Fitness Idolatry

“so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman,”

‭‭Deuteronomy‬ ‭4:16‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Fitness can be a slippery slope as a Christian.  Should we be healthy, fit, strong?  I would say it is definitely beneficial and right to be attentive to our health.  It's another thing to idolize it.  Spend some time reading through the Old Testament and you will get an idea about God's thoughts and feelings about us worshiping idols (yes, you can make yourself or your health an idol).  But let's take a look at what happens in an unhealthy lifestyle.  

Let's start at our diet.  On the ground floor of health, our diet works from the inside out.  If that sounds familiar, it is how God's Spirit works in us, it changes us on the inside, and as we let Him work on us we see the manifestation of the Spirit in our actions.  Diet does the same thing, if we eat crap, we feel like crap.  Our body begins to show physical symptoms of the unhealthy diet in us and our actions start to manifest that diet as well.  We become sluggish, lazy, and even become unable to do certain things.  So what about the fitness side of the coin.  Well, laziness as a result of poor diet can restrict, if not even deny us, avenues of fitness, whether it be sport, weight training, yoga, etc.  

So we choose to pursue a healthy diet and opt to take action and step into the gym.  Now we see the fruits our what a good diet and coinciding action produce.  We find ourselves feeling better both physically and mentally, and capable of doing things we might not of before.  It's noteworthy for parents too, as an unhealthy lifestyle like anything, can be passed on to our children whether we want it to or not.

So now we find ourself at a healthy place in life, but what about the idol concept?  In our pursuit of or at the end, when we choose to maintain our goals, we can fall in to a trapping where we focus so much on our health that we lose sight of things of more importance.  First and foremost, God Himself.  Do you spend more time at the temple of body worship (the gym) than you do in prayer, reading the Bible and going to church?  What about our families, the people we wanted to get healthy for?  Do we spend so much time exercising and putting our focus into fitness that we missed our kids baseball game or haven't gone out on a date with our wife or husband?  Dont't lose sight of the important things in life by putting fitness in the highest place.