Spiritual Fitness

This blog is titled after a Podcast from New Philadelphia church.  I started attending New Philly when I was teaching in South Korea.  While attending this church I learned about my personal identity, forgiveness, confidence, and freedom while experiencing more breakthroughs than I could imagine.

Anyway, I was listening to a podcast of theirs the other day and I decided it was high time to share it.  The speaker has an interesting method of preaching, but he is sincere and jovial.  The breakdown is as follows:

To grow in life, we need a balanced diet; protein, fruit, veggies, dairy, and yes even carbs.  But just as we need to be concerned with our physical fitness, we need to also be concerned with our spiritual fitness.  That also is consisting of a balanced diet.  Without a proper serving of fellowship, spiritual teaching (sermons), prayer, bible reading, and meditation, our growth as Christians can be stunted.

I asked God, what am I lacking?  "Where am I malnourished?"  And the response was direct.  It's the only thing I don't actually do.  Meditation.

My first thought is, "What?  Meditation is for yogis and is not part of seeking the one true God." But it is in the scripture.  I typed meditate in into an online site that finds the word in the any version of the bible.  It appeared 18 times in the Old Testament.   The word meditation was found an additional six times.

Examples include-

           Joshua 1:8

"This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success."

          Psalm 48:9

"Lord, here in your Temple we meditate upon your kindness and your love."

          Psalm 145:5

"I will meditate about your glory, splendor, majesty, and miracles."

Needless to say.  I had a lot to think about.  And especially meditate about.  But where does one start?  Why, in the family perhaps.  My spiritual father is my pastor from New Philadelphia. His spiritual father is Pastor Benjamin Robeson from California, and he has his own spiritual father Pastor Daniels.  There is a lot of security knowing that the people you trust and look up to are accountable to other people, who are accountable to other people.  Ha ha...but I digress.  Pastor Benjamin wrote a book on meditation.  It is free to download at this link.

I have just started the book, so I am not sure how things will go.  I do know that I have the attention span of a gnat, but I am ready to see myself free to grow as I work on my spiritual fitness.