Video Transcript: Total Fitness Training

Hi, I'm David Feddes. and this talk is about total fitness training. I coach basketball with boys, and I was running a gym practice one day, just an informal practice and the boys were playing and then they were doing some running. And one of the boys there was new, and he hadn't played much basketball before. And he was kind of overweight. And while the other boys were running back and forth, back and forth at top speed for a long time, he was exhausted after one or two times down the court. And he came over to me and he said to me, “How do those guys get that much stamina? How can they get so much endurance?” And I answered, “A little at a time, a little at a time. And if you want that kind of endurance, what you need to do is first run 100 yards one day, then the next day run 200 yards, then the next day 300 yards and keep building up the distance that you run. And after you've run a while also just watch your other practices. Watch how you eat; you might be eating too much sugar. If you just lay off the sugar and the foods with flour and so on in them, you'll find that you're dropping a few pounds. And so, little by little if you drop a little weight and you work your way up in your running, then you can be more fit and after a while you can be able to run like those other boys and if you practice your shots, you're going to be able to shoot like those other boys. But it all starts with training and training happens a little at a time.” 

When we think about total fitness, then we need to think about the fact that we need to train for it. When you read the Bible, one picture of the Christian life is that of an athlete who trains and then succeeds in the contest. The apostle Paul was writing to people in Corinth and Corinth was big on sports. The sports winners at the famous Isthmian Games would receive wreaths and be adored by all the young people and the crowds. They were into sports and the Apostle Paul picked up on that fact. And he talked to people in sports terminology about how they could develop their lives for God. Paul said, “Don't you realize that in a race everyone runs but only one person gets the prize, so run to win.” All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. So, I run with purpose at every step. I am not shadowboxing; I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others, I myself might be disqualified. 

Now in that picture of the Christian life as a sports contest, and as training for it, a number of things come out and I want to highlight five of those. Your fitness and your Christian life are a matter of participating not just watching, of being an athlete, not just a spectator. Secondly, it involves hero worship, watching an example and then following that example. Third, there's a purpose you have your eyes on the prize and everything you're doing is aimed towards getting that prize not just feeling the pain of training for its own sake, but to move towards the prize. And what we're really going to emphasize a lot go into in more detail is that it takes training and self-discipline in order to have success. And finally, the attitude you need to have you need to be confident in all of this but not cocky and overconfident. 

So, let's begin with the fact that we are participants. If you want to be a successful athlete, if you want to be overall fit in your life, and especially in your walk with God, you can't just be an observer. Somebody has defined professional football as millions of people badly in need of exercise, watching a few people badly in need of rest. And isn't that the case? You've got a few athletes that are out there participating. Everybody else is in the stands watching. If you're going to live a flourishing life for the Lord, you need to be a participant, not a couch potato. You need to be in the game not just an armchair quarterback, someone who's sitting on the sidelines saying how somebody else could have done it. The Bible says, “Don't you realize that in a race everyone runs but only one person gets the prize. So run to win and you going to run. You are one of the runners, not one of the watchers. Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12 says that right after Hebrews 11, which talks about many heroes of faith who live in the past and then it says, “Now we're surrounded by that great cloud of witnesses of people who lived before us and now they are in glory with the Lord and they are among the spectators, but you're in the middle the race now so run with perseverance the race marked out for you.” 

If you just drop the sports picture, James says, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves.” You've got to be in this life. You've got to be going for it. Not just somebody who listens to a sermon and says that was nice or looks at other people were living for the Lord and say, “Well good for them.” You've got to be participant. So be a player, not a couch potato. That's the first thing when we're thinking about total fitness and training for total fitness. 

A second element is hero worship. If you want to be a great basketball player, and you want to be a great shooter. You can have somebody who's a hero for you, you don't literally worship them, but you really look up to them and say, “Boy, I wish I could be like that.” And so, you look at the greatest shooter in the world. And you say, “Hey, that person really inspires me. I'm amazed by the way you can switch those shots for any angle and all the things that he does.” And so, hero worship is partly just being inspired by somebody else about their success. But it also involves looking at their example. You look at this great shooter, and you say, “Well, he keeps that elbow tucked in, he keeps his fingers spread. He uses a certain follow through when he shoots, he uses his off and properly he's got the footwork and the balance. And so, you're watching his example and you watch it over and over and then you start imitating. Hero worship involves being inspired, but also imitating your hero. And this is certainly the case in the Christian life. 

The Bible says we really can't have hero worship. In this case, we really do and literally worship Him. Let's fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, Who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Fix your eyes on Jesus, be inspired by who He is, and by what He has accomplished for us and what He's already accomplishing in us and look at His example. How did He do what He did? You might say, “Well, He was the Son of God, and I'm not, so what could I do?” But look what Jesus did. He was the Son of God. He makes us sons of God by His Holy Spirit as well. And Jesus lived a life of prayer. He didn't just depend on His divine powers, but He constantly prayed to His Father in heaven. He would take time sometimes, all right, He would go out to pray. He knew the scriptures very well. So, when Satan tempted Him, Jesus had the scriptures right at hand to drive Satan away. Jesus had practices that developed His strength as a man and not just as God. And so as a man, He would fast, He would pray, He would learn the scriptures, He would discipline Himself. And we can learn from Jesus’ example, as we seek to become more like Him. We can also learn from the example of others whom we admire and want to imitate. The apostle Paul said, “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.” Sometimes we might not be able to just see Jesus, or He might seem like more a distant figure. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study Him and imitate Him. But it does mean that sometimes there are followers of Jesus who are a lot nearer to us in location. We can look up how they live. The Apostle says, “Follow me.” Look for somebody you admire somebody you wish you could be like them and learn from them.

Ask for their insights, follow their example. This is true the Christian life, how did you get to be the way you are? What are some of the practices you keep following and then do that? Or in other areas of life, if you want to do well in fitness, and you've got a friend who's really fit, and they're physically fit, and you say, “Well, what do you eat? What's your pattern for sleep? What's your exercise routine?” And you learn from their example. Or you say, “Boy, I wish I could do better in finances, and I'm going to talk to that friend who seems to be really good with money and I'm going to follow their example because they are in situations similar to mine, but they seem to do better than I do. And so, I'm going to learn from the example.” That's a big part of total fitness and training yourself for total fitness. In the whole area of vocation work I can do a lot of examples of the areas of total fitness where an example somebody who is a model for you to follow will be a tremendous help for you as you seek to develop your total walk with God in all the dimensions of your life. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that we have our eyes on the prize. A great figure skater, for example, who becomes a national champion doesn't do all the training just because it feels so good to have pain in her legs or because she wants to go through all those early morning workouts and just work her body to a frazzle. That's really not why she's doing it. She's doing it because she wants to be a champion. And she puts herself through all of those other things because those things move her toward the goal. Total fitness training isn't an end in itself. You're not doing the training just for the sake of the training. You're doing it to excel and to reach the prize. 

As the Apostle puts it, “So run to win.” When all athletes are disciplined in their training, they do it to win a prize, that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. The Apostle had his eyes on glory with Christ on an eternal prize. And at the end of his life, he could say I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, and not only for me, but also for all who long for Christ's appearing. That prize in a race goes to just one winner in a lot of athletic competitions. But in our walk with God, in our Christian life, in our journey through life, many can receive the prize, many can receive the crown not just for me but for all who have longed for His appearing. So, keep your eyes on that prize, on the calling that God has for you to take you to glory to live with Him forever. The apostle Paul said, “I want to know Christ.” That was the central part of his desire. That was the prize he was after. I want to know Christ. I want to become like Christ. That was the prize. I want to know Him better and better. I want to become more and more like Him. Don't think of a relationship with Jesus as, “Okay, now Jesus takes away my sins, and I'm forgiven. And that's it.” Of course, that's the beginning and it's wonderful that Christ takes away our sins. But now what's your prize? Was it just to get off the hook? The prize is to know Jesus. This is eternal life to know the only true God and Jesus Christ who was sent.” That's what Jesus said, I want to know Christ. And I just know Him and knowing Him to become like Him. And so, the Apostle Paul says, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus, I want to know Jesus better now. I want to become more and more like Him now. And I want to be united to Him forever and to live in glory with Him forever and to enjoy His splendor, His love, His goodness, forever and ever.” That's the prize. And so, all of our training is taking us towards that to become more and more involved in Christ to take on His character and to share His glory forever. 

And as we do that, then training is involved. Sometimes when you watch a race and watch a great athlete, it looks so effortless and you think, “What a talent!” When you see the fastest man in the world goes zooming past the competition, and he runs so fast, and he has such a lead that we get to the finish line, he can even turn to the crowd and smile and wave at them. And you think, “Wow, that man has talent!” Of course, he does. He has tremendous talent. But don't forget that he didn't get that gold medal just in those 10 seconds. And with that smile and that wave to the crowd at the end. That gold medal came after lots and lots and lots of grueling training, of lifting weights, of running again and again and again and pushing his body almost beyond endurance, to become the kind of athlete that he is. And total fitness in various aspects of your life involves that kind of training. 

All athletes are disciplined in their training. And the apostle says, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should.” A training involves for an athlete at least three different areas. One of them nutrition. You need to eat things that are healthy for you, that will build muscle that will be good for your body and for the athletic competition. And so, you eat right. Another element of training is self-denial. It means you deny yourself certain things in order to pursue your goals. You might feel like sleeping in, but you know you've got early morning training session, so you force yourself to get out of bed and you do your training. You might wish you could just stuff your face a lot of junk food, but you deny yourself and eat the food you know, that's going to build your body for the goals that you have. And so, in the Christian life, too, we need to deny ourselves and sometimes that obviously is just denying things that are wrong and sinful. But it also can mean denying ourselves things that otherwise are okay, but we need to focus on something even more important. And so rather than watching a TV program that it might be an okay program, but there's something else I need to do because I'm training to serve the Lord. So, you deny yourself something that might necessarily be bad because you're working on something that's even more of an accomplishment. And with nutrition to the Christian life involves nutrition, feeding on the Word of God, learning from Him constantly. And then there's exercise. There's going through the various drills that you need to do if you're an athlete playing basketball or football. You do your various training exercises; you throw the ball, or you practice your blocking skills, if you're in football and in basketball, you practice shooting and in figure skating like practice your jumping and your various edges that you need to do. If you're a musician, you'll be practicing your fingering and the various other exercises, your breathing all those things go into being a great musician. 

And so, three elements of training nutrition, self-denial and exercise and in the Christian life too exercise makes you better and better at what you do. It's not easy the first time to help somebody when you didn't really feel like it, but when you make yourself do that anyway, then the next time it comes a little more naturally the next time a little more naturally. It's not that easy to bite your tongue you felt like saying something nasty, but you do it and the next time you're talking is a little easier to control and so on. So, your exercises help make you more and more fit as you go along. At least there are three elements of training nutrition, self-denial, and exercise and they apply not just to physical training, but to spiritual training and other aspects of total fitness as well.

The Bible is not just a book of facts to learn or doctrines to be taught. The Bible is a training manual. All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. So, see the Bible as your trainer, as something God has given to train you in righteousness and to discipline yourself and righteousness to become more and more like Him.  Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. So, if you want to advance especially in the realm of spiritual fitness, you need to train yourself to be godly and we'll be talking in future presentations about how you train yourself to be godly as well as training for other things. But the point here is simply it does take training. Physical training is good for you. It's good for your body. It may accomplish something that's of some value, but godliness and training for godliness has value for everything for this life and for eternal life. So, train.

What's involved in total fitness training on the spiritual level? We'll see in more detail that it involves things such as Bible intake on a regular basis, meditation on the scriptures, it may involve journaling. It may involve other practices. such as fasting that help you to control your body and focus your spirit on God. It involves prayer, certainly deep prayer, we're going to talk about that. So spiritual training has various spiritual disciplines that help you to develop in your strength to serve the Lord and to walk with Him. Physical training is obvious. Fitness involves training eating right and exercising right and various drills. We've already talked about that. Financial fitness involves training and discipline; you don't become financially fit just by good luck. You learn to earn steadily a little at a time. You control your spending and it's sometimes hard to do that, You deny yourself you say I'm not going to buy that because I have financial goals. I need to get out of debt or I'm out of debt and I'm trying to get some savings for a future purpose, but you have financial discipline, where you learn what's involved in good financial practices, and then you discipline yourself and you train yourself to do those practices and you end up in a good financial position. Intellectual training is very necessary to develop your mind. I know it's a temptation for some students to wish they could just race through a class and race through a whole program of studies and be an intellectual superstar and somebody who knows tremendous amounts of the Bible, but there's no shortcut. You need to study you need to reflect deeply, and you need to discipline yourself when there are things you'd rather be doing and sometimes to study anyway, and to read and to think hard. There's a lot of discipline that goes into it. For myself, it took a tremendous amount of school, not just of going through grade school, in high school, and so on, but through college and through a seminary master's program and through a doctoral program, years and years and years of studying. And even after that constant reading of books and studying and thinking, because I know that if I'm going to be intellectually fit, and I'm called to teach others and I've constantly got to be training myself more and more and studying harder and harder. Emotional training involves again, discipline and managing your emotions. That doesn't mean shutting them down. But it does mean paying attention to how you feel. It doesn't mean not venting whatever you feel like it like if you feel angry, you just blow up in somebody's face. Or if you feel kind of sad you have tremendous emotional meltdown. No, you can feel angry, and yet, you manage it. You can feel sad, but you still manage to keep a steady hand and a steady mind in a situation and help others and then you deal with your sadness in a little different context. And so, you train yourself and you also can train your emotions in the whole realm of humility, of feeling for others of paying attention to them and your emotions become more and more appropriate to the situation. Will say more about that. In your relationships, you need discipline. If you're a parent, for instance, you need discipline of yourself to spend the time with your children and have a structured environment for them, structured time to talking and working with them to develop their lives. You need to discipline yourself to spend time with your spouse and to cultivate that relationship. Good relationships don't just happen. There's training and discipline involved. And that certainly the case in your work life where you might feel like sleeping in, but you need to get to work on time. You need to do the things that are necessary for success in your calling and vocation. You go through the training and all the other stuff and so there is no shortcut where you can avoid training and discipline. If you want to be fit in the various aspects of your life, you need to train. 

And then you need to have a healthy attitude you need to be confident, but not cocky. Great musicians are not just people who hop up on the stage and start playing without having done any training. The world class musicians are those who have trained over and over and over again and gone through all of their exercises and practiced first easier pieces and then harder and harder pieces until they can play just about anything flawlessly and perfectly with tremendous feeling. But all of that comes, those tremendous moments of beauty on stage because they trained and now when they get on stage, they have an attitude where they're confident. But they have to stay sharp but can't we all just kind of toss off his performance and it'll just happen. No, they need to stay alert they need to keep at it, they need to keep doing the things they've trained to do. They need to be confident but not cocky. 

I find that true of athletes. When I'm coaching, I find sometimes boys can be just too afraid of their opponents and that will hurt their performance. And sometimes they can be overconfident. I remember driving down the road with a group of boys and we're going to be playing a basketball game and, on the way, they were saying, “Oh man, we are doomed. We are going to lose this. This team has got boys that are older than we are and they're a good team. Man. We're going to get wiped out.” And I said to the boys, “Well, why don't I just turn the car around and go home. There's no use even going to play the game if you've lost it already before you even arrive.” And the fact is when we got there, they got out there and they played hard and they won the game. I have had other times with boys where they didn't respect an opponent enough. And so, they thought, “Oh, we're going to just stomp them into the ground,” and they found out that that opponent was a lot better than they had thought. And this is true not just in athletics or in music, but in all of life. 

When you're walking with God, when you're living by faith, when you're disciplining yourself to grow in Christ, you need to have confidence in the Lord confidence in who he's needed to be, what he's designed to accomplish, but you can't get cocky and just assume that everything is going to go the way you wanted. The Apostle says, “I labor, struggling with all Christ's energy, which so powerfully works in me.” And that's what gives him confidence. He's going after hard, but he's got Christ's energy given that it's powerfully working. And so, he knows that he's got what it takes through Christ to accomplish great things. But he's not cocky. He says I discipline my body like an athlete, lest after preaching to others, I myself might be disqualified. He knows that in the Christian life, if he gets overconfident and loses his discipline and loses his training, he could fail. And this doesn't necessarily mean that he would lose his salvation. Although even in the realm of salvation, it involves persevering and training and keeping after God and serving Him. But even if in ministry, you're did lose your salvation from some great downfall, you could do a lot of damage to the people that you were supposed to lead, and you can bring great disgrace on yourself and on the name of Christ and be disqualified from further effective ministry. I say that because you know, as well as I do, how many ministries have been disqualified because people didn't maintain discipline in their walk with the Lord. They didn't keep healthy boundaries. They didn't maintain their spiritual well-being they didn't tend to their emotions, and they wonder everything just fell apart. You've got to keep discipline. If you want to remain fit for the Lord service. Then you got to have discipline in order to fight off the devil and keep marching on God's path to heaven. 

So be confident because God working anyway but don't be cocky because you have weaknesses, you have sins you have to keep disciplining and resisting. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you. So be confident at the same time a little bit trembling and tremendous dependence upon God, and then you'll be able to move forward and to train and to move towards the prize toward which God has called you. 

So that's total fitness training. Be a participant, not couch potato, not just a spectator, get in the game. Have a hero, above all the Lord Jesus Christ, and then someone else perhaps or several people who can model for you how to walk with God, how to succeed and finances, how to manage your emotions, how to take care of your body, how to do well at their work. Find heroes that can be people who help you in your training and developing yourself. Keep your eyes on the prize becoming like Christ, having an impact like Christ and living with Christ for all eternity and that will inspire you from day to day when you get tired. And when sometimes get a little discouraged, say, “Oh, but I've got my eyes on the prize, and I'm going to keep pressing on toward the goal for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” And then the main burden of this presentation: training and self-discipline. Realize that in all these areas of total fitness, you need to train and keep training and keep saying no to things that aren't helping you towards your goal. Keep saying yes to the things that do help you develop in these various areas of life. And then the confidence in the Lord, walk by faith. But don't say, “Ah, I need no more effort. No more training, I'm going to succeed no matter what.” Don't get cocky. walk with the Lord. walk humbly with your God and yet very confidently with your God and your fitness will continue to grow. Remember, the boy that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. Kind of pudgy, had no endurance and he asked, “What does it take to get that kind of endurance? How do you get there?” And the answer was a little at a time. So, if you're not yet fully who you want to be, and who of us is, if you look at somebody else say, “Wow, I wish I could be like that, but I don't see how. just remember a limited time. start somewhere, just get in the game. Look at Jesus. start imitating somebody who knows what they're doing. keep focused on the prize and you might not get there within five minutes, you might not get there and five days or five weeks or even five years but keep on developing and moving and trusting that God, who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.