Tag: exercise

Love is a Muscle

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Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lou Ferrigno. Steve Reeves (you have to be in my age group to remember him.)

When we think of those names we think of one thing- muscles! Big, well-developed muscles.

They got those muscles through hard work, dedication and sacrifice. And after all that work, after all that strenuous activity, hours upon hours in the gym, proper diet, and loss of personal time with friends and family, if they don’t keep at it, those muscles get weak and flabby.

No, muscle doesn’t turn into fat- totally different things, but they do get flabby and weaken. Muscles need to be worked constantly to remain strong.

We all know that the heart is a muscle, but love is only a feeling right? Is it? Most people would say that love is an emotional thing, not a physical thing; however, if you have ever been in love you know that it can affect you physically.

I submit that love is a muscle. You know that old saying, don’t you? The one that goes:

“If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.”

Love has a physical effect, love is something we feel and experience; when we are unloved, it hurts and when we are loved, it is better than the best adrenalin or endorphin high any athlete can experience. Love acts like a muscle, it works like a muscle, it hurts like a muscle, and it grows like a muscle. Sounds to me like it’s a muscle.

Love needs to be nurtured and it needs to be constantly worked at. It takes sacrifice, it takes hard work, it takes humility, it takes compassion. It takes as much work as any physical effort you would make to build any other muscle in your body.

And like the muscles you get when you work out steadily, you need to keep at it to maintain what you have gotten. I am no muscle-man by any stretch of the imagination (although I do have a pretty nice set of guns for an old fart) and I work twice as hard at just maintaining what I have as I ever did building it up. I also work just as hard, if not harder, to maintain the love I feel for Donna (my wife) and my family and friends. I don’t do social media because I believe that is more like broadcasting than committed communication. I call and email people one-to-one to demonstrate that I am willing to take the time to be with them, and them alone.

Today everything is cocooned- yes, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. have made socializing easier, but is it the right kind of socializing? Is it really intimate? Is it really one-on-one? Does it take effort? These technological forms of communication have taken something very valuable out of communication- it has taken away the love. It has taken away the intimacy of talking to someone and replaced it with the cold, unemotional and unattached simplicity of just posting something on a bulletin board for any and all to see. In other words, it takes no effort and building love takes effort.

Love needs to be personal. How can it not be? Love for one’s fellow man (or woman), love of art, love of nature- these are all good, but impersonal.

There are so many passages in the Bible about love I won’t even put one here, except the most important one- Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might.

See? Didn’t I tell you that love is a muscle? God tells us to love Him with all our might and you need muscles to be strong.

The message today is really simple- we are commanded to love God and to love each other- this takes a lot to do. We are, by nature, self-centered, self-absorbed and selfish. We are sinful and hedonistic. We can overcome our Yetzer Hara (Evil Inclinations) with the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) leading us if we follow what it says, and if we exercise our love.

I am not one to talk. I am saying do as I say (actually, do as He says) and not as I do. I try to do what pleases God and fail many times. And when I do something good, I revert back. If backsliding was an Olympic sport I would hold many gold medals. But I keep trying, and that is what we all need to do. To run the good race, to keep our eyes on the prize, to build muscles of love and not let them get flabby.

The V’ahavta prayer (Deuteronomy 6:5-9) tells us to love God, and remember His commandments, to speak of them when we arise and when we sleep. I do. I also make sure that when I arise I tell my wife, Donna, that I love her. And when we go to sleep, I tell her that I love her. And I tell her that I love her as often as the feeling hits during the day (and it hits a lot.) I also remember to tell my sisters Wendy and Gayle that I love them. I would tell my children, Alexandra and Bryce, that I love them (if they would talk to me.) I do this not just because I do love them, but it is also how I exercise my love. It’s how I keep it strong.

You really want to build up a sweat exercising your love? Tell your spouse how much you love them next time you are in the middle of an argument! Yes, right there in between the “You always” and the “Why don’t you ever”  statements say, “You know, despite all this I love you and I am so thankful we are married. Even though I am pissed right now, I am still very much in love with you and never want to be with anyone else. Ever.”

Then go back to arguing… if you can.

Love is really strong when you exercise it regularly, and it has the strength to knock out anger and hatred in one punch. Wouldn’t you like to be that strong?

 

 

Respectfully, Yeshua, I disagree

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In each of the Gospels (B’rit Chadashah) when Yeshua is praying before His arrest, He asks the Talmudim (Disciples) with Him to stay awake, but they are sleeping when He returns from praying. He says, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

Respectfully, Yeshua, I disagree.

The problem we have as human beings is that the flesh is strong, often stronger than the spirit. Now, nothing is more powerful than God, and when we call on His spirit all things are possible (Yeshua says that, too, and I fully agree!), but the flesh is our humanity. It is our physical presence in a physical world, one which resents and rejects the very Ruach (spirit) that is what we really need to survive being “in the flesh.”

The flesh is what causes us to not just sin, but want to sin.  Our nature is sinful, in that we are drawn to hedonistic opportunities. The little red guy with the horns and pitchfork on our left shoulder usually beats the stuffing out of the little white-robed guy with the harp and the halo on our right shoulder. If that little angel really wanted to, he could knock the red guy into the next century, but that’s not in his nature. Yeshua was led like a lamb to slaughter, not saying anything. He was humble, even to death. We are told that the proud will be humiliated, and the humble raised. That’s the reason, I believe, the little guy with the harp gets the short end of the stick most of the time. However, when we work with that guy, we can overcome our nature. With the spirit, our flesh can be subdued and the spirit can be the stronger. When we partner with the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) it will help us to overcome the Yetzer Hara, which is the Evil Inclination that we are all born with; in Judaism it is the Yetzer Hara, in Christianity it is called Original Sin- either way, we are born into sinfulness and must spend our entire life overcoming it.

When Yeshua said the flesh is weak, what He really meant is that the human ability to overcome our nature is very weak. The “flesh” Yeshua was talking about was our self-discipline, our desire to do good, our ability to overcome ourselves. That is weak because the sinful nature of our flesh, the self-absorbed, hedonistic and undisciplined mindset we all have hard-wired into our very psyche is humanly impossible to get past.

But with God, all things are possible. And that means that even the meek, humble and forgiving little angle on our shoulder can rip the horns off that little devil and stick them where only a proctologist will be able to recover them. He can do that, with our help, with our support and with our desire to obey the Torah.

As a human I love, first and foremost, myself. To some degree it is a necessary thing- self-preservation is the most basic instinct of any living creature. However, God teaches us that to give one’s life for a friend is the epitome of love, and we all know at least one person whose self-love is so out of control that they live an unhappy, solitary and depressed life. I don’t want to end up like that, do you?

We can’t weaken the flesh, but we can strengthen the spirit. I have asked God to take a certain desire from me, I have lifted it up to Him and said, which I really, really feel, that I can’t do it and I need Him to just excise this desire and these thoughts from my mind. You know what His answer was? He told me, “It doesn’t work that way.”  He showed me that I need to work with His Ruach, I need to strengthen my ability to draw on His spirit for strength, He showed me why Shaul (Paul) said in 2 Corinthians 12:9:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

The flesh is strong and the spirit is weak in each of us, but the flesh is as strong as it is ever going to be, whereas the spirit can grow stronger every day until we die. As I try to obey God’s word (that means the Torah) more and more, I strengthen the indwelling spirit simply by getting myself out of the way so that the spirit can fill me. In other words, each day I try more and more to die to self.  The more I die to self, the more the spirit will fill me, the stronger it becomes until it rules my every action, and even though I will always have sinful thoughts, the spirit will be speaking to me louder than the flesh can. My flesh will whisper and God’s Ruach will shout, so all I will hear is God.

We are told that God’s Word never returns void, so here’s an easy way to strengthen your spirit: read a chapter of the Bible every day.

That’s a spiritual exercise everyone can do.

Is Your Flesh Weak or Strong?

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Yeshua said of His Talmudim (Disciples), when they couldn’t stay awake with Him as He prayed that night after the Seder, that their spirit was willing but their flesh was weak.

I wonder if, with all due respect to Yeshua, He didn’t get that backwards.

I know that there are many times my spirit (actually, His spirit within me) tells me the correct thing to do, but my flesh outweighs it and I do something else. In that case, isn’t the flesh stronger than the spirit? Doesn’t Shaul say, in Romans, that he does what he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t do that which he wants to? Is his spirit strong and willing and his flesh weak? It seems to be the other way around, doesn’t it?

We are creatures of the flesh- we have to be. We are born into the flesh, we live in the flesh, and we will be flesh until we die and are resurrected in new bodies which will be born of the spirit. Until then, we are flesh and the flesh is powerful.

When we have the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) within us, we are guided by that spirit to do what is right in God’s eyes and we are comforted by His presence, which that spirit brings. But we are still flesh, and when my spirit says to go get some food for a person who is asking for help, it is my flesh that makes excuses for not doing so: I am in a rush, I don’t have any small change, the cafe is all the way across the street, whatever. It is the flesh that says to do what I am doing and not care for that person in need, even when both the spirit and flesh say it will only take 5 minutes. The difference is that the spirit says, “Oh, come on- this will only take 5 minutes” and the flesh says, “You’re late- you don’t have even 5 minutes to spare.”

The spirit is right and the flesh is wrong, but the spirit requires discipline to follow and the flesh is always the easy way out. That’s the problem, isn’t it? When we are flesh, in a world controlled by flesh, the flesh is the easy way and the spirit is the hard way.

So the only thing to do is exercise your spirit until it is stronger than your flesh. Pray, force yourself to help others, make sure you get some time with other Believers and listen to their stories of how they have strengthened their spirit, and decide for yourself who is going to rule you. Yeshua said we are all slaves to something, so decide: will you be a slave to your flesh, or a slave to God’s spirit?

For me it is an easy decision: I want to do what God wants me to do. Yet, as much as I want to, it is a hard thing to actually do. Maybe that’s why so many are called but few actually get to the end. In fact, we are all called because God says (check it out in Ezekiel) that He is not happy with the death of any sinner; He would rather we all turn from our sin and live.  That means we are all called.

It’s only those who can exercise their spirit to be stronger than their flesh that will make it. Just saying you believe isn’t enough- even the Enemy and every one of his demons believe. It is the ones who believe, have turned from their sin and produced fruit (the offering of good works that we need to present to God at Judgement Day) whose spirit has been strong enough to win out over their flesh.

Are you exercising your spirit? If not, you had better hit the bricks, get on the bike, and start doing a few spiritual push-ups every morning. Only God knows how much longer you have, so don’t delay because He isn’t likely to give you any notice.

No Pain; No Gain

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Having been very active in sports during High School, and throughout my life, I have a deep and intimate understanding of the title for today’s Drash.

It’s not wise to hurt yourself, but when you push your muscles to their limit, you will feel it over the next couple of days. It is a “good” hurt because, although having sore muscles does hurt, it represents that you have done a good job, you pushed yourself to the limits of your ability, and (so far as physical exercise is concerned) that means you will gain more muscle and endurance.

Real muscle grows when you destroy it. When you feel that “burn” and your muscle is “pumped”, the excess blood flow that causes that feeling is going there in order to help the destroyed tissue. The destroyed tissue isn’t just replaced; the body builds more tissue than there was originally. That is how body-builders get those large muscles (even without the ‘roids’). The constant destroying of muscle and careful rebuilding through proper diet and rest results in larger and stronger muscles, with greater endurance.

Faith is a spiritual muscle that we need to work with, every day. And, just like biceps, pecs and abs, we need to push it to it’s limits; indeed, we need to destroy it so that we can rebuild it to be stronger and more enduring. The way we exercise our faith is to live  in a way that pushes us to do more than we want to do. In other words, we need to force ourselves to get outside our spiritual comfort zone.

Get more involved in activities at the place where you worship, witness to friends and family, even strangers, more often. Risk their disapproval. Go on mission trips, help the homeless and needy, volunteer, just get off your butts and do something that takes faith. Pray more often (see my section on Prayer for some ideas about that), read the Bible more often, trust more often (oh, that is a hard one). And here’s the really difficult one: forgive more often, and more completely.

Exercise your faith by using it. I gave you some ideas above, but I don’t know what you need to do. I don’t know where your faith is weak…but you do. You know what makes you feel uncomfortable, you know what you don’t like to do, and you know what God is telling you to do. Finally: it’s all about you now.

Search your heart, seek those things that God tells us we should all be doing and that you know you don’t do, and do it!

That’s pushing your spiritual muscles to the limit. And just like the professionals, rest and eat properly. The proper diet is to read the Word of God (Man doesn’t live on bread alone but every word from the mouth of God) for food to nourish your spirit, and rest through intimate and private prayer time with the Lord. Prayer is refreshing to both your soul and your spirit, and even to your physical body.

So get on out there and work those spiritual muscles! Feel the burn, get pumped; Yeshua worked His spiritual muscles completely and showed us how we are to do it. Stop being a Weakling of Worship, and become a Schwarzenegger of Spirit!

Remember: Yeshua was the first one to say, “I’ll be back!”