Faith & Works at 24-Hour Fitness
After promising myself and those I love that I would return to healthful ways after the holidays, I made my first pilgrimage back to the sweatshop known as 24-Hour Fitness.
Why was I not surprised to swiftly see so many others there in the throes of New Year’s resolutions. Rows of eliptical and treadmill machines, stairclimbers and upright bicycles, all taken by puffy, perspiring pilgrims, grimly gritting their way to better health. This is a commitment they’ve made and they’ll keep it, all the way through the end of the month.
But, come February, the parking lot won’t be so full; the machines will fall increasingly empty. The resolutions which seemed so firm and important in January will have succombed to the expedience of other priorities. For many, the inertia of inactivity creates too strong of a pull to merit regular exercise.
I’ve been on this pendulum for several years, beginning when my wife and I decided that a membership in a fitness club would help motivate us towards better health. It actually has. Regular, strenuous, cardiovascular activity kicks those endorphins into play and I feel better, mentally, physically and spiritually.
But it has not ceased to be a constant choice. Just like spiritual devotions, physical exercise, at least for some of us, is a choice we must constantly face to conquer the inertia of inactivity. The faith that such activity will reap positive results won’t do any good unless the choice is made to begin and to continue.
The guy at the fitness center told me that muscles weigh more than fat. So it’s an interesting balance: By exercising, we burn fat, but develop muscle. Lean muscle weight is better than passive fat weight. Yet, fat doesn’t get sore … muscles do! So amidst the soreness, I need to continue the push, believing that works, coupled with faith will reap the desire end.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to February and March, when, for some, the good intentions crumble, opening up more free exercise machines for me. But I pray that my choice will still be consistent to follow what by faith I know to be best.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Earlier when I read this comment, I passed it over and went on. However, I believe that if I overlooked the kernnal of importance here, others have too, since no one has commented. Hopefully I’ll be able to unpack it so it will be more clear.
An abreviated summary of the comment might be rendered as:
1. New Years Eve there are alot of resolutions made.
2. Starting New Years day, we start breaking them with great alacrity.
3. This is an action that we tend to repeat, not just in the yearly cycle, but many times in between.
Is that a reasonably accurate summary? After looking at this, there are really several points that could be made.
1. Habits are formed by repeating an action or thought pattern over and over again. When I was young, God gave me a enviable mind. Little did I realize the treasure I had until I ruined it. Looking around, I find that I am far from the “lone ranger” on this one.
However, what is important to this discussion is the WAY I ruined my mental abilities. I attended a small country SDA church school. Other then an almost complete, for that day, compliment of Ellen White’s books, there was about an equal number of other books. Probably a hundred or so books in all. Before I graduated from the 8th grade I had read them all as well as the Bible a couple of times. At this point I started loosing interest in reading because any of the books I had access to, I had read. So,when I just got started reading, I could almost always lay the book down and tell the rest of what was in the book.
Well, then one day I found what to me was better then a gold mine. I found the public library. I thought I had “died and gone to heaven” over the amount of books available to read. Typically, I would go in on Monday or Friday and check out 5, 6 or 7 books and return them all read on the following Monday or Friday. I would then check out another like amount. At first, this was OK, that is until I discovered the stacks where books on fiction, murder mysteries, westerns etc. were kept.
Oh, yes, I knew that they were just made up stories to excite and entertain, but they were interesting. So, I would read and then try to forget. But, what happened shocked me. I was starting to find my school work coming harder. I started having difficulty memorizing and remembering and not from old age either. What I had done was trained my mind to forget. It worked real well, too. My reading dropped off for I had to spend almost all of my time getting even lower grades in my school work. Where before a quick reading of the information would help me get a reasonably good grade, now I had to carefully study at least twice as long to even get a passing grade, not the grades I had been use to.
Several years went by and I struggled to get decent grades. Then I read that there is nothing better calculated to strengthen the mind like a reading of God’s word. I desperatly needed some help there, so I set all other reading aside, even my car magazines etc., and only read the Bible, then later the writings of Ellen White. While I never regained what I had lost, I was able to get much of it back. This is the power of habits.
The same thing happens when we get into the cycle of making resolutions with less then the best intentions of keeping them, we train ourselves to take these resolutions and promises to ourselves, then promises to others, more and more lightly.
2. Beside, the effort to make ourselves good is not unlike the fiction books I was reading. God never asked us to make ourselves good. In fact when Israel made that proposal, God said that it wouldn’t work. See Deut.5. In contrast God offered to do for us what we can not do for ourselves. So, one can best understand the Old and New Covenant (arrangement) in this way.
Old Covenant = “All that the Lord has said, we will do.” See Exous 19:8.
New Covenant = “All that the Lord has said, He will do.” See Hebrews 8.
The New Covenant is the heart of the gospel which is: “God will do for us what we can not do for ourselves.” That is the New Covenant arrangement.
3. When we get into the “forgetting habit,” as I did and the “breaking promises habit” as happens with New Years Resolutions, we in essence undermine our Christian experience. Our promises to serve God come under the same category and as a result, we find that we break them too with alarming alacrity. See Steps to Christ, page 47. The ease with which we slip back into our life of sin alarms us. There are several things that happen then.
A. We seek the methods of humans to try and reach the goal of being a Christian, we are doomed to failure. Only the methods found in God’s word will bring success.
B. Finding that those human methods do not work, we then rationalize regarding the standard, concluding that it is too high and no human can reach it, so we lower it. The lower standard is much easier to reach, so we decieve ourselves in thinking we have resolved the problem. And often will then go out and “share our faith,” and lead others in the same wrong path we have taken.
C. When the realization sinks in that things still are not working right, discouragement takes over and we give up trying to be a Christian. So, we just float along with the crowd of others who have come to the same conclusion. Taking the name of Christian in vain. Having a form of godliness, but no power.
D. Then any and every human theory and suggestion by which we can be what we feel we should be is glummed onto. As each one fails we sink back further into the cycle that brings even greater discouragement and Satan has us right where he wants us.
THE SOLUTION
Jesus wistfully commented one time: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith in the earth?” Here is where it is well to check word meanings. The other day on TV a little girl asked her mother what a person’s soul was. The mother incorrectly responded that it was the same as a person’s spirit. With a sigh of relief, the little girl cheerfully responded: “I always wondered what God wanted with the soul of my shoe for.” We laugh, but there are far more dangerous misconceptions then that going around.
For example, the term “spirit” can mean several things, the most popular three are:
Spirit = intelligence.
Spirit = Wind or breath.
Spirit = an unseen or airy intelligence, i.e. a ghost.
For those who want to check this out, see Aarndt and Gingrich on pneuma.
So too with the word “faith.” It too is a word that is sadly misunderstood. The same Greek word, pisteo, can be translated as either: Faith, Trust or Belief. In today’s mindset, probably the word Trust is the best way to translate it in most situations. So, when Jesus wondered if He would find “faith” in the earth when He returned, He was wondering if anyone would be trusting Him at the end of time. Not an unreasonable concern.
So, the bottom line is this. Be careful what we train our selves to do. James addressed this in the first chapter of his letter to the church. See verses 2-4. We are to rejoice when our trust in God (faith) is tested (put to the test to see how good it is). For as our trust in God is tested and we respond by choosing to do things in the manner He asks us to do things. In this way we develope the habit of trusting God’s way to be the best way. The result of developing that habit is that God considers us to be “perfect, complete and lacking in nothing.”
I don’t know about you, but that is the way I want heaven to see me.
Maranatha
Ray Phillips