Spiritual Running Shoes

Posted by Nathan Firesheets on Aug 9, 2011 in Daily Bread | 4 comments

Imagine a person who is trying to lose weight. Six days a week he eats whatever he wants and spends all his spare time on the couch, and then on the seventh day he eats a salad and runs a mile. He probably wouldn’t lose any weight—in fact, he would likely gain weight! You can know everything in the world about how to eat right and exercise, but if you only do it for a couple of hours a week, you’ll never succeed. Why is it then that we do the same thing to our spiritual lives?

As someone who has struggled with weight most of my life, I’ve had to learn this lesson the hard way. There is no quick and easy solution to weight loss—it takes making the decision every single day to eat healthy and exercise. And you never reach a point where you’ve arrived and can go back to eating unhealthy food and being lazy—it takes a permanent commitment to a complete lifestyle change, or you risk slipping right back to where you were—or worse!

This is a perfect analogy to our walk with God. It isn’t just a single decision to become a Christian and then we’re done. We have to continually feed our spirits with the Bread of Life, and then we must exercise our faith by doing what the Word says. And it’s not enough to just know God’s commands and want to obey them—we actually have to follow through and do what He says. And we never reach a point where we have arrived—it’s a continual process that will continue until the day we die. As the old Sunday School song teaches: if we aren’t growing spiritually, we’re shrinking—the same way that muscles atrophy when they aren’t exercised.

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”

So maybe it’s time to stop thinking about everything that God says to do and actually start exercising our faith. Let’s lace up those running shoes and go for a run.