Are You a Spiritually Fit Leader?

Posted on Jul 01, 2021 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Men's Christian Living
Posted by : Boyd Bailey

A couple of years ago I was finally fed up with failing to keep myself physically fit. Nothing I did on my own was working, so I hired a trainer named Don. As I said to him, “Don, I would rather pay you $250 a month than thousands of dollars for an angioplasty.”

There’s another price to pay for this improvement. When I leave my sessions with him, I’m seriously sore—and not just ibuprofen sore! Don pushes me in the ways I need to be pushed if I want to make progress. And because of the time and effort I’ve invested, I now have more energy to serve others. Just as important, I have the energy to wrestle on the floor with my grandchildren!

Paul compares living the Christian life to a runner who prepares for a race or a boxer getting ready for a big fight. We must, he says, train just like a successful athlete: “Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air” (1 Corinthians 9:25-26 nrsv). In other words, we need to training our spiritual lives the same way an athlete must train for a competition. And as with the athlete, it always helps us to know what we’re training for and understand the goal we have in mind.

Like the marathon runner, we need a burning desire to win. Otherwise, we may never finish the race. You can’t just wake up one day and decide to run the Boston Marathon the next week. You have to work toward it. It’s the same with the spiritual race Paul talks about. Without a vision and goal, all our daily practices and habits can easily be misdirected. And we need to know how to reach our goal and fulfill that vision.

So what is the primary goal we’re striving to reach as leaders? It’s nothing less than embracing a level of communion with God that will ultimately affect the community of people we serve as leaders. It’s becoming more loving and Christlike in everything we do.

A clear vision of becoming like Christ will motivate us to engage in the necessary spiritual training. This training involves the way we live each day. Daily, then, we are renewed by God’s love as we conform to His plan for us, surrender to His will, and continually make the small choices that keep us on the path toward intimacy with Him. We understand that our life stories aren’t just disconnected, meaningless strings of isolated events and situations. They’re given meaning as we live in harmony with the stories God wants to tell through us.