This blog is part of a lecture taught by David Freddes from one of the classes that I am taking. I have entered much of what He talked about in one of his lectures and then added some of my input on the subject.

“Submit yourselves then to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:7–8).

Those verses give us a description of the great need for spiritual fitness and also a pretty good understanding of what spiritual fitness is at its essence. At its core, we are spiritually fit when we’re close to God and resistant to evil. And on the other hand, when we’re far from God and don’t have a very good immune system or strength to resist evil, then all sorts of other problems happen as well. And so for fitness in all the other areas of our life, the very core of it is spiritual fitness. And the very core of spiritual fitness is: Are you close to God, and do you have strength to resist evil? That’s the essence of it.

Well, how do we go about getting that kind of fitness, where we’re drawing near to God and where we’re strong to resist Satan? It all begins with the heart. You really can’t talk about spiritual fitness without talking, first of all, about your heart and your heart health. You’ve got to guard your heart from the temptations that come your way. You’ve got to guard your heart for God’s purposes, because God puts in your heart who he wants you to be and what he wants you to do. And so you’ve got to guard that against all the phony things that try to crowd out what’s true to your heart of hearts.

Sometimes we think we’re doing just fine, but God is weighing our heart. And a big part of spiritual fitness is learning to see our heart the way God sees it—to see our sinful heart and the fallen things in our heart just as God sees them, to become aware of them and to resist them. When God gives us a new heart, the good things he puts in our heart and the great purposes he has for us—to be able to discover those things that he’s put in our heart and to avoid the distractions. Spiritual fitness involves learning to see your heart and experience your heart in tune with the way God sees it.

So when I’m thinking with you about spiritual fitness, let’s not skip ahead too quickly to the importance of spiritual disciplines and practices and things that will make your heart healthier. I want to make sure first that you’re in tune with the Lord—that you’ve come to the Lord and trusted in the Lord Jesus as your Savior, asked him to wash away all your sins with his precious blood, to credit all of his righteousness to you so that you have a right standing with God, and to cause you to be born again and to give you a new heart that only the Holy Spirit can implant in you—with God’s Spirit living in you and with a new human heart or human spirit that he gives you. Then you’re ready to move further into spiritual fitness, and not before then.

So spiritual fitness is not just a matter of learning a few good things or fighting a few evil things. It’s having a heart—a heart for God. And a heart for God, a good heart filled with God’s Holy Spirit, is a heart that brings out good things. And without a heart like that, the good things are not really going to happen, and the bad things are going to flow out of an evil heart. We can’t make our heart good. We need a good heart, but we can’t make it good. And so we need God to give us a new heart.

in Ezekiel 36, God says, “I will put a new heart and a new spirit within them; I will take out of them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26)—a living, beating heart.

So God does this heart surgery. It’s the same kind of thing Jesus talked about when he said, “You must be born again” (John 3:7). The Bible uses different words to describe it, but to receive a new inner life, to receive a new heart—and when you do have a new heart, then sometimes there’s still old desires and sins that battle within you. And so you keep praying that God will keep renewing that new heart. 

So just hear me again: you need the new heart before you need anything else.

Spiritual fitness begins with the heart, but it doesn’t just stop there. It pursues it. It matures and grows and develops through disciplines as the Holy Spirit’s working in us. And the disciplines might take a different shape for different people. For example, the kind of training you need and the discipline you need to win the marathon is different than the kind of discipline and training that you might need to be a successful player in the National Football League. Now, both of the pictures that I’ve just shown are very disciplined and, in a sense, very fit. But this great lineman could never run a marathon, and that marathon runner could never play in the National Football League. Each one needs to train in a way that’s appropriate for the thing they’re hoping to accomplish.

 And in our Christian life, there are some things that we need to do in common. We all need Bible intake. We all need prayer. But some of us may need a little different kind of training. For instance, someone who tends to just go through life without thinking very much about it may need to journal and carefully think and ponder what’s happening in their life and then write it down. Somebody else already thinks too much about how they’re doing and sometimes they get too down on themselves because they’re so introspective. And for them, maybe journaling would be too much of a good thing. And so there are some practices that one person might need that another person might leave aside and pursue other kinds of spiritual disciplines. Or there might be a discipline that everybody needs, but that in a particular situation you may need more of.  So realize how much you need disciplines. And the purpose of those disciplines is to train yourself for godliness. 

 Godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come (1 Timothy 4:8). In a sense, this verse really focuses on everything that we want to say about spiritual disciplines and the whole purpose of it. You’re training yourself to be godly, and that godliness is valuable for you in this life as it helps you to grow in many ways and also for the life to come.

The purpose of spiritual disciplines is to power up—to become stronger in the gifts you have, to seek more and more of the Spirit’s anointing and power in your life, so that you can accomplish the mission, the purpose to which Christ calls you. What a glorious thing that is—to grow in godliness and to train yourself for it, so that you’re more like Jesus, so that you’re getting closer to Jesus, and so that his power and his anointing and his impact is upon you. The only way that we can live the life that Jesus has made available for us is to have disciplines in our life. We can not the abundance of joy if we do not learn to control our emotions instead of them controlling us. We can never be content if we do not control our thoughts and not let ones of what we do not have or do not like about something run through our mind. 

 Because God created us He knows exactly what we need and do not need in order to have the best life that He intends for us to have. Therefore, He tries to lead and guide us to where we need to be so that we can be who He created us to be and do what He has called us to do. We each have a personal walk with God, a personal purpose, a particular reason that we were put on this earth. And that will look different for each one of us. We all have to have a relationship with God and we are all called to be Godly. But we are all created differently with different needs and different desires that will require different things from each of us. 

 Being spiritually fit is the only way that we will have the abundant life that Jesus offers to us. If we are not in tune with the one that created us and working towards being all that we were created to be it will affect all other areas of our life. So the very first area of life that we have to be fit in is our spiritual life.