The Point #160 - Which Muscles Are Most Important?

Exercise is important. Too bad I hate it!😂 But at least I’m at a point in my life when I realize, though it is not so fun, it is necessary. Do you know what group of muscles is most important for us to keep strong? I’ll give you the answer in the audio today. We are continuing on lessons from Jesus in the Gospels. There is a spiritual discipline that is very necessary, though not fun, that we must master so that we can have strong Christian lives. We’ll also be talking about this exercise today. Any guesses?

Transcript

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We're continuing our talks about lessons learned from the life of Christ in the Gospels. Exercise. I hate it. I want to love it. I keep wanting to love it. For years I've wanted to love it. I do it. Especially now that I'm 50. I know that I have no other choice if I want to live a long and healthy life than to get exercise and to keep my body strong. But that doesn't mean that I love it. Hopefully, I will get there. There's still hope. Recently, though, I did read about building muscle. And I thought it was interesting because it said that training your core muscles, your abs, obliques, and lower back, this is the set of muscles that gives you the most bang for your buck. A strong core improves your posture, prevents your back pain, and boosts performance in all other exercises and daily movement. It's the foundation that everything else is built on. So that makes sense. Your core muscles, because your legs, everything, walking, all of it has to do with having a strong core. I understand that. And so it started me thinking: what is something that I feel in my Christian life and in Christian life in general is something that has to be exercised regularly. What muscles get used a lot if you have a strong Christian life? And I immediately go to this set of spiritual muscles, which talking about things we don't like to do, and that is this. Humility. Humility is like the core muscles where it's the foundation of everything else. It's what keeps everything else strong in the Christian life. Jesus loved talking about and to children when he was on earth. And in Matthew 18, he says that we are to humble ourselves like little children. And and that is what is so beautiful about little kids. They're not proud and cocky when they're small. They easily forgive, they easily apologize, they easily make up, they just are happy. And it's not about who's right. When little kids just they just want to be happy and they want other people to be happy. That's what's so awesome. And that is what Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like that. So in heaven, we will live like little children's attitude, little kids' attitudes on earth. And I love that. Being humble, keeping yourself humble. You know, some things like the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, those things. The Holy Spirit does that through us. But my friends, let me tell you, and let me remind myself: humility is not a fruit of the spirit. Humility and forgiveness, those are things that in the Bible God tells us to do ourselves. He says, humble yourself. That is a job that he gives for us to do. He said, go exercise. This is important. Exercise this often. Humility, which keeps away the ultimate sin, which is the mother of all sins and the root of all other sins, and that is pride. We are to humble ourselves on the regular. I taught in Sunday school yesterday the story of Naaman, and he was a great, powerful, um, rich, famous military man. And his uh his duty, his um obedience that he had to do was to go humble himself enough to go dunk him's body seven times in the Jordan River, which was nasty and dirty and yuck. And he had to do that. So no one could do that for him. He couldn't pay to have it done. Elisha did not even come to meet him personally. Like you would think there'd be a great military general, maybe Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur or General Lee or Grant, and they would get all the honors from the heads of state. Elisha showed Naaman, there's nobody that's better than anyone else in the kingdom of God. And if you're going to get healed, leprosy was a picture of sin in the Old Testament. If you're going to get healed, you're going to do it the same way everybody else does. Go humble yourself and obey God. Dip in the Jordan River seven times and you'll be healed. When we trust Christ as our Savior, which is the only way to heaven, and it's not about works that we do, just his righteousness. The first step in that is the repentance, realizing we are sinners, realizing we're on our way to hell. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And that first step is humility that plays out in our life every single day. So to get those muscles strong and to stay strong, let me just give you a few things that will happen a lot in our Christian life to have strong humility and a strong core in our spiritual bodies so that everything else works well. Apologizing often. Caring more about relationships than about being right. Caring more that other people are not offended or misunderstood or um turned away from the gospel than caring about our own pride. And a lot of times that just takes the humility of saying, I am so sorry. Please forgive me. Oh, I didn't mean to do that. Oh, I probably misunderstood that. Oh, would you please forgive me? Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh no, you go first. Jesus himself was the example in everything to us, but he was the example of humility and meekness. He humbled himself from being the God of the universe to being born as a totally dependent infant who could do nothing on earth and was misunderstood his entire life and ministry and career. And he humbled himself so that sinful men could put him on a cross, beat him, curse him, say that he was a devil and lie about him so that we could have salvation. When I think of that and how much humility that took, made the Bible said he humbled himself and made himself up no reputation. And he is going to be exalted forever and ever and ever. Humility is a temporary state. Humility is not staying down on our hands and knees with our faces rubbed into the dirt for the rest of our lives and just being a doormat for everybody. That is not what humility is. Humility is a temporary state that makes things right so that God can exalt us. God can make us his child. God can heal our relationships. God can heal, uh, can do so much for us. God can lift us up and glorify us here on this earth and give us tons of blessings. The first step is humility. Humble ourselves. We are not God. He is God. We have a low place. He has the highest place. We are abased. He is exalted. And how that plays out in our daily life is exalting others over ourselves, submitting ourselves to others, submitting ourselves to our own husbands. The stuff that is hard because our pride kicks against it all day long. So I say to myself, if I want to have a strong body and to be strong into my 70s and 80s and be able to do things, I need to keep a strong core. No, doing core exercises is not fun. Moving my body so that my core gets strong, there's no fun in that. And being humble is not fun. It's something that you force yourself to do on purpose, and then all the good stuff comes from it. All of the restored relationships, all of the happiness and peace in your home. Moms, it takes a lot of humility not to make everything about how your kids offended you because they didn't do the chores you told them to do, they didn't take out the garbage, they didn't clean off the steps, they don't see what needs to be picked up, they don't do this, and they don't do that. What it takes for a mom is the humility to say I'm not too good for this. This is not a personal affront to me. I am not going to be personally hurt because the house looks like this, or they didn't do this, or they didn't buy me this gift, or they didn't celebrate my birthday or Mother's Day or anniversary the way I thought they should. Humility gets past all of that and just says, How can I love you? How can I serve you to every human relationship we have? It gets so much junk out of the way. And Jesus said, just humble yourself like a little child. A little child isn't worried about all of the crazy, prideful things that we wrap around ourselves when we're trying to uh make ourselves the best as we get older. All of the stuff we have to have, all of the way we need to be treated, all of the way our expectations of how the day should go and vacation should go, how dinner should go, what people should say to us. Humility wipes out all of that and just frees up a space so that we can love others and God can be glorified and Jesus can be exalted. So let's keep exercising this very vital muscle in the spiritual life on the daily. What can you do today to humble yourself? How can you humble yourself in your relationships and your family today? How can you humble yourself in your relationships at work, at church, in your community, in your neighborhood? It's not fun, but it sure is effective, and it sure helps to spread the gospel and the love of Christ. Let's walk in love, friends. Loving God through loving others.