So we all have these things where we have to do, okay, I've got to get past what I don't enjoy doing because I know it's good for me. But staying active is so key to remaining a good instrument for God's work. Gary Thomas believes Christians need to prioritize not just our spiritual health, but our physical health as well.
Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, I'm John Fuller. John, we're coming out of that holiday season, you know, we're into the new year. And we're all thinking a couple of things. One is, okay, now I got to pay off that credit card bill, maybe from overspending. And then there's the overeating part.
And I'm certainly in that category where I probably had too much turkey, too much potatoes. Yeah, there's just such good stuff. Yeah, I got to get to the gym now and start working on that. And it's not a guilt trip, but it is an important aspect of life to kind of keep all those things under control.
And we talked last time with Gary Thomas, his great book, Every Body Matters, kind of the spiritual implication of that. And it's an area that I haven't really given that much thought to. I enjoy working out, especially with Trent, he really works out. But getting to the gym every three, four times a week and doing some weightlifting is more my pattern. I'm not a big aerobics guy, I never have been. But, you know, that's something for the new year, I got to take a look at and maybe start doing more of that in addition to the weightlifting. But the conversation last time was great.
God cares about you, the whole person. And we covered that last time. If you didn't hear it, go listen to it, get the app for the phone and you can access all the programs.
Or you can go to the website and download it that way. Yeah, yeah, we talked about caloric therapy and volleyball therapy and M&M's and blizzards. We talked about a lot of stuff.
And how skinny our wives are. Gary is a prolific author and writer and speaker. He's been here a number of times. He's on the Pastoral Teaching Team at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch. As you said, Jim, we're covering the content of his book, Every Body Matters. And we've got details about that book on our website.
Find the link in the show notes. Gary, welcome back. Thank you. Great to be here again. Always good to have you. You know, one thing I really want to say it publicly that just the way you approach your content and communicate, I could see it's really important to you. You think a lot about these themes.
You're not haphazard. I tend to be a little more spontaneous, but you're that kind of person. You remind me of Jean, actually my wife, because you drill down and you think deeply about something.
And I just want to give you that observation and appreciation because I know you work hard at your communication on some of these themes. And we laugh about this one, you know, our body and should we be taking care of it. And as you get older, most of us say, that's okay. It gets me closer to God. Actually, I get one foot in heaven this week. The more Big Macs I eat, the closer to God I become. But you're saying, no, no, that's not that's not the idea, right? Just give us that kind of overview, a little bit of what we talked about yesterday in terms of God's perspective on the body, soul and mind. There's a passage from 2 Timothy 2, 20 through 21, where Paul writes to Timothy, If anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work. And for me, that is the goal of taking care of our bodies. We talked about yesterday being instruments instead of ornaments, that I want to be an instrument for special purpose.
I want to be useful to the master and prepared to do any good work. Now, I know it's always growing, but how many people will hear this broadcast? Probably a couple million. OK, so let's say 50 percent of them hear this and say, you know what, there are some small changes I can make. We talked about being realistic and not saying that you're going to completely change yourself, but making some small changes with what we eat and how active we are. And I hope we get into that a little bit more. And let's just say, and I don't think this is an overpromise, that that adds a year to their life.
Not necessarily chronologically, but mobility and engagement and being able to be involved and share with others and love on your family. We could add through this podcast a million years of kingdom service. Jesus said to his disciples, pray to the Lord of the harvest. We need more workers.
There aren't enough of us. So those of us that are workers in the kingdom, if we can add a year of service, this active, more engaged, you could be adding a million years of service to God's kingdom. And Jim, that's my motivation because there is nothing more important than the kingdom of God. It's what Jesus said we're to seek first in Matthew 633. And so again, this isn't about creating ornaments for people to admire us. I'm so far past that. But it is about wanting to be that instrument.
However many years God gives me, I want to be engaged and energetic to love and serve and give. Now that is a good motivation. This one is a little touchy, but of course we're pulling the content from your book. So this is what you've written.
So now you can blame me for it. But this idea, you know, we tend to weight certain sins. You think of adultery and murder, pretty severe sins and you know, God hates sin and we get that. But the Bible also talks about, you know, gluttony and some other things that kind of cut a little closer to the heart. I think there's a distinction, but maybe I'm wrong when you look at it. How do you see it? There is a distinction. And I've heard people run too rough shot over that. Well, the Bible condemns gluttony as much as it does sexual sins for instance or whatnot.
But it doesn't. Now when you're writing a book on taking care of your body, you want there to be more Bible verses. I'm going to be honest. You guys know I love the Christian classics, ancient books that people have written through the generations, different Christian traditions. And they all mention gluttony and sloth. It's one of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony is not in the Ten Commandments. And so wanting to present scripture, I went back and realized the Bible actually doesn't say that much about gluttony. There are just a few verses and a lot of them are indirect. One is Proverbs 23 where it says, The main import of this passage is not that it's a sin as much as it leads to poverty. If you give yourself over to an addiction with food or with wine, you're likely to end up poor.
It's not saying so much. It's a sin in itself. So I don't think we should take the Bible's near silence on gluttony as a carte blanche.
It really isn't an issue at all. I take it down to an issue of wisdom because what the Christian classics say about it, I found to be true. When I'm not taking care of myself by that overeating or eating the wrong foods and not exercising my body, not having any movement, I know I feel more sluggish spiritually. So rather than saying is it a sin to do this or not, I'm just saying is it wise? Am I making myself a useful instrument for God or am I making it more difficult for God to use me by overeating and being too inactive? Gary, that's such a good picture as a model of what to aim toward, to be in spiritual fitness, intellectual fitness, and physical fitness.
I mean, that is Paul and Jeremiah, and it's a great illustration for us. You call laziness, this kind of brings it forward to today because we're so distracted. I mean, I can sit and watch football all day Saturday and a little bit on Sunday, but it's just something I like.
I watch the plays, I'm into it, I used to play it, so I'm looking at all the technical components. It's interesting to me, and I kind of put that in that laziness category, but it's really distraction as well. Today, we live in that kind of concern where we can be entertained by a box, and we sit there far too long. I mean, after dinner, Jean's been great about let's not sit and watch TV after dinner, let's do something.
So she's good with walking, she gets me to walk occasionally. But speak to that idea of the laziness of the common culture. Sedentary living may be one of the greatest challenges of healthy living today. Early on in human existence, you had subsistence farming without tractors. 200 years later, you had industrial labor. About 40 years ago, we entered the digital age, and they did a study. The difference between calories burned for our ancestors and the typical 10-hour period of work today, if you weigh 170 pounds, is 765 calories just by having to work.
If you weigh 140 pounds, it's 630 calories. Which means if we want to keep up with our grandparents, and they have their typical workday, and we have our typical workday, we would all have to run six miles a day just to even it out. I've seen this with my dad and my mom. My mom is 89, in amazing shape physically and mentally.
My dad is 95, soon to be 96. And you see, the importance isn't just chronology, but mobility, how active you will be. Dr. Mehmet Oz and Michael Rosen said this. Your level of physical activity is the single most important predictor of whether you look old and decrepit by age 62 or 102. Humans are designed to be physically active. The project of staying young is not about avoiding disease, it's about avoiding frailty. Physical activity is underrated in terms of helping you stay vital and keep you from disintegrating. And I have seen that with my parents, that as long as we can stay mobile, we should try to. And it's never easier.
How many people are listening to this podcast while they're walking? I mean, it's never been easier. The ancient, some of the Christian classic writers talked about artificial exercise as a waste of time.
Not anymore. You can have great worship times, you have great sermons, great podcasts, like Focus on the Family, where you're not putting your life on a shelf to exercise. You're building your mind as you're building your heart and your soul and your body. So I think being active, Jim, is so key. And like we talked about yesterday with Karen and volleyball therapy, find something you like, whether it's taking a walk, playing volleyball. Something active. Something active that keeps you going.
And we all have our challenges. You mentioned you like strength training. That's where I'm absolutely weakest. And everything I read says it's what's most important for me at that age. I like the cardio.
I just don't enjoy the strength. So we all have these things where we have to do, OK, I've got to get past what I don't enjoy doing because I know it's good for me. But staying active is so key to remaining a good instrument for God's work.
And Gary, what I love about you is you think up here at the 50,000 foot level and then you make it very personal, very practical. And you observed that when we resist the temptation, say, for instance, to overeat, that kind of helps us build up our resistance to other sins like lust or greed or even impatience. And I think you had a story about a Wal-Mart parking lot that illustrated that.
This has been a lifelong battle for me. And even joining church staffs, I see how I'm challenged sometimes by church culture. I was in a church office, a worship office, where they always dump all the excess food from the church dinners or donuts or whatnot. And one time somebody had left a box that somebody had given them of those chocolate covered macadamia nuts, which macadamia nuts have more fat and calories than any other nut, which is why we cover them with chocolate. You know, that's sort of the United States.
To hide the fact. And so I knew I had to double down. You know, we've just gone through Christmas. A lot of people have probably gone through Wal-Mart. And it's the worst time of the year to go through a Wal-Mart, right? Because you've got people just walking with their carts and you've got traffic and getting out of the parking lot. And this one was just and I just know before that there would have been this impatience and this frustration, literally resenting people I've never met because they're taking so long or trying to get their kids along or they're just walking slow or whatnot.
And you feel like my gold in the Wal-Mart is get in and out. It's not the journey, which it shouldn't be that way. But I noticed how addressing physical fitness addresses many of those other issues. You mentioned patience and lust.
This isn't new to me. I don't want to take credit. The early Church Father Chrysostom said this, The God of the belly overwhelms the whole body, sets self-constraint as a bound to it, as God sets the sand to the sea. Jerome, who was a contemporary of Chrysostom, said this, In the eating of meat and the drinking of wine and the fullness of stomach is the seedbed of lust. They saw a connection between bodily self-control and self-control of things like impatience, greed, lust, some of these other sins we focus on that we're whole people. And if we're gradually becoming dull to God's Spirit and self-control every day by what we eat and how we don't move, we're becoming duller to every sin in our life. What they would say is this is sort of a gateway sin to other temptations that were opening wide the door, and I found that to be true. I don't believe that working out and watching what I eat constitutes carrying the cross as Jesus represents it. But working out and watching what I eat helps me to carry the cross. I feel spiritually stronger to do that. You know, Gary, again, I think we miss it within the church community.
I don't know many churches that have a time of worship set up with a bunch of bikes or something like that. But I mean, in some ways, that's what you're saying. I mean, we should come in, learn the Word, and there should be some time during the week where the guys are getting together and doing some kind of workout, and the ladies can get together and do some kind of workout. That is kind of what you're saying. Absolutely. In fact, I started doing that meetings with younger men where we would walk as we were talking.
You know, why not? They've shown just even little 10-minute walks or everything, just really trying to get away from the sedentary living. I think it's so important for our health and our energy. What can churches do? You talk about this in the book. What can churches do to build up the body, figuratively and literally? Well, what I loved is you might think, oh, this is like a mega-churchy thing to do. But there was a couple from Iran who visited our church, and he was so frustrated. I mean, they were just from Iran. And he was so frustrated because there were a lot of health clubs in the Houston area where, imagine coming from Iran and the modesty expected, and then you go into a lifetime fitness or 24-hour.
And they loved that there was a safe place for her to work out. And he said, now, we're not going to become Christians. Our grandparents are Christians, but we're not Christians.
And I'm just like, buddy, you have no idea. A few months later, I saw him come forward to accept Christ and become members of the church where really that fitness center was the draw for them to have a safe place where they could work out. I know another church in Chicago where they have regular running groups that meet at the church. The church is a great place for this. Open it up so people can use the bathrooms. I would say this to the pastors.
They've shown this. One of the biggest impediments to getting somebody to visit your church is if they've never been there before. And if they will come on a Saturday morning for a group run and use the bathrooms, you've removed a huge psychological block for them to visit on Sunday morning. And I've found in running groups, it's the best way for me to talk to others. In one running group in Houston, there was a Jewish man there that loved to talk religion and theology and the Bible. And it was some of the best conversations we had because you're running for an hour or two.
I think just recognizing that evangelism doesn't have to be synonymous with feeding. Sometimes it can be synonymous with getting active. That's why I think there's a place for church legs or I'll even say this for some guys that go out golfing or whatnot where I don't know if you're in a cart, it's not so much exercise.
But at least you're moving and recognizing that that could just be a very valuable thing to do. You still walk a lot in golf riding a cart. Let me tell you. Said the golfer. Said the golfer.
Especially in the winter if you've got to stay on the path. I ended up nice and sore at the end of the day for some reason. I don't know why.
Gary, I do as we're narrowing in here the last few minutes. One of the things can be this overwhelming shame. I'm making this comparison, you know, like a new believer that comes into the church and you say turn to the book of John.
Let's read John 10. And they may be sitting next to you and they don't know where to go. And you help them. You say, oh, let me show you where that's at. You know, but when it comes to this issue, let's say somebody who's severely overweight. We're not going, hey, let me help you with some ideas on how to go there or to invite a relationship, a friendship, so you can actually engage that person for that goal.
Is that wrong? I'm trying to make that comparison when you look at intellectual or spiritual development and then how we treat this differently. And then how much shame comes in from people who can't control this area for whatever reason. I'm so glad you brought this up, Jim.
Thank you for bringing this up because we have to be so careful with this. I remember back. I've always loved 1970s music. And I think Karen Carpenter had one of the finest voices of anyone who's ever sang. And it was one reviewer's comment that she looked a little heavy that eventually launched her into wasn't just a life threatening.
It took her life of an eating disorder of all the places I've been in the world. I think one of the most amazing manmade things I've ever seen is Michelangelo's David. Everybody has seen pictures of the statue of David. But when you see it at the academy in Florence where it is and you walk up to it, it's just different. It is 17 feet high.
It weighs eight and a half tons. And it's shocking. Michelangelo is just 26 years old. He saw this gigantic block of marble and said to himself, there's a masterpiece in there.
Which we would just see this block. And I want to say to everybody here that feels shame about their body, don't compare yourself to Michelangelo. None of us are Michelangelo. Compare yourself to that block of marble. We're just nothing until God gets a hold of us. And he's such a master craftsman. And we said this verse yesterday, which I think is so key.
I want to read it again. Romans 12, one. Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. If you are 20 pounds underweight or 20 pounds overweight, if you offer your body to God today, you're walking, you're driving in the car as an act of worship, immediately that body is pleasing to God.
And his opinion is the only one that matters. And there are a million things I love about being a Christian. But one of the things I particularly love is that our holiness and acceptance before God doesn't rest on the shape of our bodies, but on the acceptable sacrifice of Jesus' broken and bruised body. I love that. And I could be completely out of shape.
And it goes by stages. But I'm saying, okay, God, today I want to honor you. Maybe I'm going to walk around the block. Maybe I might even go to McDonald's, but I won't have the Coke or the Diet Coke.
I'll just have water. You make some small steps, but you're saying, God, I'm doing this for you. And slowly he brings us back. But our ultimate acceptance is based on Jesus' broken body, not on our body. We're not trying to become ornaments. We want to be instruments to serve God. And that begins by offering our bodies to God.
Yeah, that is so good. Gary, right at the end here, you wrote in the book about a vision that God gave you. When it comes to this idea of persevering and being prepared for struggles, especially in that area of overcoming exhaustion and discouragement.
Tie that together. What did God show you in that moment? It's really personal to me. And I don't think I've ever shared anything like this in any of the books I've written. I'm not a mystical kind of guy. I think prayer is one of my weaker points.
I love to study. But there was this time where I felt like God was leading me into this vision. And as a runner, I was running in this awful storm in this really hilly thing.
It reminds me of sort of the mountainous area around Colorado. And I knew it was a long run. I know what a long run feels like. I was soaked. I was wet.
When you run out of doors and trails, you get cut up and whatnot. And then I came up to this cabin in the top of the mountain, and there was Jesus. And He invites me in, and it's warm. And He offered me a dry shirt.
And if there are any runners out there, you know, if you've been running for an hour in a wet shirt and somebody offers you a dry shirt. And I had dry socks and shoes, and it was just warm. And then He gave me some food to restore me. And it was just amazing, Jesus doing all this. And He shared some things I'm not going to share there.
That was very personal. So I had on this clean, dry shirt and shoes and socks. And I'd been restored. And then I felt Jesus opening up the door again, and it's still storming out. And it was still dark, and there's a trail. He says, now keep running. The race isn't over. And I don't know how much longer I have.
A couple days, a couple decades, that's up to God. But it was really about this God restoring us and saying, you're my instrument. I'm going to use you. And you get a little bloody, and you get a little beat up, and you get a little tired and wet. And God puts us back together. But then He says, keep running.
And I think that's the difference. This isn't just about me enjoying life more or feeling better or thinking I look better. The temptation is always to use vanity and pride to try to overcome gluttony and sloth. That's just trading sins, right? That doesn't make me any more acceptable to God. But when I can say, I want to address this because God has me in this race, and He wants me to keep running, until He says you've hit the finish line, I want to run to the end.
Well, Gary, this has been so good. And so often we don't think of it in this context. And that's why we wanted to have you on talk about your book, Every Body Matters, which is a great play on words. But that whole concept of developing yourself spiritually, which we all get, I mean, we want to know the Word, read the Word, pray, do all those things, which are the right things to do, and then intellectually to be able to defend the faith, know the classics like you refer to, and then obviously to be active in such a way that you can proclaim the gospel and think of that with your grandkids and getting down on the floor with them face to face and seeing those smiles, and then your neighborhood, your church, and all those things.
And if we could add a few years to our life like Paul to fight the good fight, to run the good race, it all starts making sense. But it just means we've got to get off our bahookies, really, and we've got to go do it and to live it for the Lord in every facet. So thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having me. Well, we hope you've been inspired by what has been shared the past couple of days now with Gary Thomas and that you'll get a copy of this book, Every Body Matters, strengthening your body to strengthen your soul. It's going to motivate you to get engaged in a little more activity and to take care of yourself to do those very things that Jim and Gary have been talking about. Get a copy of the book from us here at the ministry when you make a donation of any amount. We're inviting you to partner with us as we reach out and help families. Over the last 12 months, thanks to the generosity of our donors, we were able to help nearly one million people grow stronger in their faith, and as Gary alluded to earlier, if half of our audience hearing this adds a year to their life, that's a lot of impact. So join us as we make Kingdom Impact with your generous financial gift today, and we'll send the book to you.
You can donate when you call 800, the letter A in the word family, or we've got the details for you in the show notes. And we hope you have a great weekend with your family and your church family. Coming up Monday, Dr. Kathy Cook explains how to have a good attitude about your unique God-given attributes. I pray that all of us would in our humility choose to change our attitude toward the things we cannot change.
Change what we can and leave the rest alone and change our attitudes because it honors God. If I walk wounded through my days angry at my voice, then I'm angry at my Creator and I say I dismiss You. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed, even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a Hope Restored Marriage Intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.
