Podcast: Do You Have a Theology of Exercise? (David Mathis)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Physical Exercise and the Christian Life

In this episode, David Mathis discusses what it looks like to build a theology of exercise, the ways physical training can be of value to Christians, and how this might look in different stages of life. David talks about how exercise can glorify God, deepen our joy in him, and help us serve others.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

Matt Tully
David Mathis serves as senior teacher and executive editor at desiringgod.org. He’s also a pastor at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an adjunct professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary. His new book with Crossway is called A Little Theology of Exercise: Enjoying Christ in Body and Soul. David, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

David Mathis
Matt, so good to talk to you again, brother. I love talking with you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about this topic of physical exercise of our bodies and our need to move and stay in shape and take care of these physical bodies. Exercise, like running and biking and weightlifting and sit-ups, and how all of that fits into our calling as Christians, our lives as Christians. But to kick us off, I want to hear you respond to the person who’s listening and maybe their first reaction to this is, “Oh, come on. A theology of exercise? Is there really a lot of theology related to that, or is this just kind of common sense stuff?” Or, “Is this just in a different category than theology?” So, speak to that. Talk about what the connection is to theology and our exercise habits, or maybe our lack thereof.

David Mathis
I would say to the person who has that initial response of, “Oh, is this really relevant to theology? Is it really a theology of exercise?” I would say this is especially for you, because you may be living as the fish in the bowl who doesn’t know what water is. Modern life, with our screens and with our transportation—that’s really big: the planes and trains and automobiles—modern life is very sedentary. It is a wealth. We have a wealth of labor-saving devices, but that has an effect on us, and it means that we live far less active, far less effort-expending lives than humans throughout the history of the world and all the humans in the Bible. And so there’s some little basic awarenesses, and then the bringing of theology to this topic. The theological pieces that I’m seeking to bring in place in this project is, one, a theology of the body made by God. We are our bodies and have our bodies. That’s a both/and. You are your body, and you have your body. Because of that, we just take them for granted. This is us, this is my experience in the world thus far. I’ve never lived an unembodied life, and so I don’t think about the wonders of this body. And so to pause and reflect on the theology of your body, not just the mountains and skies and oceans, but your body as one of the most, if not the most, amazing things in the created world. On day six, the climax of day six, God creates man and woman. So, your body is part and parcel of the most amazing thing in the universe. And the best of that is the human brain. We can get into that later on. But if you haven’t thought through some of those basics, I really want you to come think about that for just a few minutes in this little theology of exercise. And then with it is part of that body, that creation, is that God made these bodies to move. God made you and your body to glorify him, and he made you such that in normal human conditions, your movement is an essential part of that. You are not tethered to the ground like a tree. A tree glorifies God without moving it’s legs or it’s roots. But God made us to move in the world, not just perceive with the eyes and the ears, but to speak into the world with a mouth, to move into the world with legs, to reach, stretch, push, pull with our bodies. Even as we type on our keys, we’re doing something with our body. So, to think through a theology of movement and how God not only made us able to move but made us for movement, and then how that affects our minds, our souls, and our joy. That’s really my key emphasis and key interest is how the use of the physical body serves spiritual joy.

Matt Tully
You do spend time looking at this creational undergirding to our physical bodies and what God has designed them to do and be for us. But you also do emphasize a lot, as you said, the experiential dynamic when it comes to stewarding our bodies well—exercising, working hard, exerting our physical bodies in positive ways. You write in the book, “In my adult life, especially in the last decade, I’ve found that physical exercise serves my soul.” And that’s just an interesting statement. “Physical exercise serves my soul.” I wonder if you can walk us through how did you come to that realization? What was it in the last decade or so that’s really sparked this realization, and what is that experience like? Describe a little bit more how it is that physical exercise is having these spiritual benefits for you.

David Mathis
There’s theology, practical theology, and then there’s experience. There’s the experience of being a young father, probably being twenty-five to thirty pounds overweight, being at the end of the workday and doing kids’ bedtime and hardly being able to read the book aloud because I’m short of breath and because I’m so tired from the day. I’m just ready to go to sleep with my kids right there during the middle of their bedtime. And then to find out on the other side of doing some exercise, Oh! I have more energy! It’s like God designed this body to have more energy when I’m expending more energy. I think it’s one of the counterintuitive lessons on how the body works. When you expend energy, the body is strengthened, and then you have more energy to do other things. When you’re working out with a muscle, you work down the muscle, you tear it down, and it grows back stronger. And the same is the case with the energy. But also, having heard over the years, and here’s an an example with sleep, because we can’t choose in and out of sleep like we can with exercise. I’ve heard it said for years the enigmatic connection between the body and the soul and how the soul can affect the body. And I have experienced that—a soul full of joy feasting on God’s word, and the spring that can put in my physical step because of joy experienced in the soul. And there’s the inverse relationship. You go a night without sleep, and then try to experience joy. Or if you go a couple nights without sleep, you can do things with the body, but the sleep makes it really clear that you do not operate at your full capacity. And it very much relates to the life of the heart and of the soul and of the clarity of the mind as it relates to sleep and the body. I think the same is true with exercise. Now, it’s not quite as clear immediately like it is with sleep. It took me some time to experience that—to resonate experientially—with what I knew theologically. But I do think a big part of this project is it’s not a lot of new theology. I don’t know if it’s any new theology. I think that maybe the typical reader of Crossway books will find maybe no new text in the Bible that they didn’t know existed. Probably there’s not some new doctrine that they weren’t aware of. But I’m seeking to apply some pretty fundamental things, but very important things, to the experience of our own lives. And so in the book, part two is about motivation. It’s about why would we seek to engage our bodies in a technological age in ways that are more than necessary. I think it’s very easy to have our bodily movement and exertion go down to the level of necessity. So, for us to ponder the question, Is the level of necessity the level of human thriving? I don’t think it is. And in the twenty-first century, the level of necessity related to human movement is so low that I think it’s sub-thriving for many humans, depending on your vocation and your work. And so to think about how we might use these bodies, steward these bodies in a way that we would live fully human lives. Jesus became fully human, being fully God. He wants us to live fully human lives. And I think the use of our body is one way among others that we can live fully human lives to the glory of God.

Matt Tully
Was there a moment or a situation or a circumstance about a decade ago that led you to do a little bit more careful thinking about this topic and change some of your own exercise habits in order to be more fully Christian, I suppose?

David Mathis
I do remember a particular moment in talking with my wife in June of 2015. We went for a walk one evening, and I was complaining about how difficult it was to exercise. There had been a season in my life where I was a baseball player in high school, and I stayed pretty active in college. And when I was doing campus ministry with students, we would maybe lift weights or go for a little jog. I had a more active lifestyle until I took my first full-time desk job in front of a screen, working for John Piper. Justin Taylor left for Crossway books to work on the ESV Study Bible, and they hired me in Justin’s place in Minneapolis. And on day one, they gave me a computer and gave me a cell phone, like, “Here’s your new life. You’re not going to be working out with college students anymore. Now you have a screen. Get to know your screen.” After being married for three years, no, wait. That would have been 2006. My wife and I are talking in 2015, so this is almost a decade later. I got married in 2007. We had twin boys in 2010, and my life became less and less active. My work as an editor was on a screen, and I would travel all over on planes, and I had an automobile. I didn’t walk to work; I drove to work. I realized in 2015, I’m not getting adequate exercise. I think at that point I was probably about maybe forty pounds overweight of what would be ideal at my height. And so I was lamenting this to my wife, saying, “There’s just not time for it.” And she said, walking around the lake, I remember the spot right where we were around Lake Nokomis, and she said, “That’s not a good excuse.” She goes, “You make time to read your Bible. You have your time, you make time in your schedule, and you do it. And you can care for basics like that. Why don’t you take some of your abundance of Bible time in the morning and listen to some audio Bible while you do some exercise as well?” That’s how we started. So this whole thing is very much wrapped up with the ESV. I love the ESV. I’ll read the ESV or I’ll listen to ESV while I do some exercise. And so that’s what started in the summer of 2015. I would try to do something modest every other day. I started off with just run, walk, run, walk, run, walk. When I got too tired of running, I would just walk for a little bit and just get steps in. And over time—the body’s amazing in terms of the way it’s conditionable, the resiliency that God made us with—and so that slowly happened over time. And that was the key moment—that conversation where my wife called me out and said, “That’s not a good excuse. Why don’t you try something else?” And part of that was that what was new at that point, too, is instead of trying to exercise at the end of the day after work, in the late afternoon or early evening, for the first time, I tried exercising in the morning. And practically, that was very significant for me, because then I was able to enjoy the effects of the exercise all day. If I did exercise late in the day, that might keep me from going to sleep because my body’s all charged up and blood’s pumping. If I do it in the morning, I get to enjoy the effects throughout the day, and maybe that kickstarted at least the experience of the benefits. And I wanted to go and find out if the benefits were true or biological. Were they scientific? Was this part of God’s design, or was this just in my head? Was it psychosomatic? And I was fine with it just being in my head, because the benefits were tangible enough in terms of energy for life and clarity of thought. But I wanted to look out for that biological basis as well.

Matt Tully
And in the book you do explore a fair amount of the science, the neuroscience, and the bodily chemicals that then do have a real impact on us when we exercise. They have a real positive impact on us—on our energy levels, on how we think, our focus and concentration. But before we get into that side of things, sticking back with the theological side a little bit more, maybe one of the main passages that comes to mind to everyone listening right now who’s familiar with the Bible and with this broad topic of thinking about stewarding our bodies well has got to be 1 Timothy 4:8. You address this passage in the book. I think sometimes we can read that verse, where Paul contrasts spiritual training of our hearts and souls towards godliness with physical, bodily training. He really holds up the spiritual training as more significant than bodily training, which kind of has limited value. And I think a lot of times we as Christians can read that passage and say, “Right there we see the physical training side is not that important compared to all the spiritual stuff we should be doing. And so really, when we think about spiritual disciplines and our lives as Christians, our focus really should be on that spiritual side of things.” So, how do you read that verse, and how might that interpretation that I just offered be a little bit off?

David Mathis
Here’s 1 Timothy 4:8: “While bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, for it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” So glad you mentioned that. That is such an important verse. I think 1 Timothy 4 is the key place I take my bearings in this book, and we can talk later about verses 4 and 5. But what’s so important about verse 8, the famous verse on bodily training? If you’re coming to an article or a book or a seminar on Christian exercise, you’re waiting for 1Timothy 4:8. So, first thing is that bodily training is of some value. There’s the concession. Because of the eternal value of the soul, we might say, “Oh, this temporal body, this tent of this life, is of essentially no value or very little value.” And Paul grants it. It’s of some value. So, there’s some. Not all value, but some value. And then he puts that next to godliness, which is valuable in every way. Which is exactly what I want to do in this book. One thought would be you can see that asymmetry: bodily training, some value; godliness, every way. And when you see that kind of asymmetry, you may say, “Well, I’ll just put all my eggs into the godliness basket.” And I would say that’s great. I’m doing that too. But one way that you might put all your eggs in the godliness basket is by saying, “How might bodily training serve my godliness? How might it serve the maturation, the growth, the thriving of my soul?” That is, essentially, what I want to do in this book. How is it that bodily training—now, there’s an asterisk there, so let me come back to that—how is it that bodily training can serve the godliness, the spiritual joy of the soul? Back to the asterisk. Paul’s writing in the first century. Paul walked all around the Roman world to share the gospel. So, Paul had normal human activity, and then he’s talking about bodily training? I’m taking bodily training to be pretty extraordinary training, like Olympic-like training that’s beyond normal activity. We don’t live in that world today. We live in a very sedentary age, so we’ve got another layer here we need to cover. I don’t think bodily training is talking about normal human activity. We are living in an age of sub-normal human activity, and some of us—many of us—need to take steps, depending on our vocation. If you’re a construction worker, if you’re picking up boulders all day, if you’re walking around reading meters, if you have a very active job, then you’re living a pretty normal life. But for those of us who are typing away at these computers all day and in front of screens all day, that’s a different case. So, the exercise I’m mainly talking about, there are implications for bodily training for bodybuilders, Olympic athletes, or professional athletes, but the bodily training I’m mainly thinking about here is getting us back to the normal levels of human activity and doing that in such a way that we say, “Godliness is of value in every way. And in the pursuit of godliness, in the pursuit of joy in God that glorifies him, how might I steward this human body and the magnificent creation it is for the sake of joy in God?

Matt Tully
I think one of the natural questions or one of the dangers that comes up is in emphasizing the value and the role that our physical training (exercise) can play ultimately in our godliness. When you get down to the nitty gritty, it can be hard to know how to keep those things in balance. How do I pursue the good gift of stewarding my physical body without falling into the ditch of overestimating or overvaluing that? And I think especially of our culture today. Yes, we live in a very sedentary culture with a lot of technology, where, on the whole, Americans are probably more unhealthy than we’ve ever been. And yet we also live in a culture that just idolizes physical beauty. It idolizes physical fitness in a lot of ways. There are diet fads and gadgets all around us that promise a certain kind of physical health. So, what does it look like as a Christian to see through the cultural messages we’re getting on these fronts to understand what is physical health and physical exercise? What should that look like from a biblical perspective?

David Mathis
That’s good, Matt. I think you set it up so well. We do live in a society of extremes on issues related to embodiment right now. The negligence on the one hand—we got our avatars and we live our life through our computers on that side—and the other side of those computers are filled with images, and those television games and Olympics are filled with images of the world’s best bodies. So, we do live in that tension. I don’t think that the answer between two idols is a middle one made of the two of them. I think the answer is Christian wisdom in navigating that in your specific life. But here’s the key, and it is very practical. In 1 Timothy 4:4–5 (that’s why I think 1 Timothy 4 is so important), he’s talking about life in the body, and he’s got in view here those false teachers who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods. So, these two aspects of bodily life are in view as Paul counters these false teachers—food and the marriage bed. And here’s how Paul responds. He says, “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” What does that mean to make something holy by the word of God and prayer? I take “the word of God” there to be what God says. Not just the Bible in print and leather bound, but the word of God is what he expresses. It’s his self-revelation. So, to take bodily activity, whether it’s eating and drinking, or the marriage bed, or if it’s sleep, or—and here’s where I’m bringing in—exercise, in order to make it holy, we want to do so in view of what God says about it. We need to know what God says about our bodies, what God says about human movement. And he says you make it holy by the word of God and prayer, which I take as talking to God in light of what he said. This is a relational verse. God has something to say about our bodies and about their movement, and he means for us not only to know what he says and then go about our lives, but he wants to hear from us. He wants us to take the step of consecrating bodily life. It’s called prayer. So, when we pray over a meal, that’s a really good instinct to receive the food as a gift from God. That’s in light of what he says. And then you make it holy by the word of God and prayer. By praying to him and saying, “Father, thank you for this food. I want to ask you that you would use it for your purposes in my life, that you’d be glorified to give me joy in you. Help me be loving toward others.” So there’s a gratitude part of prayer and there’s an asking. You ask him to do something. I do think one of the main things I want to suggest for Christians, whether they would be world class professional athletes or they’d live very sedentary lives and be thinking for the first time about whether they might try to engage in some exercise, I would ask you to consider what God says about the body and its movement, and then would you pray about it? Would you pray, “Father, what would you have me do?” I think there’s a lot of protection for the soul in regular prayer about our activities. Making them holy before God. So, ask him, “Father, what would you have me do?” That’s not going to be the same answer for everybody based on your line of work, your background, your season of life. If you’ve got little babies in the home, you’re probably not gonna be doing the top exercise of your life as you’re caring for little ones in the home. There are seasons of life. But to pray about it, and then I’d say pray when you do it. If you’re going out for a walk, walking counts. I say this in the end in the last chapter. Walking really does count. God made these bodies to walk. They work better when they walk. That was Hippocrates’ great cure for depression 2,500 years ago. He would tell people to go for a walk, and if that didn’t work, go for another walk. Obviously, it’s way more complicated than that, but we may overlook how far that gets us a lot of times. Walking counts. Have you ever prayed over a walk? Or if you’re going for a run, or if you’re going to the gym, or you’re doing some pushups at your own house, do you pray over your exercise? “God, I want to do this for your glory. I want to be ready to do good works for others. So, in this modest little bit of exercise, would you help make me the kind of person who’s eager and ready to help other people and do them good, that my light would shine in such a way that others would see my good deeds and give glory to my Father in heaven?”

Matt Tully
Just underlining something you said a minute ago, this book isn’t offering a step-by-step workout plan with a lot of specific agendas or workouts. It’s not like that. And as you said, everyone is going to apply the principles from this book in different ways according to the stage of life they’re in and their own physical ability and then even just the way that God would lead them in different ways. But I think that the broad idea is that this is helping us to see and think more biblically about what it means to have physical bodies and the good use of those in our lives. I think that’s so helpful. But one question related to all of this, and this falls into that category of judgment calls and wisdom and prudence. I think something that we as Christians can wrestle with, especially in light of the way that Paul does elevate this godliness as a pursuit above mere physical fitness, is it ever appropriate for us or even good for us to, to some extent, neglect our physical bodies for the sake of other spiritual priorities? For example, I’m thinking of maybe a pastor who always feels this press on his time. He’s preparing sermons each week. He’s counseling each week. He’s leading a bible study. He’s meeting with various people. He’s getting the church building ready for church on Sunday morning. Not to mention caring for his wife and his kids. And he really (maybe similar to what you were feeling) he really does feel like, I don’t have a lot of extra time. I’m not wasting a lot of time on things that I shouldn’t be. I’m not a couch potato. I’m investing my life deeply in lots of good spiritual things. I feel like I don’t want to invest more of my time into my own physical exercise. That’s just taking me away from things that are really important. How do you think about that? Would there ever be seasons when that is appropriate or that is good, or does there always need to be some kind of carve out for the stuff that you’re talking about in our lives?

David Mathis
I definitely don’t think there always needs to be a carve out that every modern person should be doing exercise. Exercise is such a recent phenomenon of the last century and a half, since we started having all these labor-saving devices and since this exponential growth of labor-saving technologies. So, it’s a pretty recent phenomenon. To the degree that your life is sub-humanly sedentary, I think this is a modern way to consider getting your body and your mind to the normal operative human level. So, I would say this. I’m not saying every Christian should exercise by any means. There are guys working construction jobs, like Jesus did growing up. I don’t think Jesus exercised. I don’t think he needed to. He was working construction. He’s walking around Galilee. He’s getting plenty of normal activity. If you are getting plenty of activity in your life, then you don’t need to add exercise to that. This is for people like me who sit in front of screens all the time thinking, Alright, the weight is not just accumulating on my body. There’s something accumulating on my mind, a fogginess. My heart doesn’t respond quite like it used to. I just don’t feel like I’m in total working shape like I was. Is there anything physical to do with that? I think in many cases there’s something physical to do with that. Many pastors do have pretty sedentary vocations, but not necessarily. You may live a really active life outside of your pastoral ministry. The act of preaching itself I think should be a pretty engaging, energetic activity. And if you’re doing a lot of public speaking, if you’re on your feet moving a lot, doing house calls, it’s a judgment for you to make in your own life. It’s not a judgment for me to make about you or necessarily for somebody else to make about you. But it’s for yourself before the Lord, with a spouse, with dear friends to think about. Here’s one way to put it. My burden for readers would be I want you to consider how you might make use of your body in the pursuit of joy in God. That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it would be, How might your body better serve the needs of others? And the big question there is, Are you glorifying God as you ought in your holistic human condition, including your body? How much do you glorify him in your body? And I don’t have the answer for every particular situation or even my own. I continue to consider it on a weekly and monthly basis. But to the original question of neglect, there are seasons in life and there are times of the week when love calls. What we’re seeking to do here is make the use of this body serve the great needs of the Christian life that God makes so clear. So, we want the body to help us in the call to love. And if others have needs, like little infants, small kids, that’s a different season of life. Caring for an elderly parent is a different season of life. Some crisis in your home with neighbors or with friends or at work, there are all sorts of seasons. I would not say that the call is always to be getting your exercise in. Exercise is a supplementary, secondary thing to help serve the goal of meeting others’ needs to the glory of God. And so as that can be part of mainstream life—you’re in the saddle, it’s a normal season—and you can think how exercise might be an asset rather than a hindrance to your spiritual life and to helping the needs of others, then I would want you to consider how it might benefit you. And if you don’t find that it benefits your situation, then don’t spend the extra time on it. Make use of that time in some other way.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful nuance here, just reminding us that exercise is a means to an end. It’s not the end itself. It’s a means to greater joy in Christ, and you go into a lot of detail explaining how it is that exercise can give us joy. It can lead us to enjoy Christ more. And that’s, that’s an amazing, wonderful thing. It’s also a means towards loving other people better, perhaps, in our lives as we are more able to do things. But I think it’s just so helpful to have it in that framework, because then that allows us to give it up when we need to in certain situations if it’s getting in the way of the more important end of loving others and honoring Christ with our lives.

David Mathis
That’s right. There’s an analog here with sleep. In the normal frame of life, there’s a stewardship. If you’re always staying up late watching the next thing on the Netflix or whatever streaming service, and you’re not getting adequate sleep, the wise thing here would be in normal life, get your hours of sleep. Have the discipline and get your hours of sleep so that your body would be at such a place that you can see God with clarity in his word and have a heart and soul that’s responsive to him and is not weighed down by lack of sleep. And there are times where love calls. There’s a late-night call, and the response is, “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” not, “I’ve got to get my eight hours.” And so this is part of navigating the Christian life with wisdom and with love. And I think the same thing that we intuitively apply to sleep we can also apply to bodily movement.

Matt Tully
When it comes to exercise and trying to, probably for most of us, do more exercise to the glory of God—that’s our problem; we are too sedentary and we aren’t working jobs where we’re constantly moving—one of the big topics that immediately comes to my mind at least, because this reflects my own life and struggles, is just that motivation factor and the consistency factor. The discipline required to build good, healthy habits, build a habit of exercising every day. And I think sometimes as Christians that’s where we can really struggle because we recognize we need this discipline, we need self-control to continue doing what we’re called to do, and that can be where we fall off the bandwagon. We do it for a few days, and then we lose steam and we don’t know how to maintain that discipline going forward. And sometimes the Christian answer of, “Well, read your Bible more and pray about it,” just doesn’t seem to work. So, how do you think about the intersection of, when it comes to physical discipline and physical exercise, how do we bring together our responsibility to pursue self-control and discipline and build good habits with our dependence on Scripture and on prayer and on God’s help? Where do you see that balance of what we’re relying on?

David Mathis
At Desiring God we love this question because we love doing everything for the pursuit of our joy in God, which glorifies him and meets the needs of others. Jesus taught shamelessly about reward. C. S. Lewis talked about Jesus’s unblushing promises of reward in the Gospels. I want to unashamedly talk about rewards. When you approach exercise, if it’s a new year and you’re thinking about Bible-reading habits or devotions—habits of grace, which I love talking about (this is a subsection of Habits of Grace)—to think about the reward. In some of the secular literature on this in recent years related to habit formation, it’s very clear about this. The reward is key to the creation of good habits. And so what I’m seeking to do in the book is try to lay out, from a Christian perspective, the rewards: Reward (capital R singular) and rewards (plural) of why you would engage bodily movement, why you would do what’s uncomfortable. Hebrews 12 talks about how no discipline is comfortable for the moment. Part of the nature of it is it’s uncomfortable. People say, “I find exercise unenjoyable.” Exactly!

Matt Tully
That’s how you know it’s exercise.

David Mathis
That’s right. Now, I would say it’s an acquired taste. Once you start experiencing the rewards that come on the other side of the discomfort, then the rewards stream into the moment of the discomfort. They get knit together, and you begin to actually enjoy—over time—enjoy the acts that in and of themselves are uncomfortable, because you’re tasting ahead of time the reward and the joy that’s in it. Hebrews 12:2 says, and this is very serious, that Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him. That whole paradigm of whatever sustained Jesus when he went to the cross, that’s what I want. That’s how I want to live. That’s how I want to be motivated. I want Christ-like motivation to do hard things. Exercise is a little, small hard thing. It’s training for the trials of our lives. It’s training for relational conflicts, for enduring, for self-control. It’s training for all the obstacles that would come into our lives and would say, “Here comes the obstacle. Quit now. Turn back.” And hopefully, through Biblical reflection, feeding on God’s word, knowing the life of Christ, the strength of brothers and sisters, and maybe even some supplemental training in pushing through resistance and exercise, we would say, “No, for the joy set before me, I’m going to endure. I’m going to keep going. I’m going to look to the reward.” And I would encourage anyone who doesn’t like exercise or who wants to start a program, I would just say to shamelessly name the rewards, look to the rewards, pursue the reward, and then take the reward all the way up. That’s why I’ve sought to make this connection with physical exercise that serves spiritual joy, take it all the way up to the reward of knowing and enjoying Jesus himself. That’s the surpassing value, Paul says in Philippians 3. So if you feel a sense of bodily stewardship could help me here, I would say take it up with Paul all the way to that surpassing value, and seek to make your exercise serve your joy in Jesus.

Matt Tully
David, thus far we’ve been discussing this whole topic through the lens of the normal Christian, whose bodies work in a maybe normal or typical kind of way. You’ve said multiple times and referenced the idea of the usual pattern or the usual way that our bodies would need to move or want to move. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to those who might be listening who have some kind of physical limitation or disability that makes the “normal” movement that our bodies were designed to do not possible or much more difficult than it would be for the rest of us. How should they think about their responsibility to care well for their bodies and to steward their bodies well as Christians?

David Mathis
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s so important. I’ve got that question in the background every time I come to this topic, and it felt like it needed its own section in the book. So, we’ve got this section here, and it’s blocked off in a different color. It’s a light gray color, and it’s “How to Think About Disability” related to this topic. There are many different layers of things to say here. On the one hand, we live in a fallen world, and all of us experience this in certain ways. For most of us, it’s in minor ways—vulnerability to various injuries, disease, broken bones, those sorts of things. Then, some experience this in devastating, major ways. To act like that’s no big deal is not a dignifying of that hurt, that pain, that disability. To say that normal human life, as God made it in Eden, involved movement, that’s not to downplay disability; that’s to give dignity to the great disability, the great difficulty, and pain that it is to have disability, to have injury. And I would say—this is where it’s really helpful in keeping us from talking too big about what’s on offer in bodily movement—I would say that there is boost for my joy (natural joy and spiritual joy) through bodily training, through movement and exercise. But it’s just a boost. It’s a small thing. I totally believe you can be a prisoner in solitary confinement with no exercise and totally dependent on the Lord and thrive and glorify him right where he has you. So, this sort of movement is not essential to the Christian life. It may be normal for human life, and we honor disability by not pretending a disability is normal, but that it’s real difficulty. And God has his ways. We’re talking about spiritual joy here at the end. God has his ways for making up for whatever lack of endorphins—that’s the old language. The new one is endocannabinoids or the dopamine of the achievement of some exercise. There are layers of help for the soul and for the brain through bodily movement. God has his ways of making up for that in saints that are in wheelchairs, that have disabilities, that can’t move in the normal, typical ways that many of us just enjoy and don’t even think hardly twice about. And so I do hope that there would be both encouragement, possibilities, and clarity here for those who are able and those who are disabled into what it means to pursue joy in God.

Matt Tully
David, as a final question, I wonder if you could speak to those who are able, who don’t have a physical disability, and yet if they’re being honest and they look at themselves, look at their lives, look at their habits, they would have to acknowledge, “I haven’t prioritized this. Not because I couldn’t, but because I just didn’t think it was a big priority. I’ve spent my time doing all kinds of other things, but as I look at my physical body, I can see that I am maybe in a similar spot to where you were ten years ago. I’m not in shape. My body is not in a good place physically, and I haven’t made this an emphasis for me.” What would you say to that person? How do they take the next step here and actually start to pursue greater joy in and through exercise?

David Mathis
I sure don’t want to hope that the feel you’ll get from the book is not condemnation or judgment. That’s definitely not what I want to bring. I start with this quote from C. S. Lewis where he talks about the carrot and the stick. And my goal here is not that you’re feeling the slap of a stick, but that you’re seeing a carrot out in front of you to move toward. And I would say if you find yourself in that situation, there are a lot of things in modern life that are conspiring against you on this. This is not simply your own doing. This may not be solely the product of your own greed or gluttony. This may just be you’re a modern person in the twenty-first century. You have automobiles. You have McDonald’s. You’ve grown up in an environment that’s very different than what the vast majority of humans have grown up in throughout the ages. It’s a lot to come awake to all at once. You begin to see and understand these things in layers. And so I would say taking a small step is significant. I don’t want to interrupt anybody’s life. If they’re thriving, if they’ve got a holy discontentment but they have a real contentment and they’re moving forward, I’m not throwing extra thirty minutes of exercise three times a week in everybody’s life. But if you would say you’re feeling that kind of sense of I think it could be better. I think I could meet other people’s needs better. I think I might experience more joy in God through his word and through prayer and through life in the local church if I had a little less encumbrance on me, then I would say give it some small steps. This is a big picture. This is why I didn’t want to write this book eight years ago, or nine years ago, or ten years ago. I didn’t want to do this a in couple months or a couple years and start talking about it. This is a long journey. Here’s a key principle. We tend to overestimate what can be done in the short run, and we underestimate what can be done in the long run. If you find yourself in a very sedentary life, if you counted your steps or just counted the minutes and walked three times a week for thirty minutes, you would begin to make progress. And you learn along the journey. You don’t need to know it all or have it all figured out, but if you have that kind of sense that you’re talking about, Matt, there are some small steps you can take. Then, see what the next step might lead to. And all along, I would say pray. Live in light of God’s word, and pray about it. Pray what that next step would be, and then pray for God’s grace when you make those efforts. If you get up in the morning and after a good unhurried season of meditating on God’s word, you go out for a twenty minute walk, I’d say pray about the walk just like you pray about the Bible reading.

Matt Tully
That’s so good. So encouraging. And the book itself is, as you said, very encouraging. It is pure carrot. It’s not stick. And I think people will find it to be a real help as they seek to take that next step and, as you said right there, much of the literature around habit formation today also testifies to how it is about that next small step. And so often we shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, when we set a big goal that we’re not ready for and that we immediately fail with. That can be so discouraging. But really, we’re just called to take the next step with all that bathed in prayer. And so thank you so much, David, for helping us to think about this today. I encourage everyone to pick up a copy of that book if you are feeling a little bit of that conviction.

David Mathis
So good to talk to you again, brother.

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