I’ve been told that suffering cannot be God’s will for me. I’ve been advised not even to speak about suffering. I’ve been promised unconditional healing and wholeness if I have enough faith.

These statements came from proponents of the prosperity gospel, people who were convinced I could avoid suffering. I remember telling a fellow believer about my post-polio diagnosis twenty years ago, explaining how eventually I could become a quadriplegic. As I related the various implications, the man interrupted me, saying, “You need to stop talking about this right now. Just speaking of this diagnosis is agreeing with Satan, which might bring it into being. Suffering is never part of God’s will. I know God just wants healing and wholeness for you.”

His words took me aback. While I’d heard the claims before, this conversation triggered a flood of painful memories: being told by a faith healer in a crowded auditorium that I didn’t have enough faith to be healed. Being prayed over by strangers, in places ranging from grocery stores to sporting events, who were convinced they could heal me. Telling a friend about my unborn son’s serious heart condition and being told simply to claim our baby’s healing.

All these people asserted that if we “agreed in prayer” and “bound Satan,” I would be healed, my baby would be healed, the pain would end. They said I needed to believe in faith, warning me never to speak of suffering, fear, or loss.

Even Apostles Misunderstand Suffering

The apostle Peter didn’t want Jesus to speak of his coming crucifixion either. When Jesus told the disciples about his future suffering, death, and resurrection on the third day, Peter rebuked him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you” (Matthew 16:22). To Peter, it was inconceivable that Jesus would suffer and be killed. That couldn’t be part of God’s plan.

Perhaps Peter instinctively rebuked Jesus because Jesus’s words about his suffering and death went against Peter’s understanding of the kingdom of God. Just before, Jesus had told Peter that whatever Peter bound on earth would be bound in heaven, and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven (Matthew 16:19). Maybe Peter thought he could override the predictions by speaking against them.

Whatever the reason for Peter’s outburst, Jesus responded with a stinging rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matthew 16:23).

Jesus’s reaction applies to the false teaching of the prosperity gospel, a doctrine that asserts suffering has no place in the life of a Christian. Proponents of the prosperity gospel often claim that we need to bind suffering on earth and not even speak of it, because affliction can never be God’s will for those who know Christ. They choose isolated verses to undergird their position, stressing a right to perfect health, ignoring the Scriptures that highlight God’s goodness and sovereignty in and through our suffering.

Based on Jesus’s exchange with Peter, I see three ways the prosperity gospel gets suffering wrong.

1. ‘Suffering hinders faith.’

While Peter’s words may seem like a loving reaction, born out of care for Jesus, Jesus saw them as the work of Satan, distracting Jesus from his purpose. Jesus came to suffer and die, and Peter tried to dissuade him from what was God’s will. At the time, Peter didn’t know that Christ’s suffering would save not only Peter, but all who trust in Jesus.

Jesus’s suffering was filled with divine purpose, as is all our suffering. Later, Peter himself would recognize that God calls some people to suffer just as he called Christ (1 Peter 2:21), and that suffering can refine our faith and glorify God (1 Peter 1:6–7).

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pray for healing and relief when trouble comes. God tells us to bring him our requests (Philippians 4:6), to pray big prayers and expect big answers (James 5:16), to ask for whatever we want (John 15:7). We know God can bring healing simply by saying the word — he created the universe, calmed the sea, and raised the dead with just his voice. But his answer isn’t always “yes.” If God says “no” or “wait,” as he did to Job, Jesus, and Paul, we shouldn’t conclude that our faith is weak or that we’ve done something wrong.

We can take comfort in the fact that if God denies our earnest requests, he has his reasons — maybe ten thousand reasons — and one day we will rejoice in them. Some of God’s purposes in suffering are to produce endurance, character, and hope in us (Romans 5:3–5). Trials make us steadfast (James 1:3), deepen our reliance on God (2 Corinthians 1:8–9), and help us genuinely comfort others as God has comforted us (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). While we cannot know all that God is doing in our suffering, we can be sure that he works always for our good (Romans 8:28).

2. ‘God always wants comfort for us.’

Jesus’s prediction of his death didn’t make sense to Peter. Jesus had just praised him for recognizing that he was the Messiah (Matthew 16:16–17). Did Peter think that the Messiah would establish an earthly kingdom, a kingdom that Peter would be a vital part of?

“If God denies our requests, he has his reasons — maybe ten thousand reasons — and one day we will rejoice in them.”

Often our view of God’s kingdom is centered on what we want. We are consumed with our plans and our glory, which are grounded in this life. But the things of God center on God’s will and God’s glory, which are grounded in eternity. Like Peter, prosperity-gospel advocates often begin with a fervent faith and revelation from God, but their minds are so focused on worldly blessings that they end up working against God’s purposes. People who cannot accept that suffering and even death can be part of God’s plan have their minds set on the things of man.

How do we set our minds on the things of God? We start by recognizing that his ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8), and only the Spirit knows the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:11). We cannot guarantee people’s healing or offer assurances that we know God wills to end their suffering, if only they believe, but we can pray to the Lord on their behalf and trust him with the outcome.

3. ‘This life is all there is.’

Peter’s rebuke of Jesus disregarded the final part of his statement in Matthew 16:21: Jesus would not only die but rise again on the third day. It’s a stunning conclusion, one that outweighs the horror of Jesus’s initial words. Suffering would not have the last word, and death would not hold him. Jesus’s resurrection means a glorious ending to all our earthly pain.

Prosperity-gospel proponents often overlook the weight of glory that is coming in heaven, preferring to concentrate on this life alone. Suffering prepares us for that future glory, perhaps even magnifying our experience of it, and makes us long for heaven (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Eternity is so central to our faith that if heaven does not await us, if this life is all there is, if our hope in Christ is for this life alone, Paul says that “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). But if the prosperity-gospel claims are true — that following Jesus always means earthly prosperity — then even if Christ wasn’t raised from the dead, Christians shouldn’t be pitied at all. Heaven would be a bonus, but the material blessings of this life would be reward enough.

Lesson for Us All

Peter had to learn these lessons about suffering, and so do we. For the believer, suffering is not a curse, not an indication of weak faith or a lack of blessing, but rather an integral part of the Christian life. God may discipline us to awaken and refine us, but his discipline is a loving mercy. He uses suffering to shape us into the image of Christ, which the prosperity gospel, in its obsession with physical health and earthly wealth, overlooks.

Jesus suffered on our behalf, and if we follow in his footsteps, we shouldn’t be surprised by our own suffering. In fact, Jesus promised we would suffer, saying, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

So, if you are suffering, call out to God. Pray and read the Bible, even when it feels like he’s not listening. If you know others who are suffering, be there for them. Encourage them, pray with them, point them to God’s eternal purposes.

The true gospel doesn’t promise a life free from suffering, but a God who is with us in our suffering, a God who redeems and transforms our griefs and prepares us for eternity. So, set your mind on the things of God, remembering that your ultimate reward is not here on earth, but stored up in heaven, where there will be no more suffering, no more tears, and no more pain.

Audio Transcript

Happy Monday. Today is Labor Day for many of us, a day when we rest from our work and think of just about anything but work. But here we are, talking about work, and we’re doing it because a number of you have emailed over the years wanting to know about work in eternity. Here’s one version of that email, from a listener named Steve.

“Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I have a question about work in heaven — or work in the new creation, to be more exact. First, will we work in the new creation? If so, what types of vocations will be needed? Does the Bible give us any hints here? And if we work, do you think this future vocation will resonate with or consummate some gifting that we always felt drawn to express here on earth, whether or not we could make money doing it here? And if you answer yes to all of this, put on your hat of prediction: What will you be doing in eternity?”

Let’s start with what we know for sure about the eternal future that all of us who are in Christ will definitely enjoy.

Jesus said that we will be with him. We will see his glory. We will have the capacity to love him with the very love that the Father has for him (John 17:24–26). The apostle John tells us “we shall see him” and “we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). That includes both sinless purity of heart and the glory of our new resurrection bodies, according to Philippians 3:21. And then in Revelation 21:4, John tells us that God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.” And then Psalm 16:11 twists that around and makes it positive: in God’s presence, we will have “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore.” Now that is for sure.

Six Pointers for Work in Eternity

Now, the question is, Will work be part of our experience of that eternal joy in God’s presence? I think the answer is yes. But I say that not because the Bible has decisive statements to that effect, but because there are significant pointers in that direction. So, I wouldn’t elevate this conviction that I’m going to argue for here to a top-level doctrine, but rather call it a reasonable, probable hope. And if not this, then something way better. I mean, if it turns out that it’s not what you thought it was, it’s going to be better, because we know there will be no sorrow there, no regret, no frustration, no disappointment with God’s decisions about what our happiness should look like.

So, here are my six pointers, and then I’ll end with a caution. These are pointers for why we can be relatively confident there will be work for us to do in the age to come, in our eternity with God.

1. God is a worker.

God himself is a worker, and we will be more like him then, not less than we are now. Genesis 2:2: “On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” And Jesus said in John 5:17, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” So, God is a worker.

2. God created us to work.

God created man to be a worker before the fall into sin. The curse that fell on man after the fall was not work, but futile work, miserable work, sweaty work that makes us hate it, that makes us want to play instead of working. But God made man from the beginning to work the world, to shape the world.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

And then, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

3. Parables point toward future responsibility.

The parable that describes how Jesus settles accounts with his servants at the second coming suggests that, now that Jesus has come, they will have work given them to do. In Luke 19:17, the master says, “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities.” Now, whether that’s parabolic or metaphorical, it may well point to the fact that we will be given responsibility in the age to come.

4. We are born again for good works.

According to Ephesians 2:10, “We are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” When Paul identified a purpose for the new creature in Christ — us — he said the purpose was work, “good works.”

5. Prophecies of the new creation include work.

Isaiah 65:17–25 describes the new heavens and the new earth to include work.

They shall build houses and inhabit them;     they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. . . .     My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.They shall not labor in vain     or bear children for calamity. (Isaiah 65:21–23)

Now, the reason I say this is only a pointer, not a decisive statement — even though it may look like that — about work in the final state, is that there is serious disagreement about whether this passage in Isaiah 65 is a description of our final state, because it speaks of bearing children, and Jesus said that in the final state there would be no marriage and, presumably, no bearing of children (Matthew 22:30). And in the age to come, we’re not going to experience death. And yet Isaiah 65:20 says, “The young man shall die a hundred years old” in the new creation.

We know there is no death in the age to come. So, the disagreement is whether these kinds of statements here in Isaiah 65 are somehow metaphorical for eternal life in the age to come — I have never been able to understand how death is a symbol for life — or whether this is a description of a millennial period after the second coming, which is much higher in its blessing than now but not yet the final stage of the new heavens and the new earth. And that would be my view.

“Work itself will be so profoundly satisfying and sweet and enjoyable that nobody will say, ‘I need a weekend.’”

But in either case — whether those are metaphorical statements and we will be working in the final state, or whether this is a next stage of redemptive history in which, yes, there will be work, and maybe pointing to the fact that there’s work in the final state — it seems to me that we can’t settle that with enough certainty to persuade all the evangelicals who love the Bible. I mean, I’ve got a lot of good friends that disagree with me on this. So, I don’t call those verses in Isaiah 65 a decisive, precise statement that there will be work in the final state, but it seems to me it points in that direction.

6. All futility will be gone.

When you take sin out of the heart and out of the world, which will happen in the age to come, the line between work and play becomes almost invisible. What is play when all our work will be totally enjoyable? I mean totally. There is no work now that is totally enjoyable. All work has some element to it we find frustrating or disappointing or futile or discouraging.

Perhaps (this is speculation) there will be sweet weariness of mind and body, the new body getting weary in the age to come such that it needs something different from its usual occupation — namely, rest and play. I don’t know, because work itself will be so profoundly satisfying and sweet and enjoyable that nobody will say, “I need a weekend. I’ve got to have some play time,” because everything will be as happy and satisfying as play. But there may be a difference.

Future Beyond Disappointment

And that word perhaps — I mean, I’ve been using the word perhaps all along — leads me to wrap up with a caution about making more precise statements about the age to come than the Bible gives us warrant to make. There are cautions in the Bible that remind us that the glories of the age to come are going to be beyond our present comprehension and imagination.

In 2 Corinthians 12:4, Paul said he saw things in heaven that no man can utter. In 1 Corinthians 2:9, Paul says that “God has prepared [things] for those who love him” that are beyond human imagination. They’ve never entered into the heart of man. He tells us that our resurrection bodies will be spiritual bodies (1 Corinthians 15:42–49). Well, who can say all that is involved in a spiritual body?

John speaks in Revelation 21:23 of a world in which there will be “no need of sun or moon . . . [because] the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” Well, who can imagine a world with no sources of created light, but only God’s light? And in Revelation 21:18, John says the city, New Jerusalem, “was pure gold, like clear glass.” What’s that — gold that is clear as glass? Jonathan Edwards wrote an entire sermon on that text, Revelation 21:18, and here’s the title: “Nothing on Earth Can Represent the Glories of Heaven” — because there is no such thing on earth as gold that is clear as glass, and that’s the way it’s going to be like.

So yes, I think we will work in the final age to come. Whether we will do what we were gifted for here, or whether we will have wholly new giftings, a thousand times greater, or what kind of work John Piper will be doing, I leave in the hands of God, who planned the universe for the happiness of his people in himself. We will not be disappointed.

The Christian grandmother, talking with me about her daughter and grandson, was heartbroken.

As her daughter unveiled her new life, beliefs, and rules, this grandmother felt the ground was no longer solid. She raised this prayed-for daughter in the church. As a teenager, her daughter made a profession of faith. But then everything changed. The daughter rapid-fired her war against “heterosexism” and the new rules that would be mandatory for any future relationship. She demanded exclusive use of preferred names and pronouns. And she told her mother she could never share Bible verses or church lessons that contradicted LGBTQ+ beliefs.

This grandmother was sure she couldn’t keep the rules straight in her head even if she tried. She could barely understand what “heterosexism” was, although her daughter had explained it many times as “the dangerous belief that heterosexuality is normal.” Why would anyone go to war against this? the grandmother wondered.

Wrong Side of History

The ultimatums and blackmail landed hard: failure to comply resulted in being cut out, disowned. Her daughter, Jade, declared herself “non-binary” and used the pronouns “they” and “he.” Her three-year-old grandson, Allan, would now be raised as a girl and addressed as Sierra, presumably because he wore a tiara at a child’s birthday party and liked it. None of this made sense. The grandmother was sure her daughter was deluded by some social contagion.

This grandmother wanted to do the right thing. She tried to find the middle road and walk the thin line that allowed her to retain a relationship with her daughter, but she wondered: Am I on the wrong side of history? Should I comply with my daughter when I believe she is seriously deluded? And what about my grandson? Is he a “trans” child or an abused one? She asked herself, What if I get it wrong?

When the grandmother reached out to her pastor, he didn’t know what to say. He told her to extend empathy and try to see things from her daughter’s point of view. The small group she attended was divided on what to do as well. Some people in her small group even warned her against being “transphobic” and told her anyone can be trans and Christian, or gay and Christian. Is this true? she wondered. Some people in her small group treated her like she caused her daughter’s problems.

Life in the War Zone

I know there are many sides to stories like these.

I know for years some evangelical leaders have wanted to understand this story from the LGBTQ+ perspective, some even sponsoring gay-sensitivity checklists and conferences. But what about the grandmother? Does her point of view matter? And what about God’s? Romans 3:4 makes God’s perspective the priority: “Let God be true though every one were a liar.” What God reveals about our lives is the true truth. The Bible knows us and our needs better than we do. And that is the very best news of all.

This grandmother’s family and church life had suddenly become a war zone, and she is not alone. I hear stories like this almost every day. If you, like the grandmother, have ever felt that you live amid a civil war, you are not alone either. On the one hand, we expect the church to conflict with the world. Indeed, John Calvin tells us to “count the rage of the whole world as nothing” (365 Days with Calvin, March 19). We see the rage of unbelief all around us. We understand the rage of the world because we remember when we were once God’s enemy.

It’s not conflict with the world that surprises us; the division within the visible church confounds us. Our Lord calls us to walk in unity amid this “crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15). He does not ask us to become compliant with its perversion, and especially when the world demands as much. Jesus calls us to model the fathomless unity of the holy Trinity: “that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22). But how can we do this when some use the Bible to call sinners to repentance and others use the Bible to call the repentant to sin?

These are the times in which we live, and Christians must face the facts.

Three Subtle Reasons

I believe there are three reasons for our divided churches. And these three reasons have unleashed five lies that many evangelical churches have embraced.

Because I have believed all these lies at different points in my life, I understand how seductive they are. God knows the times in which we live and has provided a solution. Our calling is to repent of the lies that we have believed and attempt to stay connected with loved ones lost to them — and without our becoming indoctrinated. Easy to say, but impossible to do without God’s help. What are the three reasons?

REASON 1

First, we have failed to see that the seeds of the gospel are in the garden.

Many of us foolishly believed that we could reinvent our calling as men and women, render men and women interchangeable, defy God’s pattern and purpose for the sexes, and somehow reap God’s blessing.

God’s plan for men and women — the creation ordinance — is first found in Genesis 1, and it is central — not peripheral — to the gospel of Jesus Christ: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:27–28).

We bear the image of God by growing in the knowledge, righteousness, and holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:24). Homosexuality and transgenderism represent forms of rebellion against God’s creation ordinance and image-bearing. They are manifestations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and must be repented of, not celebrated.

Homosexuality and transgenderism are not part of anyone’s creational design, no matter what our feelings say. Our feelings are not free of sin, and they don’t trump God’s truth. Christ promises to forgive and restore all who repent and trust in him for salvation. Christ does not make an ally with the sins his blood crushes on the cross and washes clean. There is hope for all in the gospel.

REASON 2

Second, we have failed to read the times in which we live (Romans 13:11–14; Luke 12:56).

In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, the United States Supreme Court declared so-called gay marriage the law of the land. It also introduced the idea of “dignitary harm.” According to Obergefell, we are harming someone’s dignity by failing to “affirm” their LGBTQ+ identity.

In our post-Obergefell world, we now have two competing ideas of what it means to be human — and these ideas have collided. The Freudian/Obergefell idea is that sexual orientation is an accurate category of personhood; LGBTQ+ is who you are rather than how you feel. After Obergefell, laws quickly were put in place to honor, affirm, and celebrate being LGBTQ+. The biblical idea, however, is that bearing the image of God according to eternal and creational categories of man or woman determines who you are. It’s Obergefell or Christ: you either celebrate and affirm your sin nature, or you repent of the culpable and unchosen sin nature you inherit in Adam.

REASON 3

Third, we have failed to love our enemies and instead pretended that our enemies are our friends.

Many of us have failed to understand that loving our enemies is an act of godly confrontation, a weapon of our warfare and a great kindness (2 Corinthians 10:4). Christian love destroys arguments and lofty opinions raised against Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Christian love doesn’t pretend that the world is a safe place or that the enemies of Christ are harmless — even if they are your daughter. Christian love seeks to make friends out of enemies through repentance and forgiveness. Christian love doesn’t delude us into believing that sin is no big deal, or that we are more merciful than God. Pretending our enemies are our friends is a cowardly cop-out.

Five Seductive Lies

These three reasons have introduced five lies into far too many evangelical churches. The five lies coalesce in rejection of biblical authority, defiance against Christ, and celebration of pride.

Lie #1: Homosexuality is a normal sexual variant.Lie #2: Being a “spiritual person” is kinder than being a biblical Christian.Lie #3: Feminism is good for the church and the world.Lie #4: Transgenderism is a normal gender variant.Lie #5: Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

These five lies rely on several false claims, but the biggest is the feminist invention that “gender” is distinct from biological sex. To create false categories of personhood, and then try to build a Christian life on top of them, is futile and foolish. As pastor Christopher J. Gordon puts it in The New Reformation Catechism on Human Sexuality, “To introduce gender as a new category of personhood, separate from the biological category of sex, in pursuit of a different sexual identity, is unnatural to the creation order and harmful for the purpose for which God made us” (13).

God promises that lies — even prominent ones that have become foundational to powerful governments and academic institutions — do not have the last word. He tells us that only the truth will set us free. As Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Jesus does not say freedom will come if you stand in the shoes of your “non-binary” grandchild by inviting a “gay Christian” ministry into your church, or if you march in the pride parade with your lesbian daughter, or if you go to your son’s gay wedding. It’s not kindness to stand in someone’s shoes when that person needs to be rescued.

Freed from the Fear of Man

The Bible calls the fear of man a snare (Proverbs 29:25) — an instrument of execution from which you cannot extricate yourself. But as my husband says a lot, the gospel sets you free from the fear of man. So, if you find yourself wondering if you are on the wrong side of history, and if you have all of this wrong, remember the blood of Christ. Remember how it bore down on demons and delivered you from hell. Remember how Jesus became a curse so that you could receive blessing. Remember that the truth of Christ sets you free, not compliance with lies.

Understand the times. Know the reasons. Defy the lies. And love your enemies well enough to tell the truth.

Not many of us are farmers. Not anymore. And relatively few of us have served as soldiers in combat. But perhaps some of us have tried our hands at competitive athletics — the kind you train for, and not just show up to play.

You may not have been aware of it at the time, but if you have been a soldier, an athlete, or a farmer, you have been challenged, like increasingly few modern people, to learn how to really work. That is, you were presented with some objective, concrete challenge — train for battle, till the field, practice for gameday — and you either put in the required effort to be successful on the field, or you grew weary, cut corners, and soon gave up. You either demonstrated you didn’t have it in you to keep straining forward, against the obstacles, to persevere and achieve the goal; or you found it, doubtless with help from coaches or teammates.

However firsthand your experience as a soldier, athlete, or farmer, Scripture stands ready to fill in, supplement, recast, or override our personal experiences (or lack thereof) and teach us a Christian work ethic — for our own joy, the good of others, and the glory of Christ. And one of the classic places to anchor in Scripture to ponder our work ethic mentions the very concrete and objective occupations of soldiering, athletics, and farming.

Like the Apostle

What Paul has in view in 2 Timothy 2:1–7 is gospel advance through disciple-making. The gospel he has entrusted to his disciple, he now charges Timothy to “entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That’s four generations in a blink: Paul to Timothy to “faithful men” to “others also” — and implied is that the “others also” will disciple still others also.

But simple as the plan for gospel multiplication may sound, the work will not be easy. It will be opposed by the world, the flesh, and the devil, almost constantly, and often at the most inconvenient times. Paul himself writes from prison. Timothy can read the writing on the wall: if such efforts dedicated to gospel advance landed Paul in jail, how long until it catches up with Timothy? But rather than shy away from the task, Paul calls his protégé to “share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” Then verses 4–6:

No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops.

Consider first, and together, the requirements of soldiers and farmers; then we’ll turn at greater length to athletics.

Like Soldiers and Farmers

Even if soldiering and farming are foreign to you, as they are to me, the broad nature of the work is plain enough.

Soldiers are men “under authority” (Matthew 8:9; Luke 7:8), who do not serve alone but alongside other soldiers (in bands or battalions). A single trained champion with a weapon may be a formidable foe — until met by hundreds or thousands trained to act as one. The power in soldiering comes from this collective force: men trained together, to act together, under the authority and clear direction of an able commander. And to do so — to both get battle-ready and stay ready — soldiers must overcome the temptation of getting “entangled in civilian pursuits.”

The soldier is one who has been called out of normal civilian life, and received into a new company, to train and stand ready to act to defend civilians. And good soldiers, Paul says, aim “to please the one who enlisted” them. They deny themselves the immediate appeals and comforts of civilian life to endure in their calling and, in the end, enjoy greater, more enduring satisfaction than abandoning their mission for trivialities.

“Maturity comes through training, not through coasting or indulging desires for comfort.”

Similarly, though distinctly, farming requires the hard work of both foresight and physical labor. Farmers plan, till and sow, weed, wait with patience for rain and growth, and in the end, engage in the arduous labor of harvesting. And in doing so, the farmer holds in his hands, and enjoys, the reward, as he ought: “the first share of the crops.” Farmers have much to teach us, not only about hard work, and anticipating rewards, but also patience: “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient” (James 5:7–8).

Like Athletes

Paul in particular may have more to teach us through athletics than we first expect. In addition to 2 Timothy 2:5, he takes up athletic imagery in 1 Corinthians 9:24–27; Philippians 3:13–14; 1 Timothy 4:7–8; and 2 Timothy 4:7. Hebrews also (not written by Paul but someone in his circle like Luke) draws on athletic imagery (Hebrews 5:13–14; 12:1–2, 11–13). The lesson in 2 Timothy 2 is consistent with the portrait of athletics elsewhere in Paul’s letters and in Hebrews.

First, maturity comes through training, not through coasting or indulging desires for immediate comfort. That is, even before the competition, even before the discomfort of enduring on race day, is the obstacle of training. Effective training requires discomfort (Hebrews 12:11). The body is not conditioned by leisure but by stress and strain, and especially through persisting in discomfort. Both body and mind are “trained by constant practice” (Hebrews 5:14), leading to maturity. “Those of us who are mature,” Paul writes, “straining forward to what lies ahead . . . press on toward the goal for the prize” (Philippians 3:13–15). All training, whether bodily or spiritual, requires some measure of toil and striving (1 Timothy 4:7–10).

Second, then, in the competition itself, athletes press on through weariness, frustration, discouragement, and pain. Learning to press through and endure discomfort in training readies the body, and will, to press on through resistance on race day. Verse 5 highlights a specific temptation to overcome: cutting corners. “An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.” Whether in training or competition, the successful athlete knows that his subjective desires do not rule over the objective rules of the contest. He is not bigger than the race or the game. He cannot train or compete as he pleases, according to his momentary wishes, but must exercise self-control. This is Paul’s own testimony in 1 Corinthians 9:24–27:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

Third, and most significantly, across the New Testament passages, the key to enduring discomfort is looking to the reward. Whether in training or in the event itself, Paul and Hebrews emphasize the reward, the crown, the prize — a vital element that makes the lesson for work ethic particularly Christian. Paul explicitly commends the prize: “So run that you may obtain it” (1 Corinthians 9:24). The imperishable crown that awaits is not icing on the cake but the reward to be kept in mind, and remembered, to keep us going when met with obstacles and resistance. Paul himself, as he comes to the end of his “race,” is not ashamed (but intentional) to draw attention to the reward, which, through anticipation, has fueled his perseverance:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:7–8)

But not only Paul. Where did he learn it? No one teaches us to look to the reward like Jesus, in his teaching, his example, and more.

Like Jesus

In his teaching, Jesus again and again draws our attention to the reward that is “from your Father” and “great in heaven.” In Matthew 5–6 alone, he explicitly mentions the reward some nine times (and then does so again in 10:41–42; see also Mark 9:41 and Luke 6:23, 35). Perhaps it was this plain, almost hedonistic thread that prompted Paul to capture an aspect of Christ’s teaching as “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Yet every bit as clear as Jesus’s teaching is the power of his example. The climactic eleventh chapter of Hebrews turns our attention, several times, to the coming reward (10:35; 11:6, 26) and then presents Christ himself as the paradigm of pressing on, and persisting through pain, by looking to the reward:

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1–2)

“Christ’s perfect grit comes first, which then makes our imperfect but growing effort possible.”

When we look to Jesus, we look to one who himself endured the greatest of pain and shame — the cross — by looking to his reward: for the joy that was set before him, that is, being seated at his Father’s right hand. He finished his course, looking to the reward. And so too, in like fashion, and looking to him, Hebrews would have us run our race with endurance, not grow weary or fainthearted, but lift our drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees (Hebrews 12:1, 3, 12).

Like a Christian

But Jesus not only taught us to look to the reward, and then practiced what he taught. In finishing his course, and achieving the victory of the cross, he secured us, who have faith in him, as his own. Mark this: we do not earn him with our holy grit, but he earned us with his. We press on, as Paul did, “because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). Don’t reverse the order. Slavery or freedom hangs on the sequence. Christ’s perfect grit comes first, which then makes our imperfect but growing effort possible. Or, you might say, Christ’s full acceptance comes first; then he goes to work on our work ethic.

So, a common thread links the work ethic of soldiers, athletes, farmers, Christ himself, and Christians alike: we recognize and own the particulars of our calling; we exercise self-control to overcome the immediate desires of the flesh; we endure in discomfort, with God’s help, for the reward, the greater joy promised at the end, which streams into the present to give meaning and strength to keep straining and striving.

And what makes it particularly Christian, and not simply human, is this: we do all our pressing on, from fullness and security of soul, not emptiness and insecurity, knowing that Christ Jesus has made me his own.

“Not feeling like it.” In the daily pursuit of Christ, I fear no phrase has hindered me more.

A few moments’ reflection reminds me of the silliness of such a feelings-based spirituality. A farmer will find nothing at harvest if he sets aside his plow with a wave of “not feeling like it.” A pianist will end her performances embarrassed if she takes a “not feeling like it” attitude to her practices. A couple will greet their anniversary with an unromantic sigh if they allow “not feeling like it” to govern their marriage.

Yet how often have I sidestepped habits of grace with a subtle, unspoken “not feeling like it” — and have expected to somehow still mature in faith and love and feel the spontaneous joy of the Spirit?

Any number of reasons stand ready to endorse the lazy slouch. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.” “I have so much to do today anyway.” “I’ll get more from Scripture when I feel like reading it.” And perhaps the most common: “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, today’s spiritual potential — today’s comfort, joy, power, life — disappears on the winds of whim.

Reclaiming Routine

To some, the word routine carries the stiffness of stale bread and the rot of dead plants, the stuffiness of library books never opened and attics dusty with age. The very thought of routine spirituality — planned, scheduled, disciplined — seems to undermine the ministry of the life-giving, freedom-bestowing Spirit. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17) — and where the spirit of routine is (we may think), there is bondage.

The dichotomy, however, is self-imposed, self-imagined. If routine smells stale to us, the problem lies in our own sniffer. No doubt, routine can be made stale and dead, as any flower can be trampled underfoot or any sky cloaked with smog. But routine itself remains good, the friend of freedom and joy.

We might call any number of witnesses to testify on behalf of routine: Daniel, who “got down on his knees” and prayed “three times a day” (Daniel 6:10), whether lions waited or not; Peter and John, who went to the temple “at the hour of prayer” even after Pentecost brought the Spirit (Acts 3:1); or our Lord Jesus himself, who spontaneously defeated the devil’s lies, after fasting for forty days, because he had routinely memorized Deuteronomy (Matthew 4:1–10).

But perhaps the most striking ode to routine appears in Psalm 119.

Routines Like Riverbeds

None who read Psalm 119 would diagnose its author as dry; none who take up his psalm can sing it in hushed tones. The man sounds as alive as a spring sparrow, as exuberant as the exclamations in so many of his sentences. He isn’t always joyful, but oh, how he feels, freely and spontaneously. The whole psalm is a living pulse.

“Blessed are you, O Lord!” he shouts (verse 12). His soul, like his song, “is consumed with longing for your rules at all times” (verse 20). Both midnight and early morning may find him awake (verses 62, 147), too ecstatic to sleep, for “your testimonies are my delight” (verse 24). His hates and his loves burn too bright to be hidden (verses 104, 119).

“Under God, routines carve riverbeds in the soul where the streams of spontaneous love run deep.”

We might imagine such spontaneous affection lives beyond our reach, the possession of a super-spiritual personality. Pay attention to the psalm, however, and you may notice something that rivals the intensity of his feelings: the consistency of his routine. Scripture poured out of the man’s heart only because he had previously, even fastidiously, “stored” it there (verse 11). “I set your rules before me” was the watchword of his life, no matter the day (verse 30). With a devotion that might make us uncomfortable, he declares, “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous rules” (verse 164).

Disciplined memorization, daily meditation, planned prayer and praise — under God, such routines carve riverbeds in the soul where the streams of spontaneous love run deep. They raise windmills in the heart to catch the breezes of the Spirit. Routines cannot give life of themselves, but they do invite life with all the readiness of a field furrowed, planted, and waiting for the rain.

String and Tune

Psalm 119 (and the rest of God’s word) gives us a robust category for spontaneous spirituality, for prayer and praise that fill the nets of ordinary moments and threaten to sink us for joy. But we have little hope of experiencing spontaneous devotion apart from the unspectacular business of routine. Daily we let down our nets; daily we take them up again; daily we wait for Jesus to bring the catch.

As we consider what routines might serve spontaneity best, we might helpfully think in two broad patterns: morning devotions and midday retreats. If morning devotions string our guitars, midday retreats retune them. If morning devotions inflate our hearts toward heaven, midday retreats give the bump that keeps us skyward. If morning devotions plant a flag for Christ on the hill of dawn, midday retreats beat off the afternoon foes ascending the slopes.

Morning Devotions

In all likelihood, we learned morning devotions as part of Discipleship 101. Repent, believe, and read your Bible every morning. But for that very reason, we can forget just how powerful and formative this pattern of seeking God can be.

There is a reason the psalmists prayed “in the morning” (Psalm 5:3), and sought deep satisfaction “in the morning” (Psalm 90:14), and declared God’s steadfast love “in the morning” (Psalm 92:2). There is a reason, too, we read of Jesus “rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark,” to commune with his Father (Mark 1:35). The morning’s first thoughts and words may not set an iron trajectory for the rest of the day, but a trajectory they do indeed set.

“We have little hope of experiencing spontaneous devotion apart from the unspectacular business of routine.”

Though we have new hearts in Christ, we do not always awake ready to live new. Our old man awakes with us, clinging close; Vanity Fair opens early; the devil waits, winking. Apart from some kind of Godward morning routine, then, we are likely to express throughout the day not spontaneous praise, but spontaneous pride; not spontaneous gratitude, but spontaneous grumbling. And so, in the morning, the wise want the first voice they hear to be God’s. They want the first words they speak to be prayer.

We will not always leave our morning devotions deeply moved. But if done prayerfully and earnestly, consistently and expectantly, then our devotions will set a tone for the hours ahead. We will walk into our day with guitar stringed, more ready to play a song of praise.

Midday Retreats

As valuable as morning devotions can be, however, souls like ours often need more to maintain a lively, spontaneous communion with God throughout the day. As the hours pass by, our strings lose their tune; our hearts drop altitude; our flags wave opposed. So, God gives us another pattern to live by:

These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6–9)

We are too weak, too forgetful, to live by morning devotions alone. As we walk through the day, we need promises wrapped round our wrists like watches. We need to wear truth like eyeglasses. We need a world adorned with the words of God.

Signs, frontlets, doorposts — such words sanction our creativity. They invite us, for example, to sanctify space, writing God’s words on mirrors and walls, car dashboards and desks. Some might replace their phone’s screen saver with a promise from the morning’s reading; others might write down a verse and slip it in their pocket. A friend in college, taking Deuteronomy 6:8 literally, sometimes drew the armor of God on his hands, a vivid reminder of the day’s spiritual warfare.

These words also invite us to sanctify time. Many would find help from retreating once or twice a day, even for a few minutes, to find a silent spot, hear again God’s words, and cast the day’s accumulated burdens on him. We might also benefit from simply pausing briefly before meetings or new tasks to settle our souls in Christ.

Finally, these words invite us to sanctify conversation. “You . . . shall talk of them,” God says — and not just in some places occasionally, but everywhere often. God means for his words to infiltrate our small talk and passing comments, our summaries of the day and our pillow-time reflections. Such conversations might start with a simple “What did you read today?” to spouse or roommate or friend.

However they come, midday retreats offer a pause and parenthesis in the day’s chaos, an oasis in the wilderness of tasks and temptations, a small Sabbath in the middle of packed afternoons, retuning our hearts to the morning’s song.

Revived and Rejoicing

The next time “not feeling like it” threatens to derail a good routine, we might confront our feelings with the words of David:

The law of the Lord is perfect,     reviving the soul; . . .the precepts of the Lord are right,     rejoicing the heart. (Psalm 19:7–8)

God’s word revives the soul and rejoices the heart — which suggests we will sometimes come to God’s word with souls asleep and hearts unfeeling. We will sit before an open Bible not wanting to read or pray, perhaps wanting to do anything else instead. And right there, in the midst of a difficult routine, God may revive our drooping feelings with a word.

When we allow “not feeling like it” to keep us from routine, we are like a man who avoids medicine because he doesn’t feel healthy, or who avoids fire because he doesn’t feel warm, or who avoids food because he doesn’t feel full. But when we engage in routine anyway — prayerfully and expectantly — we may walk away revived and rejoicing, our souls alive with spontaneous praise, “not feeling like it” nowhere to be found.

For much of the past few years, I have been reading and thinking about the formative power of Internet technology on our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual lives. As I’ve shared with people the ideas in my book Digital Liturgies, one question comes up more often than any other: “What do we do about this?”

This is a challenging question not only because identifying problems is easier than developing practical solutions, but also because our first instinct in talking about the effects of digital life is often to attempt the impossible: turn back the clock, put the electronic Pandora back in her box, stand athwart technological history, and yell “Stop!” Even if we could summon the will to delete all our accounts and get rid of all our devices, we would not change the kind of world we and our neighbors inhabit. Faithfulness to Jesus cannot and does not mean time travel. “So,” people will ask confusedly, “what should we do?”

My answer is that we should think not (primarily) in terms of retreat, but in terms of resistance. The bad news is that the thought patterns of the web are so embedded into modern life that we cannot effectively avoid them. The good news is that the same responsiveness to the power of habit that makes online addiction so powerful also makes analog resistance effective. If God created human beings as physical creatures who must inhabit a physical, objective world to live as he made us to live, then this inhabiting of the real world is not a “hack” we must manufacture, but something deeply consonant with our created nature.

Analog resistance simply means practicing habits that accord with our fundamental needs as God-created persons. Let me, then, offer three of these needs and three corresponding habits.

Need #1: Permanent Words

The Internet age is an onslaught of words. The average person in the United States wakes up and, while sleep still lingers in the eyes, reaches for a glass rectangle that will show new words. These words may be about the latest scandal in Washington, DC, or the newest gadget from Silicon Valley, or a life-changing update from an employer, a friend, or a family member. A person can consume all three types of messages before rising from their pillow. There is no limit to the kind of words a digital age can speak to us.

Because the content of our minds deeply shapes the posture of our hearts, the abundance of online words creates an urgent need for something permanent: a bedrock of truth against which the latest novelties, temptations, and anxieties crash and shatter into the ephemera that they are.

Habit 1: Meditate daily on Scripture.

Scripture is that bedrock. The inspired words of the Bible, directly from the throne room of the Creator of the universe, fulfill a human need for permanence. Imagine waking up every single day in a different bed, next to a different person, in a different part of the world, to go do a different job. While the novelty might sound exciting at first, our hearts would quickly despair of the lack of anything solid. Why do we not expect a similar spiritual despair when our day-in, day-out thought life is dominated by this exact kind of transience?

Daily Scripture meditation is a habit of resistance against the rootless digital age. As we return again and again to words that never change, the presence and promises of Jesus will build foundations that a day’s worth of media intake cannot shake. The latest controversy that beckons for outrage will seem less important than the command to consider truth in calm silence (Proverbs 17:27–28). The newest reason for anxiety will seem less ominous as we consider the saints who have gone before us into worse peril, and who never abandoned the race (Hebrews 12:1). Resist the meaningless angst of content culture with permanent words.

Need #2: Godward Attention

The importance of where we give our attention is a subtly significant theme in Scripture. Consider how Moses commanded the people of Israel not only to remember God’s word, but to observe festivals, rituals, and dietary and clothing requirements that served as constant reminders of who they were and where they came from (Deuteronomy 11:18–19; 12:10–12). The wisdom literature in particular prioritizes the skill of listening to righteous instruction (Proverbs 4:20), and the author of Hebrews admonishes us to “pay much closer attention to” the gospel (Hebrews 2:1).

Attention is a finite resource. Contrary to what we often tell ourselves, “multitasking” isn’t really a thing; in order to really hear someone or attend to something, we have to take attention away from other things (at least temporarily). In the online age, not only is our attention spread thin; it is actively harvested and colonized by digital merchants. The fight to put our attention in the right place is an upstream swim against the currents of online culture.

Habit 2: Adopt intentional structures.

In his excellent book The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch advises readers to do more than resolve to use technology better; additionally, we should implement physical structures in our lives that make wise uses of attention easier and unwise uses harder. That may mean leaving your phone in a separate room at night to make it harder to reach for in the morning. It may mean relocating computer use to a central family room instead of individual bedrooms, not just for accountability but to cut off the power of digital isolation. It may mean using apps during the work or school day that block not just inappropriate content but time-wasting and addictive content. The point is that the way we use online technology should tell the truth about what’s most important.

Need #3: Peaceful Rest

In his lovely little book And So to Bed: A Biblical View of Sleep, Adrian Reynolds observes that sleep is, theologically speaking, a reminder of our mortality. Our sleep resembles death, yet the Bible clearly says that God “gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). How can something that makes us vulnerable and stops our productive work be a gift? Because neither our sleep nor even our death can stop the sovereign God from caring for us and his world. Even as our mental and physical busyness stops, God’s power and love continue.

Habit 3: Take regular breaks.

In the digital age, we can embrace two vital expressions of rest-as-resistance. The first is, simply, the deliberate choice to sleep instead of consuming. The founder of Netflix famously said that the company’s number one competitor was sleep. This was more than a tongue-in-cheek moment. There is something in the nature of digital entertainments that entices us to ignore sleep and keep streaming or scrolling instead. That’s why some are referring to the emerging generation’s accumulating “sleep debt” — a deficit that manifests in poor physical and emotional health.

Do some self-examination. Do you wake up feeling exhausted? Are you often too tired to do your job well, or help someone in need, or parent your children with patience and grace? Ask whether your phone or streaming habits are preventing you from savoring God’s good gift of sleep.

The second expression of resistance is simply abstaining from online consumption for a given amount of time. The best way to do this is with someone else’s help. For example, only my wife knows my Twitter password. I cannot log myself in. Not only does this naturally throttle how much time I spend on Twitter, but it makes my use of Twitter transparent to my wife. She knows how often I ask to log on and can remind me of commitments that I’ve made. This isn’t a magic cure-all, but it has made a profound difference for me.

Let your digital consumption stop regularly so you can be reminded of the world and people outside your screen. Of the habits of resistance listed here, this one has had the biggest effect on me in the quickest span of time. Particularly for one who often feels like he’s drowning in the digital liturgies, disciplined times of genuine restfulness are among the most powerful means of resistance. Learn to shut off the digital world and enjoy God’s good gift of rest, and as you do, you’ll find a level of calm and freedom you may not have known was possible. And let this token of your Savior’s love reawaken you to the most precious realities in the world.

On a recent ordinary afternoon, the sight of my daughter engrossed in a game of soccer moved me to prayer. At first, as I watched her fly across the field with her ponytail streaming behind her, her face flushed with determination, I swelled with gratitude for her natural instinct to live exuberantly in the body God has given her. Thank you, Lord, for her contentment.

In the very next breath, however, worry flooded me. She’s eight, I thought. How long will her confidence last? Will she still race against the wind when her straight lines bend into curves? As her body changes, will she revel in our Lord’s craftsmanship — or will she curl inward, lifting her eyes only to cast awkward glances at the mirror?

I lifted up a new prayer: Father God, please let her continue to see the body that you’ve given her as a gift. Help her to live in her womanly body as one loved and redeemed. Help her, no matter how the years change her, to know she belongs body and soul to you.

She Walks in Beauty?

Throughout the ages, artists have celebrated the elegance and loveliness of the female form in verse, paint, and marble. “She walks in beauty,” Lord Byron famously wrote, “like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.” While such lofty praise tantalizes and flatters, in our fallen world the realities of living in a womanly body are far more complicated.

When God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, he ordained that one of the most fundamental experiences of womanhood would be painful: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). There was a physical, corporeal consequence to our spiritual rebellion. Whether we bear children or not, that curse permeates life in a female body.

“Our bodies echo God’s good work in uniquely creating women to nurture life.”

The first inklings of trouble often surface in adolescence. As little girls, we race and climb like the boys, and for a few years we may even stand a head taller, thanks to our jump on the growth curve. Then puberty hits, and suddenly we swell in unexpected places. Clothes don’t fit quite right. Pimples dot noses, and hair darkens once-bare skin. In the face of unstoppable changes, insecurities bubble up and wash away our comfort in the body God has given us.

While boys also stumble through adolescence, research suggests that the toll on girls is especially high. One UK study found that almost half of surveyed adolescent girls reported frequent anxiety about body image, compared with only one-fourth of boys. The finding mirrors previous research suggesting that girls experience more dissatisfaction with their appearance and weight. Unsurprisingly, eating disorders are more than twice as prevalent among girls as boys.

Groaning in the Body

The complexities of life in a female body don’t end with our teenage years. If God blesses us with children, we marvel at how he has equipped the female body to sustain and nourish life — yet we do so while swamped with pain, exhaustion, and insecurity. Pregnancy breeds anticipation and wonder — along with aching joints, three months of nausea, another three months of insomnia, and countless other discomforts as our bodies stretch and groan. (My personal favorite was a repeatedly dislocating rib, a gift from my daughter in the third trimester.)

Then there’s the actual birthing process. Though lauded as magical on social media, in reality it’s painful, frightening, and fraught with danger for ourselves, our babies, and our families. When those long-awaited newborns enter our arms, we cry tears of elation but also face new trials. If we can’t nurse, we feel like failures. The continuous needs of an infant deplete us. Tumultuous shifts in our hormones can leave us feeling desolate, even depressed.

We stumble through motherhood, vocation, or both for decades, and then menopause hits. Our hair thins. Lines reflecting a tendency to laugh or worry permanently crease our faces. The baby weight that we promised to lose becomes a permanent fixture on our hips. A laundry list of medical problems piles up alongside a litany of advertisements that guarantee shiny hair and supple skin. Amid the deluge, we worry that we’re unattractive, undesirable — and no longer womanly.

So, while we can say with Lord Byron that beauty marks our God-given bodies, the mundane and awkward features of living in them confirm that we still walk in a sin-stricken world.

Wonderfully Made

Amid the mire of culture and social media, our aching muscles and unwieldy hormones, we can lose sight of God’s goodness. The truth is that, while fallen, our bodies remain good even as we age and change because God made them good (Psalm 139:13–14). He created Eve because Adam needed a helper: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). God’s call for people to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) hearkens back to his design of women, whom he created to support new life.

The value of our bodies, therefore, resides not in what we accomplish by our own hands — not in the litheness of our limbs or in the firmness of our skin — but rather in what he has done, and continues to do through us.

Even if the Lord ordains that we remain childless, our bodies echo his good work in uniquely creating women to nurture life and to complement our male counterparts. Our minds work differently from those of men; while individuals vary, women overall have greater deftness in fine motor coordination, language skills, and memory, abilities that equip us to teach and guide those in our midst. While men have more muscle mass, our muscles more readily resist fatigue and recover at a faster rate, and we’re less prone to the effects of sleep deprivation. A woman’s body can endure the long, hard hours often required to care for others.

Even more important than such differences, however, is how God has made men and women similar: he created both in his image, for his glory (Genesis 1:26). And he has redeemed both through the blood of his beloved Son, who is making all things new (Revelation 21:5).

Means to Worship

Christ’s death and resurrection transform our relationship with every aspect of life, including our bodies. Rather than something to hide, bemoan, or idolize, the body is a means to worship. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Paul writes. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

As women redeemed, we aim for modesty, for holiness, and for good stewardship of our feminine vessels (Ephesians 4:22–24; 1 Timothy 2:9–10). For our call “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Catechism puts it, manifests itself in the way we use our bodies, not just in how we focus our minds and hearts.

“Rather than something to hide, bemoan, or idolize, the body is a means to worship.”

We can, as Paul entreats us, “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God,” resisting conformity to the world and committing instead to the renewal of our minds — and bodies (Romans 12:1–2). Rather than carnal spectacles for others to ogle, our bodies are godly gifts, entrusted to us so that we might worship him, glorify him, and walk in the good works that he has already prepared for us (Ephesians 2:10).

Sure Hope for Frail Bodies

For the Christian woman weary of life’s physical toll, this news is cause for rejoicing. Our bodies remain good no matter the season of life through which we tread, no matter how we sag and ache, because Christ has made us new. The worth of our form hinges not on fashion trends, but on God’s one and only Son — who gave his life so that we might live, even as our bodies age.

In him we are never misshapen, withering, or out of style. Rather, we are members of “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

As we talk with our daughters, whether with little girls racing across a soccer field or with teens scrutinizing themselves in a mirror, the gospel informs our conversations and infuses them with hope. Jesus redeems not only our souls, but our bodies, and so we reassure them that their shifting contours have a God-given purpose. If Christ has made them new, they can shut out the imagined reproach of others and instead embrace their identity in him.

No matter how awkward they feel, they were made women for a purpose. No matter how the world would chastise or pressure them, they are redeemed and made alive in Christ. And as image-bearers of the one true God, the female body in which they move and strive and love is very good (Genesis 1:31).

Audio Transcript

This week we’re talking with Pastor John about book reading. On Monday we looked at the seven ways books have impacted your life, Pastor John. You gave us a brief theology of reading as well, looking at that incredible text in Ephesians 3:4. As you were talking about those seven ways that books have changed your life, I could hear you eager to give specific recommendations. So, let’s do the who today. Whom do you read? That’s today’s question from a listener named Sam. “Hello, Pastor John and Tony! In a recent Solid Joys devotional I listened to, Pastor John, you mentioned the practice of reading ‘rich doctrinal books.’ What would you consider to be your top ten ‘rich doctrinal books’ that have helped you grow over the decades?”

Well, I have an awful time answering “top” questions, or “most” questions. But I can answer ten rich doctrinal books that have made a walloping impact on my life — whether I leave one out that’s in the top ten, my memory’s not good enough to say.

Here’s what C.S. Lewis said about our longing for the heart — our hearts — to sing with joy over what we see about God in our devotions. He said,

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than devotional books. And I rather suspect that the same experience awaits others. I believe that many who find “nothing happens,” when they sit down or kneel down to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden when they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. (“On the Reading of Old Books,” 223)

My response to that is, “Well, you can leave the pipe aside.” You don’t want to get mouth cancer on your way to devotions. Leave the pipe aside, but do pick up the pencil, and a doctrinally rich book, and see what happens. So, here are ten authors who have done this for me — made my heart sing because of what they showed me of God and his ways from the Bible.

1. Four Books from Jonathan Edwards

No historic theologian has shaped me more. I’ll mention four books: The End for Which God Created the World, Religious Affections, Essay on the Trinity, and Freedom of the Will. One of those showed me the nature of God as three in one. Another showed me the goal of God to glorify himself in all that he does. Another showed me that my affections are essential to the worship and obedience of God. And the fourth showed me the compatibility between God’s absolute sovereignty and my human accountability before him.

2. Three Books from John Owen

This little book The Mortification of Sin — eighty or ninety pages — takes us into the depths of how God overcomes sin in our lives. Communion with God shows us what it actually means to have fellowship with each member of the Trinity. And The Death of Death in the Death of Christ clarifies the glory of particular redemption — namely, that Christ really did secure the new covenant blessings for God’s elect.

3. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God

Crossway just put out a brand-new double-volume edition of this. That book — that giant 1,500 pages in two volumes — sat on my bedside table for (I can’t remember exactly) a couple of years, and I soaked with just two or three pages at night before I went to bed. I soaked in God’s holiness, his eternity, his immutability, his patience, his goodness. Someone asked Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages, “Why don’t people love God more?” And he said, “Because they don’t know him.” Charnock is a great remedy for that ailment.

4. J.I. Packer, Knowing God

If you don’t want to start with a two-volume, 1,500-page book, then start with J.I. Packer, Knowing God (250 pages instead of 1,500). The first sentence goes like this: “As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God.” Packer knows God is infinite, and he’s finite. The chasm between him and God is wider than the universe. Packer is a good, humble guide. He’s not presumptuous, but he is profound in his own special, accessible way. So, start with Packer if Charnock sounds daunting.

5. John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied

I learned my Calvinism not from Calvin, but mainly from Romans, and Ephesians, and Philippians, and the Gospel of John. But at certain points along the way in my theological pilgrimage, a book would come along that put so many pieces together in a beautiful, coherent way that I found them extremely helpful.

“Even if you read these books in your chair, not on your knees, be kneeling in your heart.”

The very title Redemption Accomplished and Applied still functions for me like a bright light. God accomplished my redemption on the cross once for all, decisively. It’s over, it’s done, it’s finished, it’s accomplished: propitiation, redemption. And then he sovereignly, at age six, applies that to my life — justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification — by giving me faith, bringing me to himself.

So, after Packer, go to Murray.

6. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

You might not think that this interesting story, which children can enjoy, a fascinating allegory, is doctrinally rich, but it is. One of the things about an allegory is that you can read it at different levels. It’s just an interesting story with monsters and dangers — or you can read it at the profound level of how the Christian life really works under the sovereignty of God.

7. J.C. Ryle, Holiness

One of the great strengths of this book that makes it so doctrinally rich is that he keeps in clear view the difference between justification and sanctification, and how they relate to each other in the quest for holiness. It also has the hidden benefit of being 150 years old, so that we can see — I was just glancing at my notes yesterday — how some of the challenges to holiness that we face, and we think are new, are really not new or peculiar to our age.

8. D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God

This is only 84 pages, but it goes a long way to keep us from talking in sentimental nonsense about the love of God. Almost everybody in the post-Christian West thinks of God as more or less lenient and kind. They bring their conceptions to the Bible, and when the Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), they fill it up with meaning that they already had in their head, which may be completely wrong. Don Carson helps us see what God is really like in what he revealed about his love.

9. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Sermon on the Mount

This two-volume collection of sermons on Jesus’s most famous sermon opened my eyes in the summer of 1968 to how doctrinal preaching could set the heart on fire. When I read it, I was 22 years old, and I thought, “That’s how I’d like to preach someday.”

10. Two Books from George Ladd

I’ll mention George Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament and The Presence of the Future. Dr. Ladd was my New Testament professor in seminary and introduced a whole generation of American evangelicals to the fact that the New Testament is eschatological cover to cover, meaning that Israel’s long-awaited kingdom of God has already arrived and yet is not entirely here. He showed us that the “mystery of the kingdom” that you read about in the Gospels is fulfillment without consummation — that’s the mystery.

The kingdom of God is already here in some senses, and it is not yet here in other senses. And the tension between the already of the kingdom and the not yet of the kingdom affects everything in the Bible, everything in life. So, eschatology is not just a final chapter about end times in the systematic-theology textbook, but a pervasive reality touching everything in the New Testament and in life.

Read on Your Knees

Those are my ten suggested authors and some of their doctrinally rich books. Remember, as you read, to be like B.B. Warfield. When he was criticized that “ten minutes on your knees would give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books,” he replied, “What! . . . Than ten hours over your books, on your knees?” Even if you read these books in your chair, not on your knees, be kneeling in your heart. And then the rich doctrine will make the heart sing.

Once upon a time, you loved to write. Maybe as a child you spent hours in your room, scribbling imaginative stories. Or maybe you picked up poetry in high school. Or maybe during college you took refuge in a private journal, your prayers and outpoured hopes finding their home on paper.

But then somewhere along the way, the joy faded. Maybe you’re an undergrad, and though college seemed to promise a writers’ Eden, academic essays have left you feeling exiled somewhere east. Or maybe the joy left through a different door. Either way, you have lost some of your pleasure in pen and keyboard — and you long to have it back. Whether you write for an audience (letters, articles, sermons) or simply for yourself (journal entries, poems, prayers), you want to say once again, with Eric Liddell-like joy, “God made me to write — and when I write, I feel his pleasure.”

So, when your delight has faded, and your fingers seem to have lost their skill, how might you rediscover the joy of writing? As one who has rediscovered such joy several times over, I offer six suggestions.

1. See the seasons.

“For everything there is a season,” the Preacher tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:1). And everything includes the rhythms of the writing life. We might wish writing were like San Diego, sunny and seventies all year round — but writing is far more like my Minnesota home, with its brilliant summers and barren winters.

If you write regularly for long, you likely will discover that seasons are a normal part of the writing life. Unlike our Lord, who “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), we who write are fickle and changeable creatures. We pass through seasons.

In some seasons, the words come quickly and joyously; your fingers can’t keep up with your cascading thoughts. Daily, even sometimes hourly, ideas pop into your head that make you want to sit down and lose yourself on paper. But in other seasons, you stare desolately at a blank word-processing screen, that obnoxious little cursor blinking failure in your face. Or you finish writing something, read it over, and wonder how such a grand idea could wear such tattered words.

“If in your writing you aim to be the best, or to be better than so-and-so, your joy likely will die and stay dead.”

Getting some extended experience with writing helps in this regard. I am still somewhat young in my writing, but I’ve been hitting keys for long enough that I don’t get as discouraged when I pass through a writing winter. The cold used to blow right into my authorial bones. When writing turned from a joy to a struggle, when it felt like I had to fight for every word, I wondered whether this was simply my new reality. I might as well hang up my keyboard and find a better use for my time.

But time and again, the season passed. Winter branches budded once more. And so now, when cold seasons come, I learn to treat them like a Midwestern January: not as a reason to give up, but as a trial to endure in hope.

The seasons of writing, however, are in one respect quite different from normal seasons. Whereas a normal winter will pass if only you wait long enough, a writing winter usually requires something more: not only that we wait, but that we keep writing while we wait. Which brings us to our second lesson.

2. Embrace routine.

Let’s switch the image now from seasons to agriculture. C.S. Lewis, in his Reflections on the Psalms, addresses the familiar scenario in the Christian life when you come to your time of Bible reading, prayer, or Sunday worship, and you find more duty than delight in your heart. We may feel tempted in such moments to forsake duty altogether as we wait for a more willing spirit, but Lewis differs: “When we carry out our ‘religious duties,’” he writes, “we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready” (97).

When by faith you go ahead and read, pray, or gather with God’s people, even when you meet great resistance within, you are like a farmer digging channels and waiting for water. You cannot make the water come, but you can dig and pray and wait on God (Galatians 6:9). And a similar dynamic holds true in the writing life.

It would be hard to overstress the importance of discipline, habit, and routine in writing, and especially during the driest seasons. We may need to take breaks, or experiment with different kinds of writing (more on that later), but trying to rediscover joy in writing without writing is like trying to rediscover joy in God without Bible reading or prayer.

You will find this advice from authors all over the place if you pay attention, even from those authors for whom we might assume writing comes naturally all the time. One of my favorite riffs on this theme comes from the short-story writer Flannery O’Connor:

I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. . . . I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there. (The Habit of Being, 242)

Like O’Connor, the best writers typically discover and rediscover their creativity within the tight bounds of routine. So, even if current struggles allow only for a brief routine, dig a little every day, or every other day, or whatever the right pace might be, and wait for God to bring the rain.

3. Kill ungodly comparison.

Sometimes, as we’ve seen, we lose joy in writing simply because the season has changed. We find ourselves in a writing winter whose coming we had no more control over than a cold front. Other times, however, we lose joy because we ourselves have allowed something to steal it. And among those somethings, one of the more common is ungodly comparison.

I say ungodly comparison because comparison can indeed be put to good use. We do well to read others’ writing, celebrate where they excel, and seek to learn what we can. But there’s another kind of comparison, a devilish kind, where we cannot rest satisfied unless we see ourselves as better than the others in view.

In an email newsletter from a few years ago, the writer Jonathan Rogers contrasted two events that took place on the same weekend in his city of Nashville: the NFL draft and a running marathon. Both events took competition seriously, yet they did so in strikingly different ways.

In the draft, the players competed according to a hierarchical orientation, an orientation highly attuned to who gets drafted first, second, third, in what round and in what order. You can be an all-star athlete and yet leave the draft feeling insecure because you were chosen second rather than first. In the marathon, however, most of the runners competed according to a territorial orientation: they ran not against the other runners, but against their own personal resistance. A few ran for first place, to be sure, but most ran for a personal record, or just to finish.

Healthy writing, Rogers writes, is far more like a marathon than a draft; it has a territorial, not a hierarchical, orientation:

If you’re a writer, forget about your place in the hierarchy. . . . What you have is a territory — a little patch of ground that is yours to cultivate. Your patch of ground is your unique combination of experiences and perspective and voice and loves and longings and community. Tend that patch of ground. Work hard. Be disciplined. Get better. Your patch of ground and your community are worth it.

If in your writing you aim to be the best, or to be better than so-and-so — a temptation common to man — your joy likely will die and stay dead. But if you see yourself as someone with a certain territory, a unique set of experiences and perspectives and gifts, then you won’t worry as much when others excel you. Of course they will. Instead, you will devote yourself to your little patch of ground for the benefit of the people around you and the glory of God.

Or to use a Pauline image, you and other writers are less like competitors and more like members of a body. If you are an eye, be the very best eye you can be; write in a way that only an eye like you can. And then resist wondering whether you as an eye write better than the hand over there. Let the hand do its handish things, while you do your eyeish things, and give thanks for each other.

4. Word-craft wherever you can.

Somewhere along the way, many of us pick up the idea that academic or professional writing equals boring writing. Maybe that’s how you lost your joy in writing in the first place: you used to write short stories, and now you write essays in MLA style, or project reports that follow a template. So, even if you find the content of your writing interesting, perhaps even worshipful, the style feels technical and sterile.

In her book Stylish Academic Writing, Helen Sword discusses the gap between what most writing books advise and what most academic and professional writing looks like. She lists the various writing virtues you would find in the best style books, like using clear, precise language; engaging readers’ attention through examples; avoiding opaque jargon; and favoring active verbs and concrete nouns. Then she writes,

Pick up a peer-reviewed journal in just about any academic discipline and what will you find? Impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined above. There is a massive gap between what most readers consider to be good writing and what academics typically produce and publish. (3)

And I would add, speaking from my own experience, the same holds true for what academic students and young professionals typically produce and publish.

But believe it or not, you will find no rule that says you cannot include interesting vocabulary or arresting turns of phrase just because your writing is going to get a grade on it or be tucked away in a corporate file cabinet. So, why not treat your academic or professional assignments — or for that matter, your emails and text messages — as opportunities to grow in word craft? Why not throw in a metaphor or trade a to-be verb for something vivid and surprising? You might find yourself enjoying the writing process more, and I can guarantee your professor or boss will enjoy reading it more.

So, “whatever you do, work heartily” (Colossians 3:23). And whatever you write, write creatively.

5. Begin where you are.

Back to Lewis. In his book Letters to Malcolm, he offers a helpful principle for prayer that applies also to writing. Instead of feeling pressure to begin every prayer time “by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life’” (88), consider starting smaller, Lewis says, even right where you are: thank him for the crescent moon outside your window, the gift of coming sleep, the wife whose hand you hold. Because, Lewis writes, we “shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest” (91). So, we begin where we are.

“Often, the joy we want to rediscover in writing comes from what we see while we write.”

We can apply this principle to writing in at least two ways. First, if you have lost your joy for the kind of writing your classes or job demand of you, carve out at least a little time for the writing that sparks your joy — whether haikus, or Lord of the Rings fan fiction, or handwritten letters, or comic books, or whatever else. And even better, find some people who like the same stuff so you can write and revise together. In other words, build up joy by returning to the writing that more readily brings you joy.

Second, if the joy seems to have drained from writing altogether, if you struggle to find delight in the act of writing at all, at least write about something you find delightful. Write about a friend you thank God for, or a passage in Scripture that stirred you, or something wonderful and surprising in the world God made. Some months ago, I was wading with my wife and sons in the Mississippi River, and we noticed around our feet dozens of snails making their way along the riverbed, their trails crisscrossing like interstate junctions. Write about that kind of ordinary glory. You might not find joy writing about biology or Jane Austen or the latest quarterly revenues, but you might find some joy writing about snails.

The sons of Korah sing in Psalm 45:1, “My heart overflows with a pleasing theme; I address my verses to the king; my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe.” Our words rarely flow more readily than when they come from the overflow of the heart. So, what is your heart overflowing with right now? Begin there. Write about it.

6. Write to see.

Often, the joy we want to rediscover in writing comes from what we see while we write. Under God’s providence, our own words can pave the path that leads us back to joy; our sentences can become the window that shows us more of God’s glory in Christ. And so, as John Piper has said, write not only to say beauty, but to see beauty.

Paul’s soaring doxology in Romans 11:33–36, for example, is no mere calculated literary device. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” This is the language of affectionate, spontaneous praise. And the praise came, in part, from writing Romans 1:1–11:32. Through his writing, Paul felt more reason to praise God than he did before he wrote.

And to that end, consider one final suggestion. In one section of Helmut Thielicke’s book A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, he talks about the importance of what he calls “the atmosphere of the second person” in theological writing and thought. After referencing the fact that Anselm begins his discourse on God’s existence with a prayer, Thielicke writes,

A theological thought can breathe only in the atmosphere of dialogue with God. . . . The weal and woe even of theological thought depends decisively upon the atmosphere of the “second person” and upon the fact that essentially dogmatic theology is a theology which is prayed. (64, 67)

The deepest joy in writing, whether theological or not, depends on whether our writing happens in “the atmosphere of the second person” — that is, in the presence of God. So, I exhort myself here along with you: before you write, and as you write, and after you write, speak to the God in whose presence you write. Venture outside the realm of the third person, where we speak about God and his world, and enter the realm of the second person, where we speak to God himself. Write with God not only as a he, but as a you.

When our writing becomes an exercise in relying on God, praising God, and telling forth God’s excellencies in Christ, then we have good reason to believe we will discover and then rediscover joy in writing, however far away it feels right now.

As with any topic related to Christian living, discussing physical exercise in the life of a pastor runs the risk of twin dangers: legalism and antinomianism. Those two terms are tricky to understand and apply, but my point is hopefully simple: the antinomian pastor doesn’t think he is under much obligation to look after his body, whereas the pastor given to legalistic tendencies in this area has many commands on how to stay fit and healthy. Both pastors think of different things when they hear “six-pack.”

With these two dangers in mind, however, we do well to consider several reasons for why Christians, and pastors in particular, exercise.

‘Universal Obedience’

An obvious and sustained lack of discipline in one or two areas of our obedience to God — such as prayer, church attendance, hospitality — very often reflects a lack of discipline in other areas of the Christian life. In chapter 8 of John Owen’s famous work on mortification, he makes the point that we must aim for sincerity and diligence in all our obedience (“a universality of obedience”) if we are going to have success mortifying our sin.

Referencing 2 Corinthians 7:1, Owen writes,

God’s work consists in universal obedience. . . . If we will do anything, we must do all things. So, then, it is not only an intense opposition to this or that peculiar lust, but a universal humble frame and temper of heart, with watchfulness over every evil and for the performance of every duty, that is accepted. (Works of John Owen, 6:41–42)

If a pastor, or any Christian for that matter, is wildly negligent in some area of life — physical health included — we rightly ask questions about whether a pattern of general negligence is present. While indwelling sin is present in even the most sanctified Christians, we should exhibit a universal (that is, total) commitment to God in all the commandments that remain upon us (John 14:15, 21, 23) — not least because keeping a particular commandment is harder if one is actively breaking other commandments.

Breaking the Sixth Commandment

What parts of Scripture might command us to steward our bodies?

The sixth commandment, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13), requires us to wisely preserve our own lives and the lives of others. And if something is forbidden in the law, the positive is also commanded (see, for example, the way Paul treats the commandments both negatively and positively in Ephesians 4:25–32). In preserving our own life, we should aim to eat well, refrain from gluttony and drunkenness (Deuteronomy 21:20), and engage in appropriate bodily exercise, such as walking, sports, or physical labor.

Obvious benefits result from aerobic and anaerobic exercise. And especially for a pastor who spends a lot of time sitting, doing both aerobic and anaerobic training may prove crucial to his long-term physical and mental health. Whether with New Testament Greek or your muscles, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

Paul likewise affirms the goodness of bodily training, commenting that it “is of some value” (1 Timothy 4:8). Various types of exercise can alleviate anxiety, stress, and depression. Most pastors, especially the faithful, need all the stress-relief they can get. In addition, just as exercise can release helpful hormones and neurotransmitters, obesity in men is linked with low testosterone. Low testosterone seems to be a new epidemic, even among younger men. Some of this trend can be accounted for by our poor eating and exercising habits. Obesity also leads to cardiovascular problems that can kill someone earlier than if he had remained fit.

“Regular exercise will likely lead to greater productivity, not less, in both the short term and long term.”

Did Jesus care about physical health? Anyone who has read the Gospel accounts carefully will understand that our Lord did a lot of walking, and sometimes over distances and terrains that would have required a great deal of fitness. He likely walked several thousand miles during his ministry, with frequent trips to Jerusalem for various feasts. And his own preaching shows his remarkable familiarity with God’s creation.

Overlooked Sin

We can decry the lack of physical activity among children these days, many of whom are overweight even in elementary school (in part because of technological innovations that allow nonstop stimulation). But adults are not exempt from overusing gadgets and failing to exercise their bodies. Can the minister, in good conscience, speak to young people from the pulpit about their excessive use of phones and their failure to exercise if he is just as guilty?

Ministerial laziness in physical exercise, replaced with overeating, seems to be an acceptable sin in North America. Pastors are meant to be examples in our conduct — that is, in our overall lifestyle (1 Timothy 4:12; 1 Peter 5:1–3). A pastor can rail against the evils of alcohol, sometimes showing a legalistic approach to the topic, all while being practically silent on the immoderate use of food. Such ministers may be the type of person Solomon warns us to avoid: “Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags” (Proverbs 23:20–21).

Now granted, weight issues are a complex matter. While many are overweight because of self-indulgence, I do not doubt that maintaining a weight is much harder for some than for others. But then again, many sinful proclivities are greater struggles for some than for others. A person naturally skinny may have other hidden proclivities toward sins that are not as obvious. We all need to work harder than others in areas of weakness. We all have specific crosses to bear in our sanctification that, for others, are less of a burden.

Fruitful, Lively Ministry

Claiming one is too busy to exercise is a rather poor excuse. God is not a hard taskmaster. We can rightly order our lives and accomplish a great deal with some discipline. Regular exercise will likely lead to greater productivity, not less, in both the short term and long term. One can also listen to a book or podcast while going for a walk.

For pastors, we have many reasons to eat well and exercise frequently. Besides extending the duration of fruitful ministry, we will find ourselves more energized for the vocational labor God has called us to, and we will set a good example to our flock. But a life of self-indulgence will catch up with us in many ways, including possibly losing the ability to minister with energy.

As we exercise and aim to stay healthy, we also can find unique ways to enjoy God. Appreciate the beauty of his creation by finding nice places to walk, run, or bike. Meditate upon the glory of God and enjoy his goodness to us, which comes in more ways than we imagine. We are not too busy to keep ourselves healthy; in fact, to keep up with the inevitable demands of ministry, we can’t afford to overlook our physical health.

Exercise and ministry can be friends. For example, if a pastor can exercise by playing basketball, soccer, or some other team sport — as opposed to going for solo walks or runs — he may find unique ways to be part of his local community and develop relationships whereby he can share the gospel. Redeeming the time is hard to do, but getting exercise in a social context can have many benefits for a pastor.

God gives us his commands to help us, not hinder us. The sixth commandment offers us the good life — the life where we care both for others and for ourselves. And pastors who care for their bodies are caring for and loving their flock. Do not kill: that is, preserve your life, within reason, as you are able. You’ll be happier in God, and he will be magnified in your life and church by your enriched joy in him.