#Spiritual Fitness

Good morning. In my country, we say Kyota.

Can you say Kyota? Is anyone from New Zealand here?

There's usually a few Kiwis around.

None. Oh, my goodness, we haven't.

We haven't come as far as St. Albans yet.

Oh, my goodness. We'll have to change that.

Hey, it's wonderful to be here. You.

I'm sure you know this, but your pastors are absolute legends.

Long before we met them, we had heard their reputation.

And so we were very privileged to come to Scotland a couple of

years ago and we spent the whole time taking notes.

And I think when they came over to New Zealand to see us, they

said, Oh my goodness, we recognize this place because

you've copied all our ideas. But they're, they're wonderful

leaders and they're, they're legends throughout the whole

movement. Just very quickly, I want to

show you my family that I've left behind in behind in New

Zealand. So we've got 4 kids.

They're a good looking lot aren't they?

That they, they, they've got the good genes from my wife Lizzie.

We've got 4 kids and five grandchildren and they send

their their love. I actually heard that my son Ben

was here a few years ago with a a kids conference, which is

wonderful. He loves travelling around as

well. My goodness, isn't our world in

chaos at the moment? A lot of people coming to this

conference in Portugal couldn't get there because they were

coming through Dubai. And I was just thinking, felt

the Lord saying to me, you know, this is a time where Christians

need to be really strong. You know, we've got to stand up.

We've got to become strong in our faith.

And so I want to talk about being strong in our faith today.

I want to talk about spiritual fitness.

It was interesting when I was coming today, saw a few people

out there jogging. New Zealand is a is a big place

for for physical fitness. I've got a friend who just did a

100 kilometre cross country run just recently.

It makes me exhausted just even thinking about that.

But you know, in the new year in New Zealand, it's probably the

same here. Everybody signs up to the gym,

they go for the month and they bring all these extra machines

in and then after the month, month, everybody sort of forgets

about it and they got on with life.

I didn't realise. Do you realise that you're

Pastor Chuck? He's a physical legend as well.

Did you realise that? I mean, we call him Chuck Norris

around the world because but you know, he came, he came to our

place and he was out running every day and he's the legend.

And I thought, how does a pastor get as fit as this?

And you may not know this, but he's got a secret and I'm going

to reveal it to you today. I didn't ask permission, but I'm

going to reveal it. If you look carefully at his

hands, he has a very special ring.

Have you seen Lord of the Rings? You know, my precious, all that

sort of stuff. Well, if you look on his hands,

he's got a special ring. It's actually black.

In his case, it's called an aura ring.

And I don't know whether it's super powersome or what it does,

but I thought to myself, I said to my wife, I want to look like

Chuck. So I bought a ring as well

because there's a picture of it on the screen.

It hasn't done the same thing for me, unfortunately.

I'm still working on it. But what it does, they're quite

incredible rings because what they do is they encourage you to

keep fit. It tells you what, you know, it

reminds me that my blood's still there, which is good.

It tells me my heart's pumping, which is also very encouraging.

But I over the holidays, we have our summer holidays over

January. And I was doing a lot of, you

know, walking up hills and all that sort of stuff.

Nothing like chalk, my goodness. But you know, I was going for a

couple of hours and it was encouraging me to say, you can

do this. You go, you good thing.

I mean, I'd even just get out of bed and it would say awesome,

you're off to a great staff. I thought, wow, this is great.

I've got my Apple Watch as well. And they both encourage me.

They're like a couple of little fans.

They're saying you go, you are awesome.

You're going to become like Chuck, you know, they're just

really encouraging. And so I, it was exciting to see

myself get a little bit fitter as the time went on because it

would show me that my heart was getting a bit fitter.

I was doing a bit more cardio and stuff like that, encouraging

me to sleep more. And I want to tell you physical

fitness is great, but I want to talk about spiritual fitness

today. You know, Timothy says, sorry,

Paul says to Timothy in one Timothy 4 verse 8.

Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much

better. Promising benefits in this life

and in the life to come. You know, we have a body, a soul

and a spirit. Did you realize that hopefully

all of you have got our bodies here today?

I think most of you have. That's good.

I've got a little diagram coming up and it'll show us that we've

got, we've got the body part of us, we've got the soul part of

us, which is the mind, the will, and the emotions.

But we've also got this part called the spirit as well.

Hopefully that diagram might come up and you'll see it there.

There we go. And so often we think mostly

about our body and we think about our soul.

We can exercise our body to become like Chuck our soul.

You know, we get counselling and we do mindfulness and all those

sorts of things, but our spirit is the part of us that relates

to God. And in one Thessalonians 523,

Paul says, now may the God of peace make you holy in every way

and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless

until the Lord Jesus Christ comes again.

You know, I know people who are incredibly physically fit, but

spiritually they are malnourished.

They don't focus on their spirits at all.

And God actually does want us to be physically fit.

He wants us to have healthy minds as well, but he wants our

spirit to grow. And a spiritually physical,

sorry, a spiritually fit person is a person that is incredibly

close to Jesus. That's what a a spiritually fit

person looks like. I've got a diagram coming up

here and I want to talk about what our lives are like.

This diagram here, you'll see it has Jesus in the centre.

You know, there are lots of things that we can have as

passions in life. Some of us might really love our

work. That's a bit strange.

Maybe we have passions like sport and running and you know,

you'll have English football teams and different things that

you absolutely love. We love the All Blacks in New

Zealand. Family is obviously very

important, but what have you got in the centre of your passions,

in the centre of your life? You know, the goal of our lives

as Christians should be to have Jesus in the centre because the

definition of a God is the thing that you love the most, the

thing that you're most passionate about.

And I want to ask you today, what is at the centre of your

life? What is the absolute passion of

your life? Because as Christians, the

journey of our lives should be that we try to bring Jesus into

the real centre. Now don't panic.

Today if you look at all those other things and you think, oh,

maybe it's my family, maybe it's, you know, my technology,

maybe it's music or whatever The thing is, over our lives, God

wants us to get spiritually fit by bringing Jesus into the

centre. You know, we often hear the

saying Jesus is Lord. What does that actually mean?

Well, it means that Jesus is the boss.

It means that he is in charge, it means he is the greatest joy

of our lives. And we can sing about Jesus

being Lord, but if he's not in that centre circle then he

actually isn't Lord of your life.

The famous missionary to China, Hudson Taylor said Jesus is

either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all.

So my challenge today is what is the centre of your life?

What is in the inner circle? Because whatever that is, is

your God. You know, when people become

Christians, there are some people that totally change.

They become radical in so many ways and sometimes they almost

seem a little bit too radical. When my day, they went out and

smashed all their CDs and you know, they got rid of a whole

bunch of stuff and they were telling everybody about Jesus.

They were excited and everything seemed to change.

Rather like one of the songs we sang.

Your talk is different, your walk is different.

That's what it looks like to be a Christian.

But I've noticed in recent years there are people that become

Christians and nothing much seems to change.

Their language is the same, their integrity is the same.

They still pretty much do what they used to do.

Not not much seems to change other than they just start

coming to church. Number of years ago Liz and I

were counselling a lady who was have having marriage problems

and she said to us my husband likes going dancing at

nightclubs. We said Oh yes she said he

actually takes his wedding ring off before I he goes.

Do you think that's a problem? And we said yes, I think that's

actually rather a serious problem that that, that that

you've got there. And you see what he was doing is

when he was at home, he had his ring on saying, I'm a faithful,

wonderful husband. But then he would take the ring

off and who knows what would happen.

It was sort of like conditional faithfulness.

And I want to ask the question today, when you go to work, are

you still faithful to Jesus? When you're with your mates in

the pub, are you faithful to Jesus?

Are you a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

Friday, Saturday Christian? Or are you different when you

come along to church than you are during the rest of the week?

You know, some people are just Sunday Christians and they say

they've become a Christian, but really all they've done is

they've added something onto their lives.

In my country we have a thing called sleep outs or granny

flats. I think you call it an annex.

And so I want to just show you what a what a house looks like.

There it is. That's my life.

Imagine your life looks like that.

Imagine you're just an ordinary life.

And then you become a Christian and you add an annex on the

side. It'll come up.

There we go. You add Jesus onto the side,

he's just attached. So your house looks exactly the

same. Your life looks the same, but

you've just got this little attachment that you sort of

visit once a week. You go in there and just have a

wee look around and think, oh, this is a nice wee annex, isn't

it? But God does not want to be your

annex. He does not want to be your

granny flat. I'll show you the next slide

which shows exactly what he wants to be.

He wants to be the whole house. He wants to come and he wants to

take over the whole thing. He wants to totally redecorate.

So when people come into your life as they think, wow, this

place has changed. This, this place is a whole

different place. I mean, I can sort of vaguely

recognize what it was, but something is radically different

there. And I want to challenge you.

When Jesus came into your life, is that what happened to you?

A man came up to Jesus once and he said, what is the most

important thing that I could possibly do with my life?

If I was just going to have one focus, if I was just going to

follow one commandment, what would that be?

And Jesus said to him in Matthew 2237, Love the Lord your God

with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.

This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is

like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Friends, when we become Christians, God wants us to love

Jesus with every single thing that's in US.

He encourages us to bring Him to be the greatest passion and to

come to the absolute middle of our circle.

You know, it's not enough just to be part of the Christian

culture, not enough to just come along to church and raise their

hands when our hearts are in different places.

You know, I want to read to you the scariest verse in the Bible

as far as I'm concerned. Ever listen to this in Matthew

721. This is Jesus speaking, He says,

not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the

Kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father

who was in heaven. Many will say to me on that day,

that's judgement day. Lord, Lord, did we not prophecy

in your name and in your name drive out demons and before many

miracles? Then I'll tell them, I never

knew you away from me, you evil doers.

Isn't that a scary verse? This is people who turn up to

Jesus on Judgement Day and they're expecting to get in And

they, they say, Jesus, you recognize us.

You know, we were not just average Christians.

We were, we went to Verso Church and St.

Albans. Impressive.

You know, we were on the worship team and we, we, we did usher

and we did all sorts of things. And they're expected to get in.

I mean, not even only that they were on the ministry team, they

were doing miracles and casting out demons.

And Jesus says, I don't even recognize who you are.

What a scary thing that is. And he says, I never knew you.

When you look at that Greek word, the Greek word gonosco to

know, talks about intimacy, talks about being very close.

It's the type of word both in Greek and in Hebrew.

They have a similar word that talks about the intimacy between

a husband and a wife. And Jesus is saying he wants

intimate relationship with us. He wants to be close to us.

I want to show you another diagram of circles.

And this is how we know God. You know, how well do you know

Him? You know, there could be people

here in every part of these circles and that's OK because

we're on a journey. There are some people in our

society that are completely unaware of Jesus, don't even

know anything about him, and they're on the journey.

Hopefully there are some people that know about Jesus, so

they're a wee bit closer. There are others that would be

like an acquaintance. I know him just a little bit.

I've encountered him. I, I want to get to know him

more. There are people that would say

I'm a friend, I'm a friend of Jesus.

But you know, Jesus wants something even more than that.

He wants intimacy. He wants incredible closeness.

What does it look like to have incredible closeness with Jesus?

Well, I know lots of old people. I'm becoming one myself

actually. But I know lots of old people

who have walked with Jesus for many years.

And you can tell a person that is very close to Jesus, we've

got a friend who's passed away and has photos going to come up

on the screen. His name is Bruce.

He's the granddad of one of our pastors.

And Bruce walked with Jesus for decades.

And you'd go and talk to Bruce and anytime you just said the

word Jesus, he would burst into tears.

Tears would just stream down his face.

I remember once, probably the last time we saw him, Liz said,

oh, Bruce, you just love Jesus, don't you?

When he just burst into tears and he said, oh, yes, I do.

And all these tears would would come down his face.

And I remember thinking to myself, that's the way I want to

end up. I want to become so close and so

intimate with Jesus that just the thought of him would bring

tears to my eyes. You know, I know a few elderly

people who are like Bruce, been very close to Jesus all their

lives. And it's wonderful because as

they get older, they get excited about seeing him.

You know, most people fight death.

I don't want to die. Give me any pill you can to keep

me alive. And these people are saying, oh,

I just can't wait to die. I can't wait to be with Jesus.

And I was with one lady that was, you know, in the process of

passing away. And she said to me, tell me what

it's like to be with Jesus. And I told her, you'll open up

your eyes and Jesus will be there.

And she said, oh, I can't wait. And I came and saw her a couple

of days later and she said, oh, I'm still here.

She said, I, I go to sleep and I think I'm going to wake up and

see Jesus just like you said. And then I, I open my eyes and I

think, oh, I'm back here on earth.

And she said, I just wake up so disappointed because all I want

to do is just be with Jesus. Don't you want to end up like

that? Don't you want to be in that

intimate place? What I want to tell you quickly

how you can head along that path, how you can become

spiritually fit. There's five things just very

quickly. Number one, make a decision that

Jesus is going to be the passion of your life.

Just decide it. Today I'm going to make him in

that inner circle #2 ask the Holy Spirit to help you because

the Holy Spirit is your coach. He's like your aura ring.

He says, come on, you can do this.

You can become more like Jesus. You know, you're off to a good

start. You know #3 prioritize spending

time with Jesus everyday. And I'll come back to that in a

minute #4 find others who will go on the journey with you.

Do you know, we're designed to be a team to do this together

and #5 commit to a number of weekly habits that will get you

close to Jesus? Now, do you know that just as

you go to the physical gym, you can see I don't go there

particularly often, but I want to tell you something.

I probably shouldn't say this, but their son Kaya, who's

probably here somewhere, he's a legend, man.

He is a legend. I mean, he's, he's at the gym

the whole time, this guy. And it's incredible.

And, and I haven't been to the gym all that many times, but but

when I do go, I know there are lots of different exercises that

you do. They exercise different parts of

your body. And do you know, all throughout

history people have actually gone into the spiritual gym and

they do spiritual exercises or spiritual habits practices they

call them, or disciplines that actually help you become closer

and closer to Jesus. And very quickly, in the time we

have left, I want to go through six of those things, six key

disciplines that we can do, the 6th exercises that will help us

come close to Jesus. The first one is worship.

The second one is prayer. The third one is the Bible.

The 4th 1 is fellowship. The fifth one is giving.

And the 6th 1 is mission. And let's very quickly look at

those exercises and then we're done.

So let's look at the first one, worship.

You know, when we worship, it exercises our spirit.

It opens us up towards God. You know, when I want to get

close to God, the first thing I do is to start to worship.

I put on a, you know, some music for some worship music.

I might sing myself, I might play my guitar or something like

I, I want to do something that's going to open my spirit towards

God. Romans 12 verse one says.

And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to

give your bodies to God because of all he's done for you.

Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind that he will

find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship

him. Just giving your whole self to

God and say Lord, everything I do, I want to be a worship to

you. I looked up the Internet

definition of worship. I think it was on AI so you

can't completely trust it, but this was a good one.

It called worship. It calls for complete, undivided

devotion, utilizing 1's entire being, emotion, spirit, and

physical effort to serve and honour God.

Isn't that cool? The Westminster Shorter

Catechism is not light reading, I want to tell you.

But the first part says what our purpose is in life.

Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

That's the purpose we're on Earth.

To to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

Let's whip on to the next one, which is prayer.

So the first one's worship, second one is prayer.

And I want to tell you, prayer is a two way conversation.

It's not you just giving a shopping list to God, telling

him what to do for the day. Prayer is where we not only talk

to God, but we listen to him as well.

And I want to suggest the best part of prayer, the part where

you'll really grow, is where you start to listen to God.

John 10, verse 27, Jesus said, my sheep listen to my voice.

John 10:27

I know them. There's that word again,

gonosco. I become intimate with them and

they follow me. When you spend time each day

listening to God, you will come close to him.

And prayer is incredibly powerful.

James 516. The earnest prayer of a

righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

So prayer every day is a tremendous spiritual exercise #3

the Bible. Did you know that the Bible is

spiritual food? Now we need physical food to be

able to stay alive. But Jesus said in Matthew 4

verse four, people do not live by bread alone, but by every

word that comes from the mouth of God.

Do you realize that when you read the Bible, even if you're

reading it and it seems a bit boring and what you don't

understand it spiritually, you are taking in spiritual food

which is making you grow stronger.

Something is happening whether you know it or not.

I love this. In Hebrews 4 verse 12, when it

Hebrews 4:12

talks about the Bible, it says the word of God is alive and

powerful. Isn't that cool?

The Word of God, which is the Bible, it's alive.

Imagine that there is no other book on the planet that actually

has spiritual life on it. There's no other book.

You can't get Shakespeare, you can't get TSL, you can't get

anybody else that writes. No matter how brilliantly they

write, none of them have spiritual life like the Bible.

When you read the Word, life comes into your being, for the

Word of God is alive and powerful.

And that word powerful in the Greek is inner gaze, which means

energy, power, activity. When you read the word of God,

spiritual energy. You know, when you go to the

gym, I was saying to Kaya about going to the gym.

I say, why don't you go to the gym?

You know, what do you love it? He says, I come out and I feel

full of energy. I must try that sometime.

So, but that's what happens spiritually when you read the

word of God. The 4th 1 is fellowship.

Do you know a real deception that is around these days that

is that we are designed to do church all by ourselves, that

we're it's just Jesus and me. It's my personal relationship

with Jesus. That's an incredible deception.

I mean, we do have a personal relationship with Jesus, but

we're designed to be in teams X 244 to 46.

All the believers met together in one place and shared

everything they had. They worshipped together at the

temple every day. They met in homes for the Lord's

Supper, so that in the early church they were just meeting

all the time because they realized that they were designed

to be in teams. And this is a good word for the

church today in Hebrews 10, verse 25.

Hebrews 10:25

Let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but

encourage one another, especially now that the day of

His return is drawing near. God has designed us to grow

spiritually when we work in teams.

Christianity, the Christian life, is a team sport #5 giving.

Now I wasn't asked to speak about this one, but it's

actually the truth. Do you realize that when you

give, it grows you spiritually? And I've seen that time and time

again. One of the last bastions of

faith is that one of the last bastions, one of the last holds

the enemy has over us is our money.

And when we start to give and when we start to be generous, it

actually explodes our spiritual life.

Matthew 6 verse 19 Jesus said don't store up treasures here on

Matthew 6:19

earth where moths eat them and rust destroys them and where

thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven

where moths and rust cannot destroy and thieves do not break

in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there

your heart will be also. See when we give, we're actually

making God the treasure of our lives.

Do you want Jesus to be in the centre of your life?

Whatever you do with your money shows exactly where your

treasure is. You know, Paul said in one

Corinthians 16, verse 2, on the first day of the week, each one

of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his

income. And so this is another pattern

that we get into, the pattern of tithing where it can be really

hard and really difficult to do. But there is a spiritual growth

aspect that happens when we look at our income and we say I'm

going to be generous towards God and I'm going to do it

regularly. It's one of those spiritual

things that brings about tremendous growth.

And the very last one is mission.

Do you realize that you can sit in church all your lives and you

can be so full of knowledge that you become spiritually obese

because you don't exercise your faith?

And so there's a certain point where you can learn it so, so

much, but if you don't actually go out and do the stuff that

God's called you to do, you actually go backwards.

That's why people say, oh, church is so boring.

Oh, I've heard it all before. Oh, I want to get into the deep

stuff. Do you know what the deep stuff

of God is? It's actually doing the stuff of

the word. It's doing the stuff.

Oh, I've heard people talk about healing and evangelism so much.

Great. Do you do it?

Because that's never boring when you lead somebody to Jesus,

never boring when you reach out in faith and pray for somebody

to get healed. You know, there are two types of

mission that we do 1 is ministry.

That's where we serve God within the church and mission where we

serve God in the world. And all of us should be involved

in those two things. Ministry where we take some role

within the church to help our Christian brothers and sisters

and mission either locally or overseas.

We were saying God, we're going to out work our faith.

The very last thing that I'll say before I go is that we are

in the spiritual race. Do you realize that we're

running this race? And Paul talks about it in

Hebrews 12, verses 1 to 3. He says, Therefore, since we're

Hebrews 12:1–3

surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off

everything that hinders in the sin that so easily entangles,

and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our

faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross,

scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne

of God. You know, we're on this race to

become close to Jesus and there's all these people have

gone before that are cheering us on.

So you can do it. You can get there.

You can you can become spiritually fit.

And I love this thought of the fact that when we appear before

Jesus, He's going to be so excited to welcome us into his

arms. Two or three weeks ago I went

along to see a race where my little 5 year old granddaughter,

Honey May was doing a Jew Ethelon.

So did she had a bike ride and a running race.

And I can proudly say today that she won.

And it was great because us grandparents and others were

going go, honey, go. And we were saying run that

direction. She didn't really know which

direction she was supposed to go.

And she got on the bike and they just said pedal and go this way.

And her dad was running along beside her and go round this

side here. And she fell off once.

And I said, get back up. And there was all these

instructions being shouted out. And then she came.

And when she went through that thing, we just cheered.

And you know, that's what it's going to be like when we come

before Jesus. He's going to be there and he's

going to welcome us and he's going to say, wow, you did it.

You obeyed, you kept on going on the course, and now you've won

the race. Friends, I can't wait for when

we appear before Jesus and we recognize them and we say, wow,

this race was worth it. Can you stand with me today?

And we're just going to invite the Holy Spirit to come and

we're going to allow him to move today.