How can I become a spiritual Olympian?
1 Corinthians 9:25, Matthew 4:3–4
It must have been a strange sight, one cold night in a mostly abandoned hockey rink in Norway. It was September of 1979, and some hockey players with the letters “USA” on their uniforms were skating up and down the ice in the dark, doing a brutal skating drill that had most of them on the verge of collapse. Their coach, Herb Brooks, was preparing them for the Olympics at Lake Placid, and he’d been disgusted with their lackluster performance that evening—a tie against Norway’s second-best national team. So, he decided to punish them with “Herbies,” repeatedly making them skate up and down the ice in starts and stops, continuing long after the rink janitor had turned off the lights. Little did they realize that this grueling night of seemingly endless repetitions was building a foundation that would result in their shocking victory over the greatest hockey team in the world—the Russians—five months later. And as they completed their 4–3 victory on February 22, 1980, what was most noticeable was how the Americans were consistently skating better than the Russians, beating them to the puck, seemingly tireless as the last few minutes drained away. The discipline of that long night of skating in a darkened rink in Norway five months earlier had helped make this hockey miracle come true.
Discipline is absolutely essential to success in the Christian life as well. Twice the Apostle Paul used athletic analogies to make this point in his epistles. In his day, the version of the Olympics was called the “Isthmian Games.” A victor’s crown in these games was very prestigious, and athletes would make supreme sacrifices to obtain it. Paul likened his own discipline of his body to those rigors: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:25). Paul refers to the astonishing discipline of an athlete exercising self-control in all things: strictly watching his diet, sleep, and leisure, so that he can give full attention to athletic training. Little has changed in two thousand years. Modern Olympic athletes must be extremely disciplined over every detail of their lives, or they have no chance of winning the gold medal. They must especially focus on the specific aspects of their own sport to gain the highest level of skill possible. In the same way, excellence in the Christian life requires discipline, strict training, specifically in the area of personal spiritual development.
Another key passage from Paul appears in 1 Timothy 4: “Train yourself to be godly. 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). Paul there commands Timothy to train himself to be godly. As we noted earlier, the Greek word translated train is gymnazo, from which we get the word “gymnastic.” Here Paul directly contrasts the physical training an athlete undergoes to the training needed for godliness. He commands us to train ourselves for godliness with the same relentless purpose that a skilled athlete uses to develop his technique.
In this commitment, we are to imitate our Lord Jesus Christ. We get a glimpse of some of Jesus’ habits of personal piety in the Gospels. For example, in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, we learn of Jesus’ love for an early morning prayer time with his Father: “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). He continued this habit throughout his busy ministry: “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
“He commands us to train ourselves for godliness with the same relentless purpose that a skilled athlete uses to develop his technique.”
Similarly, we see two other aspects of Jesus’ spiritual disciplines in his time of testing in the desert: Bible intake and fasting. The scriptural side of Jesus’ devotional life comes out in the three passages from Deuteronomy he quotes to resist the temptation of the devil. The first of these was Deuteronomy 8:3, which Jesus quoted to refute the temptation to use his miraculous powers to benefit his own life: “The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.’ Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”‘” (Matthew 4:3–4). This was more than just the right verse to crush the temptation Satan hurled at him. It also showed the preciousness of “every word” that came from the mouth of God. Though we have no direct evidence that Jesus read the scriptures every day in a morning quiet time, he must have had a regular pattern of scripture intake. The preciousness of the scripture to Jesus is also in evidence when we consider that Jesus had memorized all three of the passages he used in the desert. He had hidden God’s word in his heart that he might not sin against the Father (Psalm 119:11).
Concerning fasting, the forty-day fast of Jesus in the desert is clear evidence of his total self-control over his appetite. Jesus did not fast as mourning for sin, but he fasted in conjunction with his prayer life and the time of testing in the desert. We do not see Jesus fast again in the New Testament, but his willingness to fast is plainly established at the beginning of his ministry.
A daily quiet time is the foundation to progress in the Christian journeys. Therefore, a Christian should “train for godliness” by consistency in this area. Following the example of Jesus, I think the best time for a quiet time is early in the morning before the business of the day overtakes us. To make certain this happens, we need to set our alarm early enough to allow for a rich time in the Word and in prayer. But if we deprive our bodies of sleep too regularly, we will be sleepy during our devotion times and throughout the day. So, we need to go to bed a little earlier to maintain the same length of sleep time the body needs. This requires sacrifice, since evening is a time in which our desire for relaxation and voluntary pleasures may tempt us to stay up too late.
It was Christ who likened the Bible to food when he said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). One thing is for sure, we cannot survive spiritually without a steady diet of scripture any more than we can survive physically without a steady intake of nourishment. The primary source of biblical intake must be our daily reading and personal study of the Bible. Our Bible intake should be both broad and deep. The spiritual discipline of reading through the entire Bible in a year, year after year, will help a person maintain a sense of the sweep of redemptive history, as well as continue their ongoing training in biblical theology (the study of the unified message of the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments together).
So how do we “train ourselves for godliness?” A mature Christian invests in certain habit patterns on a daily basis that prepare him/her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges. A Christian stores up the riches of God’s word and the sweetness of fellowship with God in prayer. Simply put, a mature Christian has a daily devotional life, a regular pattern of Bible intake, personal worship, and prayer. Bible reading and prayer are the two legs by which we make progress in the internal journey, and a mature Christian will not let a day go by without time spent in each discipline.
(excerpt from An Infinite Journey (pp 343-5), by Andy Davis)
