Tuesday, if you don’t know, is the day I set aside as my regular day each week to prepare the sermon. And it follows along with a series. So Monday night, for some reason, my Garmin, I have a Garmin on my wrist, my friend at night, that said, you had your worst night of sleep since I’ve known you.
Get with it. I had like, well, it was six hours, but that’s hard for me to function on six hours. So I was, I got, I did everything the same way.
I went to Colin’s school and did the Bible quizzing class and they didn’t throw me out. And then I came home and I finished praying and I got my lesson and studied the Bible. And I felt like the Holy Spirit led me to a great sermon on financial foundations.
And then it just, something was gnawing at me the whole time and I had the PowerPoint already done. And it was great. And then I looked and I thought, wait a minute, the weeks aren’t adding up.
And I went back and looked and this week, I realized that next week is on financial foundations. So I worked ahead, but I wasn’t thinking through enough. And I told AB the wrong Sunday and we had to switch everything up.
Good thing it was early in the week. And then I switched gears to work on this week’s, which happens to be on having a fitness focus in our life. And I got to live it out when my body was tired, my mind and my spirit did not work the same way when I was trying to put everything together.
So I might have to review that if it’s like do, I used to do tax returns at midnight when I was a CPA. So maybe it had the same effect. I always felt sorry for them.
But the fitness focus tells us that if we are gonna have a holiness of life, then we need to have a holistic fitness outlook. Believe it or not, your physical fitness can affect your mental acuity. Your mental acuity can affect your emotional status and your emotional status, and all those can play into your spiritual fitness.
So for holiness of life, we need to look at all of those and they work in with each other. Paul talked about that a little bit when he wrote to the church in Rome in Romans 12, verses one through three. We’re gonna look at that and talk about that a little bit today.
Will you stand as you’re able? I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed by this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I say to every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
The word of God. For the people of God, thanks be to God. Amen, you may be seated.
Well, we’re gonna look at a fitness focus and how fitness has to do with holiness. Has anybody ever thought of fitness of your mind, of your body, of your emotional state, how that fits in with your spiritual fitness, that it all works together positively or negatively? One area can start affecting the other areas. I mean, emotional issues, spiritual issues can eventually cause some serious physical issues.
If we look at all those together, Paul shows us a great point here on who we are called to be. So when we make decisions about our holiness, that includes our decisions about our health and our fitness physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, as one impacts the other. If you look at 12.1, Paul says, I appeal to you.
He’s pleading with them. He’s not commanding them, but he’s pleading with them by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now, what does it mean to have a body that is a living sacrifice? What does, I mean, in our world today, so many people say, what I do with my own body is my business and nobody else’s business.
Don’t tell me what I can do. And God says, that is my body. Paul says it in another way.
My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit lives within us and everything we do to our own bodies and our own minds, we do to God. If we’re followers of God, then we have to take that seriously. Holiness is something that is physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
It is all those things combined. Robert Mounts says full surrendering is sacrificing our body. Our sacrifice is a full surrender of our bodies to God and that is our spiritual worship.
They seem like they’re polar opposites. What happens physically? Why is that our spiritual worship? Paul says that because we, with our own bodies, are a living sacrifice. Now, it’s not just all punishing our bodies.
During Lent, everybody’s given up coffee, right? Don’t give me that look. I gave up coffee for Lent, but I don’t drink coffees. Our bodies become a sacrifice.
In fact, this is cool to think about this, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, a living sacrifice. Now, that is a new way of thinking. When you think of a sacrifice in an Old Testament sense, what had to happen? Death, blood, and that’s what Jesus did.
You sacrificed a life to atone and or like a scapegoat takes on the sins of the people. But Paul says, you, because we don’t need a death sacrifice anymore. Let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page.
Who took care of our death sacrifice? Oh, man, you guys are awesome. Jesus took care of the death sacrifice. That’s what we’re pushing towards in Lent, remembering this walk that we journey with Jesus on as he goes to the cross and sacrifices anything.
And when we go to the cross and we sacrifice, it’s not that we sacrifice to death, although some Christians have had to give their lives for their faith. Paul says we are a living sacrifice. We sacrifice our bodies as in we die to ourselves, we die to the world and we live to Jesus.
It’s a whole different concept. It’s not just about taking away, it’s about giving back to God during this Lenten season and our bodies, that is holiness. That is holiness is when we sacrifice a living sacrifice and give what we say, what we do, what we eat, how we, you know, taking care of our bodies.
Like if we are really, really sick and we say, I don’t really wanna go to the doctor, we might not be taking the best care of our bodies. How does that all fit together? Then the second verse is just as cool. Do not be conformed to this world, just like your bodies not be conformed.
So we’re also talking about your minds, your emotions wrapped up in everything. Like, does anybody watch 24 hour news and all of a sudden you feel a higher level of anxiety in your life? How are our emotions wrapped up in our mind and what is our thought process? Paul says this, and this is the cool thing about holiness. I love this part.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds. It doesn’t say transform yourselves. Holiness, we seem to think sometimes it means I gotta do this, I gotta try harder, I gotta stop this.
It’s all about what I do, but instead it’s about letting God. It’s about letting God. It’s about the Holy Spirit renewing us, renewing our minds.
Does anybody ever get thoughts in their mind that they hope they don’t let slip out the mouth? You know, some people say it like, if my whole life was on the screen, how would that be if someone else could read my mind? How do we renew our minds to think God, to think about Jesus, to think about, okay, we come to a difficult situation and instead of saying, how am I gonna get out of here, say, God, how are you gonna use me in the midst? That’s a living sacrifice. God, how are you gonna use me now? How are you going to take my hands or my feet or my voice to bless this person who needs blessed, to help this person who needs help, to correct in the right way that they will accept it and live it and love it? It’s the work of the Holy Spirit. Renewal is the work of the Holy Spirit and it’s good and acceptable.
Now, he goes on to say, our minds are renewed that by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Part of the renewal, part of the fitness is testing. Testing, you know, Paul says in, John says in 1 John, test every spirit.
Test the situation and make sure where God is and if God is involved in that. Testing is something we do for each part of our lives. Before passing a grade, to see if we have the mental acuity we take a test or write a paper.
I hate to even mention that because ABs live in that. Pray for AB. Last semester, come on, buddy.
And I had, I had about two decades of dreams that I walked in and didn’t know we had a test. Don’t let that happen to you. Renew your mind, unlike me.
Before passing a grade, we test our mental acuity. And different times during our days, even as we get older, I like to do some games on my phone just to make me learn different words and grow my mind in different ways. There is no point in our life where we don’t grow and learn and try to test our minds and move forward even if we don’t, if we have issues with aging and not remembering, we can do exercises that help us work with that.
Before entering the ministry, I had to take a psychological exam to make sure I was mentally and emotionally fit to be a pastor. I’m not a pastor, somehow I’m still here. We test our emotions.
How do we respond? I mean, a lot of when someone says something to you, it tells you a lot more about them than it does about yourself. I mean, if they say something that’s really hurtful, we test ourselves. How are we responding? How do we react to that? Not say, that’s something we try to work with our kids on all the time.
It’s your response that matters, not someone else’s. What you need to focus on, what you can control is your response. And if you are emotionally not fit, which we all have times we’re emotionally not fit, sometimes that’s from being tired, sometimes that’s depression, sometimes that’s stress and anxiety and all these other pressures we have in life.
And we need God and others around us to help us become more emotionally fit. Spiritually, one of the great things we do here at One Hope is we ask ourselves the class meeting question, how goes it with your soul? How is your soul? That’s one of our tests, how is your soul? And what can we do to pray for your soul, for your spiritual life, for how your connection is with God? There’s a test in that. And of course, before sports, I had to take the most eye-opening experience in my life when I did sports in school, I had to do a physical test.
And it was surprising because at the end of taking all the exams, the doctor said something, I said, you need to check my what for what? And he said, turn your head and cough. And then when you turn 50, it’s just worse from there. Physical exams is what we need, it’s our annual checkup, it’s how we do that, it’s how we take care of ourselves.
God, when God called me into the ministry, into starting the church, and we had our first dinner over at the Gouges and they wanted us to meet some people from their Sunday school, I walked in weighing the most I ever had in my life on crutches. And it was like, how do you start a church when you’re in this kind of health? How does it work? But God has worked through that, my hip got stronger and physically, I’ve been through several months of the living sacrifice of not eating everything I want to eat. And all of that stuff, we just have to go through and do.
It’s because if we don’t take care of ourselves, if we’re not fit as much as we can be, physically, mentally, or emotionally, how can we do what God is calling us to do if we don’t take care of all those parts? In verse three, Paul says, think with sober judgment. James Denny puts it like this, he implies, don’t be an intoxicated Christian, an ego-holic. You have to know who you are, what your limitations are, how you can push those limitations, how your pride is stepping in the way.
One of my favorite memes that I’ve seen, I was gonna look it up and put it up there, but I didn’t, but it was a guy who, they’re rocking it today, but it was a guy who was standing with his coffee, a guy who was probably in his 50s, on his cabin, on the porch with his foot propped up, and it said, the number one injury for men is forgetting how old they are, forgetting their age. And I’ve had a lot of lessons with that on the humility of knowing age, and you’re not 20 years old anymore. Humility, humility in our lives can strengthen our mind, our spirit, our emotional state, our physical status, humility to give it all over to God and trust in God.
Fitness focus is holiness of life. Fitness focus is how we can serve God and love God in every way possible. Let’s pray.
Almighty God, teach us to be a living sacrifice. Transform us by the renewal of our minds. May we be holy and acceptable to you.
May we realize that spiritual worship is here in this place today, but it is in every interaction we have with other people. It’s in every situation we have in life. It’s in our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness.
Help us to make a plan to strengthen each one of those things. Help this church to be able to help people to be fit in every way, because that is our spiritual worship. It ties so closely to holiness.
Help us to test our fitness. Help us to trust in you. Help us to know that what we have is yours.
To be sacrificial, to be humble, and to stand before you transformed and renewed by your Holy Spirit. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.