Why Christians Should Care About Fitness

– [Jeremy Treat] Well,
when it comes to fitness, sports, I’m going to defer to Dr. Thoennes here
because when I was a student at Biola University I would play intramural
football and you would play intramural football and he would school all the
youngsters. So you clearly must have thought a little
bit about fitness, sports, in the
life of a Christian. – [Erik Thoennes] Well,
that was a long time ago. And I think definitely a Christian should
take fitness seriously because our bodies are these incredible gifts from God that
are masterfully designed. Just the human hands, just
the way the body works is a tremendous gift and we are embodied souls and the
resurrected state will be embodied. And so we can’t slip into a mentality that
overvalues the soul or the spirit or the immaterial over against the material or
the physical. We need to realize that there’s a holistic
view biblically of human beings as body and soul and so we need to care for our
bodies and our souls and also realize that those two work together,
that often the health of your body has an effect
on your soul. The Psalms talk about that. Proverbs talk about the effects,
the relationship between body and soul. So if we don’t take care of ourselves
physically it can have spiritual, emotional, physical effects on us,
even relational and practical effects. You just can’t do certain things,
go for hikes with your family, play with your kids,
do the sorts of things you can. I was thankful that I was able as a young
professor to play sports with the students because
that had a social, relational bonding effect so I was very
thankful for that. And, yeah. To steward our incredible gift of our
physical bodies I think is expectations Christians should
have on themselves. – [Jeremy Treat] Yeah. I feel like for me, personally,
I’ve wrestled with this question throughout my life because I grew up
loving sports, loving fitness, but I felt this tension between my love
for basketball and my love for Jesus. And I felt like
I was given categories from the church that didn’t
help resolve those at all. It was one or the other and often times
what I was doing with basketball, it didn’t matter to God or so I perceived
unless I used it for spiritual purposes to share the Gospel with people on the
court or to win a championship and thank God
after the game. And now I look back on that and I think in
a lot of ways I was working with a sacred-secular divide that didn’t value
the place of the body and only saw the soul and this idea that God cares about
spiritual things and not other things. So for me when I look at the doctrine of
creation, you know, you open up to the opening chapters of the Bible and you see
God creating everything good, not only in the spiritual
and physical but even the dynamic of creativity and developing
and all of that. So for me, I feel like I’ve grown to
appreciate sports whether that’s shooting around with a basketball, doing gymnastics
in the front yard with my kids. But there’s a tension in that as well
because it can quickly veer the opposite way which I think we see in our
culture a lot with fitness and sports. – [Erik Thoennes] You have to wonder even,
I was just thinking if even the question of whether or not we should take fitness
seriously is a pretty modern question. I bet for all of human history,
going out and doing something in addition to bringing the crops in and doing all the
manual labor people would do that would naturally
to keep themselves fit. Now, it has to become a separate category
to stay fit when it just was a part of natural life for most people very often
but it is. It’s reality. We can be incredibly sedentary. Our lifestyles allow us to be sedentary
and so to realize our bodies were made to be used and God has given us the gift
of being able to do that and to steward it and to not have a sacred-secular
perspective on these things. Obviously,
we can be inordinately concerned about our appearance
and I think that’s an important distinction,
that our appearance cannot be what’s driving it but
stewarding the gift God has given us has to be
the main thing we’re about. – [Jeremy Treat] Yeah. I think the point about cultures is
interesting because even fitness and beauty and health in our culture gets
defined in some ways by
this unrealistic standard. I mean, LeBron James says he spends a
million dollars a year on his body, right? So to aspire to that… – [Erik Thoennes] It’s a good investment
for him. – [Jeremy Treat] For the time,
the resources, the expertise around him. I mean, you think of how different it is
for us and how we think of
stewarding our bodies. But let me ask you this,
if we think that fitness can be a good thing and is meant to be a good thing in
sports, how do you see the idolatry of that
then playing out? If an idol is taking a good thing
and making it an ultimate thing how do you see that
playing out in our culture? – [Erik Thoennes] Well, one is being
driven in our efforts at what we call fitness but it’s really just an
impression, an appearance that we’re trying to give to people of youthfulness
which is an idol in our culture of an appearance that is impressive in
some ways. Talk about something that’s affected
ministry in really troubling ways is such an
importance on appearance. And so, again, that can be idolatrous but
to put an inordinate amount of time on something, even fitness,
whatever it is can be out of control if we don’t keep it in perspective and realize
that our bodies are wasting away. And it’s tragic to see guys my age
clinging to anything that represents their youthful vigor when the outer man is
wasting away and hopefully the inner man is growing stronger
in the midst of that. – [Jeremy Treat] Yeah. I feel like for me growing up I definitely
saw how fitness and sports became an idol. And I wasn’t self-aware enough to see it
but wanting to find my identity and success, wanting to build my community
around that. And so for the athlete or for someone who
is very involved in fitness it’s not that different that than different realms in
life, that the Gospel isn’t into that, that I find my identity in Christ,
that I care whether I win or lose but that doesn’t crush me or build my whole life
around that. So I think the Gospel gives us a whole new
framework for thinking about fitness where it restores us to a place of seeing our
bodies as a gift from God that we’re called to steward
but not as an idol that we’re ultimately going to find
our identity in. – [Erik Thoennes] Amen. Amen.