OK, I get it. It’s totally legit for Christian publishers, Christian fitness influencers, Christian owners of gyms and everybody else who is Christian to market and sell their latest and greatest fitness challenge. If you can make 70 bucks and help someone be closer to Jesus for 7 seconds – go for it!
I just think it would have been really weird if Jesus had told Simon and Andrew while they were fishing, doing their everyday busy life, “Come follow me – for just 7 weeks and if you don’t think this being fishers of men idea is just as cool as I think it is then you can go back to doing your same routine – until I come up with something else and then I hope you’ll try it too because I’ve got a program to sell here.”
Being in the world AND of it is tempting. I mean it can’t be all that bad, right? God didn’t have social media, algorithms, or best practices for success back then. He sure didn’t have bills to pay. If he had come on, you know he’d do it too. He can do anything he wants.
So here you go, if you’re going to do “challenges” let’s at least be sure to incorporate biblical truths into them. Things like this:
Stay awake with me 1 hour.
Matthew 26:40
Pray unceasingly.
1 Thessalonians 5:17
Don’t have eyes for the fashionable god of darkness, thinking he will give you what you want and you won’t have to bother believing a truth you can’t see. Our lives are at constant risk for Jesus’ sake, which makes Jesus’ life the more evident in us. We’re not giving up. How could we! There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
2 Corinthians 4
IF IT’S NOT REALLY A CHALLENGE – IT’S NOT A CHALLENGE
God wants people to practice fitness as a physical working out of the faith that is on a “can’t see” level. If the life of Jesus is to become more evident in us then we must train not with the cheapness of a challenge but by exercising ‘forever’ daily beginning now and not giving up but continuing right on into eternity.
