Day 105: Spiritual Discipline

"But reject profane and old wives' fables, and exercise yourself toward godliness.  For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."  1 Timothy 4:7-8

Here's an excellent metaphor for spirituality.

The two verses seem to make up two important components for spiritual discipline: self-control and practice.  If we take a step backwards to follow the physical metaphor, these two components are diet and exercise.

Dieting is a very interesting field.  I must say that in our modern times, a healthy diet is quite hard to come by.  On the one hand, everything that is being advertised is quite unhealthy, from soda and fast food ads on TV to having all of the processed snacks in eyesight at the supermarkets.  On the other hand, many diets that claim to have health benefits have absolutely no scientific backing or approval.  In fact, even studies in support of fad diets tend to be debunked and/or retracted.  Therefore, dieting consists of resisting the temptations of advertisements and the temptations of fast results.  The only solution is to go to your personal doctor and/or nutritionist to find out what is best for you.  In the same way, spiritual self-control involves quite a bit of resisting of temptations - both of things that will only harm our minds, bodies, and souls and of doctrines that claim to be able to be a quick fix to our problems.  Yet, we have our authority more easily and readily available to us than a doctor (with the long waits and exorbitant costs).  God is just a prayer away, and the word is only a book a way (or even an app!).  We have all that we need, but we need to put these things into practice.

Exercise is quite straightforward.  Do this, and that will happen.  Do cardio, and you will lose weight.  Practice strength training, and you will get stronger.  The best thing about exercise is that you can see the results.  Looking at your physical appearance, you can see when you lose some weight or gain some muscle.  When you are performing everyday tasks (such as walking up stairs or even walking around for certain periods of time) or even when meeting with a personal trainer, it becomes very clear whether you have been doing your exercise or not.  There is no lying.  The same goes for our spirituality.  If we don't put it to practice, it will be quite obvious.  If all we are doing is asking questions and not researching or praying or reading, then we will be left with the blubber of ignorance.  If we don't put the teachings of Christ into practice, we will forget them.  Words are nice, but if they take no root, they are merely noise or scribbles.

Just as a nutritionist or a doctor wants us to get healthier, the same goes for Jesus.  Jesus wants to see us become the best that we can be.  Through his teachings, Jesus shows us how to get into shape.  Until we put them to practice, they will mean nothing to us.

Day 051: Holiness

"For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God.  You shall therefore be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy."  Leviticus 11:45

Over thousands of years, we have learned more ways to become holy before the Lord.  According to the Old Testament, there was a pretty quick and easy way to achieve this, although today we can look at it as being a backwards method.  Perhaps I could explain this with a parallel image from my personal experience.

Back in high school, I was approaching my unhealthiest state of being, with my years of refusal to perform any physical activity (I'd found a loophole out of it in middle school, and my high school had no physical education class) or to eat healthily.  So, starting around my second year in high school, I started to exercise regularly.  I made some great progress in terms of weight loss.  At the end of my third and final year, I finally learned how to cook, which was a skill that I worked on immensely in my freshman year in college.  During that freshman year, I began counting calories, following guidelines from my own research, and made even more leaps and bounds down the scale.  However, I was quite compulsive with my counting that it was a sort of distraction (mind you, this was in a journal I carried around everywhere).  It was annoying to have to look up every detail about different food that I would eat.  So, after a few months of doing that, I switched over to cutting carbohydrates entirely from my diet (save a cheat day once a week), and I sped down to my final weight (although somewhat far from my unhealthy goal).  In fact, I still must say that cutting carbs entirely is the easiest thing to do since I'm not responsible for portioning things out and keeping track of them.

That's how I see these food laws from the Old Testament: a quick and easy path to sanctification.  It's one thing to keep track of different fasts, prayers, goals, feasts, and traditions, which can seem to be overwhelming to almost anybody.  It's another, though, to paint things in black and white, which makes a complicated thing to be very simple.  It may sound rough, but still simple.

Paul, though, gives us many examples about how we can live out our faith, our holiness, in the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.  We read that we can become teachers, preachers, healers, speakers, evangelists, interpreters, and servants.  We can live a dynamic faith now.  However, that's where we know that we have a large responsibility to God.  God has given us so many ways to be holy, so what is our issue?  We turn away from God.  We need to come back to God.  We need to start taking care of ourselves, sanctifying ourselves through our talents, through our time, through our treasures.  We need to start preparing ourselves to become perfect offerings before God.  Lastly, we need to become the unified body of Christ, with all the many different parts, working for our corporal sanctification.