Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Michael Jordan has “a gift” for basketball (even at forty years old), but Michael Jordan still practices every day. Placedo Domingo has the gift of song, but he does vocal exercises every morning before breakfast. Many are gifted (Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretsky, Michelle Quan, Barry Bonds) but they all still practice and stay fit. Because the competition is tough. If you step back, even an inch, you’ve lost the edge, and someone else has taken your place at the top. That’s all St. Paul is saying in this strange little paragraph he wrote to Corinth so many years ago. He knows the Corinthians are a sports-minded people. (Every year Corinth hosted the Greek world’s second-most prestigious games, exceeded only by those at Olympia.) Corinthians would identify immediately with runners, racing for a prize, or boxers “beating the air.”

Apparently, Paul had heard that, among the Christians at Corinth, there were some slackers, men and women who had been given the gift of salvation but were no longer working at it. Lazy in the spirit. Undisciplined in their faith and in their service, they had lost the edge. They were no longer spiritually fit. So he points them to their own athletes, runners in this case, who exercise remarkable self-control and run with such determination. (And, ironically, Paul points out, they strive so mightily for a mere perishable prize, a wreath of ivy or of laurel leaves, while we Christians race for an everlasting crown of glory. Yet we don’t show the same level of determination as they.) Moreover, he says, unlike in their race, there can be more than one winner when Christians run; we can all win the prize which is salvation in Jesus Christ. If we stay fit, spiritually. If we don’t get flabby in our faith.

Jesus used a different picture to teach the same “staying fit” lesson. He would warn his disciples to, “Stay awake, don’t fall asleep, and keep plenty of oil in your lamps, so you’ll have what you’ll need when the bridegroom arrives.
Paul inserts himself into his own word pictures. “I punish my body,” he says, “and enslave it (like those athletes with their training and their drills), so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.” In Philippians he’s in that foot-race again: “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” And, of course, in II Timothy, nearing the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” There’s a prize waiting for me, a crown of righteousness, which Jesus will award to me on that day. Both Paul and Jesus knew that trying to live in the Kingdom of God while also living in this world was very difficult, and required enormous effort, and discipline.
Spiritual fitness is still an issue. Our competition does not miss a trick. (And if you don’t think Christians are competing every day with pagans, and pagan values, just as they were in Paul’s day, look again. Read the newspapers.) We have to be in shape, and stay in shape – spiritually. America’s founding fathers said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” The price of faith is too, if we are to be active and influential Christians. If we are to make a difference. If our faith is going to be more than a Bible on the coffee table and some nice childhood memories.

So what’s the training program? What activities and exertions must we do participate in to stay spiritually fit? Certainly prayer is one such activity. If we’re assessing our own spiritual fitness, we might start by asking how regular and how meaningful is our praying. If he is really the vine, and we are really (only) the branches – helpless unless we are tied into him – we better learn to pray.
I find it harder to pray sometimes than others. There are days when praying is relatively easy, and then there are days when I need a mental crow bar to rip my mind away my own concerns and free me to center my attention on God. What gets our attention gets us, of course, and we often behave as if our attention is out of our control. But, in truth, we are able (sometimes with great effort) to direct our attention. The Bible says we should have “the mind of Christ.” That’s a tremendous challenge. How can we meet it with all these other concerns insisting on an audience, unless we can learn to attend to God. It’s helpful to me, when I am so helplessly distracted, to read the Bible as I pray – perhaps the Sermon on the Mount, or a favorite Psalm. Having something in front of me, to focus on, frees my mind to think of God. I also find that when I do manage to pray, at a time when I thought I could not, these are the prayers that are most helpful and satisfying to me. They got me out of the world’s trap.

Another spiritual exercise is service. When we serve others (especially the last, and the lost, and the least of this world) we not only help other people; we also build up our own faith. It works both ways: faith leads to service, service strengthens faith. For serving is a mark of the Kingdom of God. When one person helps another, especially when there is nothing to gain, the Kingdom of God is at hand. When Jesus’ people stop serving, stop looking for opportunities to serve, they’ve slipped off the cutting edge. Their faith grows dull. Find somewhere to serve. Even if you don’t feel like it, do it. It will build up the muscles of your faith.
Christian fellowship is another way to stay in shape. It, too, works both ways: faith brings us into fellowship, fellowship leads us to faith. The tie “that binds our hearts in Christian love” really is blest. I know that not all Christian people are easy to be with. There’s nothing wrong with choosing your closest Christian friends from those with whom you are comfortable. (Although I must say that some of my greatest growth in Christ came when I learned that other people, other kinds of people – even though they were not like me – shared my passion for Jesus, and we could learn from each other.) One sign that faith is getting flabby is in pulling away from the Christian community. To keep the flame alive, we need each other.
Finally, another way to stay spiritually fit, is to study the faith, especially the Bible. Invariably in today’s world, the most vocal critics of Christianity know nothing about it. They set up a straw man and shoot it down. They portray our religion is a moral code, a preachment of right verses wrong, and, then, if they spot a Christian who is not living right, they conclude that the whole enterprise is bankrupt. But morality’s only part of our faith, and it is the last part: how we live after we see, in Christ, how much God loves us. True Christianity recognizes human sinfulness every step of the way. We know what it means, “For as in Adam all die.” (The Adam in all of us still leads us to sin and death.) But we also know what it means, “Even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” To think of Christianity as only a moral code is just plain wrong.

A very well-educated young woman told me recently that Jesus was a simple, Jewish teacher (and, she said, that’s the way he is portrayed in the Gospels), and, she went on, it was Paul who distorted the picture by attributing divinity to Jesus. As educated as she was (and she came from a Christian family – probably would have considered herself a Christian), she was totally oblivious to the fact that the letters of Paul are the earliest writings in the New Testament. They predate the Gospels by twenty or thirty years, and (on that basis alone) if we must make a choice who to believe about Jesus, Paul or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it would have to be Paul. Besides, the Gospels don’t present Jesus as a simple, Jewish teacher. They take great pains to show him as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. We don’t know our own religion. We need to study, and keep studying, to keep our faith in shape.

In the Book of Revelation, God criticizes the church at Laodicea for being “lukewarm,” “neither cold nor hot.” Not that its people had lost their faith, exactly, but that they had grown complacent in it, had become spiritual couch potatoes. Probably they were doing the same things we do: budgeting for no growth, planning the same events this year that were held last year, holding down and holding back. It’s easy for churches and people to fall into that mode. We must stay in shape and run the race with vigor, every time. The crown is not awarded at the beginning but at the end.