing that has been said of getting in healthy physical shape also applies to getting into healthy spiritual shape. “No pain, no gain.” In terms of increasing our spiritual health there will be times of discomfort that we will have to go through to become spiritually healthy.
Sometimes people want to take the easy way out. A person will want to hear or study only what makes them comfortable. If a spiritual practice makes someone uncomfortable or if something the scripture says leaves one ill at ease, then those things are avoided. The reality is that growing spiritually will result in being uncomfortable with ourselves and who we have been in the past.
Growing spiritually and remaining comfortable are incompatible. If you want to always be comfortable with your spiritual life, you will never mature into the person God intends for you to be. You will have to challenge what you have always held to be true and see if it is really God speaking or something that comes from your own need to be comfortable.
In study of the scripture there is a tendency to study it only for the sake of being sure one believes the right thing. What is sometimes overlooked is the need to take action on what the scripture says. Without action on what the scripture says, nothing changes. James wrote, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”3
Ross T Lucas 