Fitness is a current craze in the United States. While not everyone is on board, enough people are that fitness centers have cropped up all along our highways. If we want to improve our health, we just stop in, and they have a plan for us.
Nutrition centers do something similar. They offer us options for healthy eating and nutritional excellence. Eat the right things, they tell us, and our bodies will function at their optimum level. We’ll be healthier, fit, and need to visit the doctor less often. They say there’s truth to that old axiom: An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.
One thing fitness instructors, nutritionists, and doctors agree on is that the changes we want don’t happen overnight. Jennifer Pache in “Ask an Expert” in the Winter 2015 volume of The North Texan magazine says it like this:
“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is no shortcut to good health or to losing weight. It requires patience and discipline.”
How is it that Christians think walking with Christ will be otherwise? We decide to follow Jesus, and instantly, we are perfect Christians, totally holy, and an example for the world to follow? There is no shortcut to following after Christ. To repeat Pache, it requires patience and discipline.
Read Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 4:7:
“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
Paul’s conversion to Christianity was an awe-inspiring miracle of God. A great light shined from heaven, stopping the marauding Christian-basher in his tracks. Even so, he had to work at following after Christ. The world repeatedly got in his way and tried to drag him down.
Paul described his spiritual journey as a fight. A good fighter has to work out hours a day, punching bags, lifting weights, and battling mock opponents in preparation for the real thing.
Paul also said he finished his course. A runner trains over long-distance courses before he ever enters a race. He watches his diet, restricts himself from his favorite desserts, and disregards fast food distractions so that he can be fit and get the hours of practice he needs.
Paul’s final words tell the truest test of his walk with Jesus. He kept the faith. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing we do, to keep believing when we have nothing tangible to put in our hands. For Paul, when he was in chains, in prison, and abandoned by his fellow Christians, there must have been times he wanted to give up. He held on, though, becoming one of our premier contributors to today’s Bible.
We only get podium time, our laurel wreath moment, if we put in the preparation beforehand. It requires patience and discipline. Then and only then we will stand before the King and he will say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
When we work out for Christ, we will win in Christ’s name every time.
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Code: FGO.E.25.16b.vp.kjv