Christians Shouldn’t Normalize a Sedentary Lifestyle

Sedentary Times

Alongside breathing, eating, thinking, feeling, and speaking, one of the great fundamentals of human life is movement. Bodily activity is so basic, so obvious, often so assumed, that we easily overlook what a veritable superpower it is. Yet movement is one vital aspect of our enduring human nature that our present age threatens to undermine.

Few today would disagree that we are living in a sedentary age compared to generations and centuries before us. One great downside of the exponential burst of modern technologies is that our bodies and their movement seem to matter less and less. As a fellow pastor insightfully observes, “Much of what we call ‘technology’ does not actually help us to become more productive at our work but rather does our work for us. While claiming to help us become more efficient, this sort of technology actually trains us to do little or nothing at all.”¹

We have cars, and we walk far less. We have machines and other labor-saving devices, and so we use our hands less. We have screens, and we move less. Added to that, in our prosperity and decadence, food and (sugar-saturated) drinks are available to us like never before.²

Unless we break the cycle, we will consume more, move our bodies less, and then find it ever harder to lift our own weight off the couch when some physical opportunity or request beckons. Simply walking upstairs becomes a mental barrier. Taking out the trash feels like more than a chore. Doing work around the house seems daunting.

We still move, of course—we must. But many of us have been conditioned by this present age and our own lazy impulses to move as little as possible. Now, economy of bodily movement has long been a survival instinct, in God’s good design, to protect against starvation, but few reading this book are under any near threat of starvation today. Our need is not for conserving calories but for putting to good use the abundance of calories we consume (almost) without thinking.

To the degree that our default is to move as little as possible—rather than to move freely, eagerly, and enjoyably—we undermine or inhibit some essential dynamics in the Christian life. As Christians, we cannot content ourselves with taking our bearings from our sedentary society. Our modern excesses are not just of human concern but Christian concern.

Bodies in Motion in the Bible

Regular human movement has been assumed throughout history. For instance, consider what we gather about the normalcy of bodily movement and activity from the Old and New Testaments. In one sense, we might simply observe, “They had no planes, trains, and automobiles.” Adam and Eve walked out of the garden when they sinned and spent the rest of their lives working the ground with their own hands and whatever tools they were able to produce. Noah and his sons built an ark as big as a football field with their own hands and sweat. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were nomads—that is, they moved around and walked, herding sheep for their livelihood. So, too, Joseph and his brothers walked. Pharaoh put the Israelites to hard labor. Moses, no matter how comfortable his first forty years may have been, spent his last eighty on his feet. Which brings us to the wilderness generation, when God’s people wandered, that is, moved about the desert for forty years.

In the time of the judges, we are confronted with two clearly negative examples of obesity: Eglon (Judg. 3:17, 22) and Eli (1 Sam. 4:18). Fat food was a blessing; fat men were not. King David, on the other hand, is represented as a kind of physical specimen. He killed Goliath in his youth, and he manifestly was no weak man. He was a man of war—skilled and fearsome—and according to Psalm 18 was not only deadly with projectiles but also able to outrun other men with his speed, agility, and strength.

Our modern excesses are not just of human concern but Christian concern.

Inactivity in Scripture spells disaster, in time, for nations and generations, as in Deuteronomy 31:20: “When I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, which I swore to give to their fathers, and they have eaten and are full and grown fat, they will turn to other gods and serve them, and despise me and break my covenant” (so also Deut. 32:15; Jer. 5:28). And when such national and literal fatness led to the destruction of the holy city by a foreign army, serving as the instrument of God’s covenant justice, then the people walked on their own two feet some seven hundred miles around the desert to Babylon. And seventy years later, when Cyrus the Persian issued his decree that the temple could be rebuilt, that may have sounded like great news for believing exiles, but only a fraction of them actually took up the seven-hundred-mile journey to move back home.

In the Body, for the Soul

Fast forward to the first century and consider how much Jesus walked. It’s over one hundred miles from Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem. That’s not a long trip in a car or bus. But on foot? It makes for five to ten travel days—that is, walking all or most of the day. Then ponder the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul!

All this to say, one of the major differences between our times and biblical times, very practically, relates to our technologies. One of the main manifestations of that is the general sedentariness of our lives compared to theirs. And if the above summary of biblical bodily exertion makes you tired just thinking about it, consider how the orientation of our modern age on physical activity, compared to the preindustrial world, affects how we think about doing good for others—because doing good typically requires bodily exertion in some form. Good comes into being through working, not wishing. And apart from that, the sedentariness of our bodies is not disconnected but deeply integrated with our inner person—with our minds, hearts, and wills.

Our bodies and souls are profoundly and mysteriously connected. What we do with one can deeply affect the other. We train our souls through conditioning our bodies, and what we do with our souls can greatly affect our bodies.

This article is adapted from A Little Theology of Exercise: Enjoying Christ in Body and Soul by David Mathis.

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