Personal Training
Exercise. Its hard enough being motivated to finish a uni assignment, let alone dragging yourself out of bed to go for a run. If I were a celebrity it’d be fine, because I’d have a personal trainer, a personal chef and a personal assistant. Or maybe if I could afford membership to a gym, that would help; surely seeing all those other fit people would get me into gear. Or perhaps if I were really good at a sport, like the next Stephanie Rice or something, maybe then exercising would be a breeze.
What I really wish is that getting fit was easy. But it’s not. Training and working out are hard. And you can’t cut corners. There’s no point doing a thousand push-ups if you aren’t doing them properly. It’s meant to hurt.
It’s not just physical exercise that I’m lazy about. I wish that the spiritual training Paul talks about would be a walk in the park. Increasingly I’m realising that there’s a good reason for Paul’s athletic analogy, when he says, “I beat my body and make it my slave.” (1 Corinthians 9:27)
In fact the more I look through the New Testament the more I find references to hard work: straining, labouring, toiling, struggling, suffering, training.
We are instructed to “be prepared, in season and out of season”, to “not become weary”, to “make every effort”, to “stand your ground” and “press on”, to be “a workman” and to “be diligent”.
The Bible assures us that the race we are running as followers of Jesus is not an easy one. This truth confronted me quite recently, as I realised that I had stopped running the race, or at least decreased my pace rapidly.
I like to think of it as A Series of Unfortunate Events. On a trip to Perth to visit my brother, I neglected to pack my Bible (somehow Cloudstreet made the cut). A number of Uni assignments. Getting sick. All of a sudden it was weeks since I’d had a decent session of reading the Bible and praying. And all of a sudden, the thought of doing either of those things sounded like such a drag.
During my spiritually stagnant state I was home for the weekend. Inwardly I groaned as Dad suggested we have a “family devotion” – I felt like I was 15 years old again, wishing my Dad would let me do my own thing.
But what he said reminded me that as a Christian, I needed to actively put off the old self, and put on the new. Avoiding this is about as stupid as doing a thousand push-up with your back arching like the Harbour Bridge.
There will always be reasons we can find to not work hard at spending time in God’s word, to pray and train ourselves in godliness. But God’s mercy is all the more reason to keep running the race as hard as we can.
This is my last week at Uni. Ever. It’s been a whirlwind of essays, assignments, Lunchtime Bible Talks, meetings, Bible studies, MYCs, NTEs, and coffees from Nectar (RIP Nectar). I’ve found that it can be really easy doing all these things, but the hard thing is living your life as a Christian everyday. It is hard to be godly in the way you go to lectures and tutorials. It is hard to speak the words of God to your friends when you’re hanging out with them. It is hard to keep Bible reading as a vital part of your life.
That’s why Paul calls us to beat our bodies and make them our slaves.
So, as I learnt to say in that ill-fated SPAN151 class, “Adios Amigos!”
Author Unknown
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