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Training in Godliness
1 Timothy 4:7-8, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Dennis Mullen
- January 6, 2008
Training in Godliness – 1.6.8
Paul’s famous words on training in godliness…
7 Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives' tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. 8 For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. 1 Timothy 4:7-8, NIV
1CO 9:24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, NIV
Someday I want to produce a list of top ten most ignored Scriptures in today’s church. I fear these will be near the top. TRAIN for godliness? But that would go against our long-standing belief that everything having to do with God should be easy and trouble-free, and that if it doesn’t come to us naturally, then it must be too hard and God doesn’t want us to do it. Besides, doesn’t it go against the idea of GRACE that we should train, put forth effort, on God’s behalf? Isn’t salvation and even holiness a free gift? And PRIDE – what about pride? Doesn’t a focus on training and growth tend to make arrogant Pharisees out of people? This isn’t a track team, after all, and what about those who don’t have as much ability as most?
Some of those are legitimate concerns, but there are answers to them, and they begin with the fact that these passages I just read happen to be in the Bible and we need to deal with them rather than just ignore them.
So today we are going to begin the new year by talking about training in godliness, and I hope when we are done, you’ll have the knowledge you need to devise a simple training plan of your own.
To begin, let’s look at the plan of a world-class athlete. Deena Kastor, who I mentioned last Sunday, is a marathoner who hopes to make the Olympic team at the marathon trials in Boston on April 20. If Deena finishes in the top three at the trials, she will run for the U. S. at the Beijing Olympics in August. This excerpt from her journal (from December 31) says that she plans to do both:
Deena Kastor’s journal at NYYR’s site – 12.31.07
As I sat down
to write this blog I intended to reflect on 2007. With an Olympic year just
hours away, I keep being yanked into my preparations for the Trials and
eventually the Beijing Games.
Beijing is only eight months away. Between now and then I will log over five thousand miles. I will go through 15 pair of DS Trainers. I will take 200 ice baths. I will log 600 hours of afternoon naps. I will get more than 200 massages and have a total of about 1000 acupuncture needles. All this in an effort to maintain health and get as strong as possible.
I am so inspired by her plan that I’m going to adopt it myself, except I’m going to ease into it by starting with the 600 hours of afternoon naps and see how it goes.
Notice that nothing is haphazard about Deena Kastor’s plan. 5000 miles over the next eight months…and trust me, she knows how many of them she is going to run today and tomorrow, and at what tempo. And there will be a cost. Deena’s sponsors are going to pay for those 15 pairs of Asics, and those massage therapists and those acupuncture treatments (whatever!). But more than that, this is going to consume Deena Kastor’s life for the next eight months, and it might mean that all she really has time for is running and her family and not much else. She might have to skip the new Batman movie when it comes out and she might not have time or energy to go to a concert. She certainly won’t be ice skating or snow skiing over the next eight months. And although she doesn’t mention it, her diet will be highly structured. She won’t eat casually or carelessly.
And why not? The Olympics are the pinnacle event for a professional track athlete and this is her job. But remember how Paul puts it in perspective…
1CO 9:24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.
Deena Kastor inspires me with her remarkable plan, but that plan also provokes a question: How can we, who have so much more to gain, plan our godliness training with similar dedication? What would such a plan look like?
If I were to give you five minutes to come up with a plan for your own training in godliness, you might have trouble with it, just because it is an unfamiliar request. But it isn’t that complicated. The elements are pretty simple to grasp and I’ll bet that most of you could come up with several of them.
The elements of a marathon training program are pretty simple. There’s training, rest, and diet among other things. And under “training” there are long, easy runs, and shorter runs at race-pace, and even shorter interval runs at much-faster-than-race pace, and there is hill training and some weightlifting and a few other things. It isn’t complicated to lay out a plan, but most people, having a plan in hand, won’t follow it. That bring up the first element of our godliness training plan, and I talked about it last week:
Each service here contains people who have NOT made that decision, and each human heart contains some area that still holds out against godliness. Wherever you are in your commitment, I want you to know that you are welcome here, and I want you to know that the key to living in God’s full blessing is to live as close to him as possible rather than as far away from him as you can get away with.
Christians, understand that if we truly grasp what it means to come to Christ and be saved, it is a contradiction to have accepted Christ and yet NOT be fully committed to godliness. Jesus said: MT 16:24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Yet that IS the place where we find ourselves, and the decision I need to make is to fight the contradiction.
I compare this to DIET in a runner’s training plan. No runner gets to the Olympics by eating a lot of Big Macs and pizza. Those foods don’t contain what it takes to build a runner and they DO contain a lot of stuff that the body has to work around in order to stay healthy.
As a Christian who lives in the world (rather than withdrawing into a monastery) you are going to be offered a lot of non-nutritive junk. Some of it will be mostly-harmless fluff, cotton-candy Hannah Montana Disney marketing stuff. Some of it will be downright harmful to your soul – pornography, for example. When you go to work or school, you’ll have to contend with the thinking of atheists and new-agers and bigots and many others whose first and highest loyalty is to some part of THIS present kingdom. How can you POSSIBLY hope to hold on to your faith without a steady diet of healthier stuff
PS 119:103 How
sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth
I’m not talking primarily about deep study here. What I’m talking about is simply reading or listening to Scripture and paying enough attention that you start to learn what is important to God, what he has been doing for the past several thousand years and what he wants from and for you.
This is such an easy thing to do in this place and time, but the easy things are the easiest to put off. It’s easy to get a copy of the Bible in plain language and it doesn’t take a lot of time to read some of it each day. Now, we ARE talking about training here, and if you are going to train, you need a plan for reading. There’s an ad in the bulletin about a plan to read through the Bible in a year. It’s a good plan from Lookout magazine, and it contains four readings each day from different parts of Scripture. And there is an ad in the bulletin for a chronological Bible where the books are arranged differently than usual. If you want to read through the Bible, ML will email you a list of questions on each chapter of the Bible.
If you just need a place to start, I’d suggest you start with Luke’s Gospel. There is no better way to grow in Christlikeness than to learn a little bit about the life of Christ each day. After that, read Acts, then the rest of the NT. And set a time to do it every day. That’s what you do when you are training.
Now, here’s an important warning about Bible study… It seems that our constant temptations in church are to either pay it no attention or to make it the sum total of our plan for godliness. There are Christians here today who don’t know John 3:16 or even who John is or whether that’s 3:16 am or pm, and there are those who are in the midst of a study of the symbolic implications of the iron-clay feet of the statue Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about.
Those are extremes, but some of us have no plan for going through the Word, and others, if I asked you what your training plan for godliness was, you would show me a plan for studying the Scriptures. That’s why I want you to see that Bible study is akin to an athlete’s diet. If Deena Kastor makes the Olympic team, her diet will be a big reason for it, but it doesn’t follow that she would be a better athlete by eating more and more often, and by doing nothing but eating.
If Bible reading or listening is one side of the conversation, Prayer is the other. Prayer is much more than telling God what he should do... It's speaking to him about what is on your heart, and he desires it.
I'm not suggesting anything deep or especially long, just a dedicated plan...a starting point. Get up each morning and sit quietly for a few minutes and thank God for everything you can think of. Start with just that each day, and I believe it will open your eyes and heart to what else God is doing and invite you into other conversations with him throughout the day.
Simply what James says: JAS 1:22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
This is the great neglected truth of the American church. We count how many people show up to eat and measure our success by that. We ask: “What are you doing to grow to be like Christ” and accept it when people talk about how much study they do. Growth in knowledge by itself puffs people up with pride. The people who killed Jesus were among the best Bible scholars the world has ever produced. I say that cautiously to people who may not know the Bible at all, which is an equally dangerous problem...but don't think you have a complete training plan if your entire plan is to read and study Scripture.
An illustration my father-in-law inspired: If we all gathered weekly to watch an exercise video, would it get us into shape? What if we broke off in small groups and discussed the principles and methods? What if we ended each session by gathering in a circle and joining hands and praying for an increase in fitness? Actually, any of those might be valuable IF we combined them with a rigorous plan of actually exercising.
I'm talking about something very specific and very personal that YOU hammer out for THIS week: I'm going to treat THIS person well, this person who really doesn't pull out the best response in me. I'm going to show my family that I'm learning to be a servant by doing THIS all week without any word about it. I'm going to give God more control of my money by doing THIS by Friday. I'm going to set THESE boundaries for my life or my entertainment so that I give God more purity from myself.
In fact, that is exactly what I want you to do. On your insert, between you and God, spend a minute or two and write down ONE THING, one exercise you'll do this week to improve in some needed area and strengthen your godliness.
Lots more... Worship for example, or fellowship. Practically every elite runner is part of a team that trains together, cheers one another on, travels to meets together, eats together. The lone wolf long-distance runner is a myth. Most people can't do it alone.
Same with us. No plan of training for godliness is going to work by yourself, especially since godliness is bound up so much in how you treat others. You need the team!
But let me leave behind the other things I could say and return to that decision...have you made it? Christians: Have you really accepted the call of Jesus to surrender it all, to quit living with a foot in each kingdom and to live the lifestyle that produces godliness? Will you today? And if you have never accepted Christ, are you ready to make that decision???
Morrison
Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E.
Race St.
Kingston, TN 37763 (865) 376-5205
