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Holy Sweat: 3 Reasons Church Leaders Should Get in Shape

I don’t run triathalons or marathons. Nor am I a fitness freak. But as a 47-year-old preacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of my mortality and the ever-sagging effects of gravity.

It was early on in my ministry experience that I began to realize that I had better start working out or bad stuff was going to happen to me. Heart attacks, diabetes, and strokes happen to preachers, too.

It was easy for me to dismiss my out-of-shapeness in ministry because for years I was in excellent shape. In my late teens and early twenties, I was a roofer by trade. The result of 10-12 hour days of manual labor was me being slim, tan, and quasi-ripped. In college, I had 8% bodyfat and could hang with the best of them when it came to push-ups, sit-ups, and the like. But then something strange happened. I went into ministry full time.

My roofing hammer was exchanged for a commentary, my ladder for a desk, and my once rigorous manual labor job for a sedentary calling. To add injury to insult, I tore my ACL while dancing to a Michael Jackson video (don’t ask.) My injury gave me an excuse to be even less active.

Soon I ballooned from 155 to 223. The closest I came to working out was sprinting to the kitchen and curling a fork full of food to my face. But worse than that, my blood pressure spiked up while my energy shot down. In the middle of the day, I began scheduling what I nicknamed “fat naps” to try to compensate for my lack of energy.

To be honest, I felt guilty every time I preached on self-control because it was obvious that I wasn’t controlling my own appetites. I coped with stress by eating. I coped with ministry frustrations by eating. I coped with the guilt I felt from eating by eating.

Although I came from a very health conscious family who worked out with weights, ate healthy, and took vitamins, I had kind of dismissed all that as “unspiritual.” The body, I reasoned, was temporal. Why would I spend time going through the pain and strain of working it out when I was going to get a new one in heaven someday?

But what I came to realize was that if I didn’t do something really soon, my body was going to be really temporal. If I didn’t do something drastic, I was going to die sooner rather than later.

As 1 Timothy 4:8 reminds us, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” As church leaders, we rightfully focus on the importance of eternal values. But if we don’t stay in basic shape, we may enter into eternity sooner than we think.

So with all this as a backdrop, here are 3 reasons for church leaders to get/stay in shape physically:

1. Getting in shape gives you endurance to face the rigors of ministry.

“But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.” 2 Timothy 4:5

Ministry is hard. It is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually taxing. So when you are physically strong, it enables you to face these challenges with a sharp mind and strong body. There’s something about enduring the hardship of doing those extra sit-ups that prepares you for the pain you are going to endure in that extended elders’ meeting (and at least if a rogue elder punches you in the stomach, he’ll hurt his fist against your rock hard abs.)