Do you know what would happen to your body if you ate a lot of really nutritious food for an extended period of time and didn’t do any physical activity? Sure you do. You’d get fat. That’s not a shock to any of us, but what may shock you is when I tell you there are a lot of Christians that are spiritually fat.
What do I mean by spiritually fat? A person who takes in large amounts of spiritual nutrition (the word of God), and then doesn’t seek to regularly apply it to their lives by acting on it and using their gifts and talents to serve the body of Christ will become spiritually fat.
I learned this when I worked for the Phone Center at Andrew Wommack Ministries. A woman called in one day and quoted dozens of scriptures to mee, then told me about the great things brother Andrew taught, Oral Roberts taught, and Joyce Meyer taught. As I listened, I was thinking, “Wow! This woman really knows the word of God!” She then began to share some really shocking and basic personal struggles she was having and then asked for prayer for the equivalent of a spiritual hangnail. I gave her a verse of scripture and prayed for her, but then got off the phone bewildered. How could a that woman knew that much of the word of God have needed prayer for something so small? Why didn’t she just pray for herself? The Lord then reminded me of James 1:
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
God showed me the woman I had ministered to had not put into practice many of the deep truths of God’s word that she had heard. This wasn’t an assumption on my part. She shared with me quite a few areas of disobedience and rebellion in her life. These areas of compromise and disobedience led this woman into spiritual deception. While she intellectually knew a lot of Bible, she was very spiritually immature because she didn’t put the word she knew to practice. God then showed me how I had done this at times in my own life as well and reminded me of the importance of putting into practice that which we know to do. That is how we become spiritually fit!
I don’t write this blog to mean or condemning, but to provide the final piece of instruction as to how to grow spiritually! The last two weeks we have talked about the importance resting in Christ’s finished work and spiritual nutrition. Here is last week’s blog if you missed it. When we rest in Christ’s finished work, and feed ourselves nutritious meals from His word, the final ingredient to getting spiritually fit is to exercise or act on the word we have received. This is comparable to a person who eats healthy and then lifts weights. Lifting the weight creates the resistance to develop muscle and helps burn excess calories. It’s a necessity to getting physically fit the same way acting on God’s word is a necessity to getting spiritually fit!
I hope this series of articles has both enlighten and encouraged you to get spiritually fit in 2024! If you’d like to learn more about being a doer of the word, check out this message I taught at Grace Life Church.
