Spiritual exercise

Every time I turn on the TV, I see at least 3 commercials for getting healthy... weight loss and diet scams and ads for the Ab Burner Plus Ultimate... or my personal favorite, the Super Duper Pull Up Bar which looks for all the world like a piece of electrical conduit but evidently gives you a 6 pack and makes all the girls on the planet - especially those wearing bikinis - desire you with an uncontrollable passion...

anyhow, it is no secret the Americans are FAT and/or out of shape!

Some of us are a little overweight and some of us are corpulent (my word for the day - means morbidly obese, which just sounds bad!), while others are just not in good cardiovascular condition....

So we Americans spend about $40 Billion a year on 'getting healthy'. wow.

Yet we are still in poor physical condition... why? simple! Diet and Exercise! ...simply put, we eat wrong and don't exercise enough!

(Analogy alert!)

Most of us are in poor spiritual condition as well... for the same reasons: we 'eat' wrong and don't 'exercise' enough!

So what are you filling your spiritual belly with? Do you read the Word daily? (we sure wouldn't miss a meal, right?) when you study and read the Word, what is your purpose? It seems that when most of us study, it is to prepare for a Bible class (in which we are trying to help people reach a certain conclusion) or to 'check out' what that preacher said... when we study like that, we are depriving ourselves! Or, for the vast majority of us, I'm afraid we don't even touch a Bible until we are on the way out the door to 'church'... so we get all our 'nourishment' from someone else... and all in a nice tidy package 2 hours per week! When that is our method for feeding ourselves, we are STARVING!!!

what are you doing to 'exercise' your spiritual body? note: when Jesus is separating the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25, he is doing so based on how they treated each other, especially the 'least of these my brothers'... note further: when God speaks through Amos (recorded in Amos 5) to His people, He is warning about the disconnect between the 'Tuesday them' and the 'Sunday (ok, Saturday, but you get the point) them'... when Jesus Himself defines 'religion', He says that it is taking care of widows and orphans and keeping one's self pure....

Momma used to say that losing weight is really simple.... (and by the way, I have lost about 3,756 pounds in my life.... but I've gained just over 4,000 lbs)... to lose weight, you simply take in less that you put out! eat less, exercise more!

I wonder how that works in an analogy? If we were foundering on the Word - absolutely FULL of It, I guess the application would be clear.... but we are starving for His Word... AND most of us don't get NEAR enough spiritual exercise!

so, while God instructs us to know His Word ("write in our you hearts"), He spends a LOT more 'ink' on how we treat each other... the EXERCISE!

ok, now I'm rambling...

I know that most of us are spiritually unhealthy. And I know studying the Bible - by itself - will not make us well... we gotta put It into action... (to be continued....)


Blessings!