Daily Affirmations - Day 3 - Health and Happiness - Strength Training

Day 3: Strength Training

Oh Lord, You will prepare and strengthen and direct our hearts...

For physical training is of some value (useful for a little), but godliness (spiritual [strength] training) is useful and of value in everything and in every way, for it holds promise for the present life and also for the life which is to come (1 Timothy 4:8 – Amplified Bible, Classic Edition - AMPC).

Sanctify, O Lord, our souls, bodies and spirits; examine our minds and search our consciences. Take from us:

All evil imaginations,

All impurity of thought,

All inclinations to lust,

All depravity of [ideas],

All envy, pride and hypocrisy,

All falsehood, deceit and irregular living,

All covetousness, vain glory and sloth;

All malice, anger and wrath,

All remembrance of injuries,

All blasphemy

And every motion of flesh and spirit

That is contrary to the purity of Thy Will.

Amen.

~ Prayers of the Early Church ~ Edited by J. Manning Potts ~ Public Domain

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Now exercise means effort, often painful effort. No athlete is crowned unless he strives... As Charles Simeon, whose influence was so great at Cambridge in the early years of the nineteenth century, quaintly put it: “My dear young friends, you can’t go to heaven in an arm-chair.”

For exercise unto godliness means effort. It means self-denial, the practice of self-discipline. Every athlete, we know, goes into training. So must the man who will exercise himself unto godliness. There are many things which are harmless, and at times even useful, but the man in training avoids them that he may win the prize…

We have, it is true, come to appreciate exercise so far as concerns the body… We have even begun to appreciate the analogy of body and mind, and to perceive that the exercise and discipline of the mind, like that of the body, reproduces its power.

And yet it remains true that a great many people fancy that the soul can be left without exercise; that indeed it is a sort of invalid, which needs to be sheltered from exposure and kept indoors in a sort of limp, shut-in condition.

Now the apostolic doctrine is this: “You do not grow strong in body or in mind without discipline and exercise. The same athletic demand is made on your soul.”

~ James Hastings

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Do not strive in your own strength; cast yourself at the feet of the Lord Jesus, and wait upon Him in the sure confidence that He is with you, and works in you. Strive in prayer; let faith fill your heart—so will you be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might.

~ Andrew Murray ~

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