One of the great things about exercise is how easily you can measure your progress. You can assign a number to the weight you have lost, the mass you have gained, or the improvement in your blood pressure. It’s easy to recognize jogging at a faster pace or loading heavier plates onto the bar. With enough time and success, other people notice, too. Your clothes fit differently or your demeanor changes. If you try hard enough and stick with it, that is. Because sometimes we want to lose weight – but we don’t want to change our diet or do cardio. We want to build muscle – but we miss a lot of gym days because we also like sleeping in. Whatever our excuses or however genuinely good our intentions may be, though…the numbers don’t lie.
“Do not be deceived,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7 ESV). Whether it’s our physical health, athletic ability, academic progress, business success, or personal relationships, we reap what we sow. There are choices I make that help produce the results I am getting – for good or ill. So, if I don’t like the results, then it’s up to me to make changes to produce different ones. You see, sin wants to make us victims. It is always somebody else’s fault. Circumstances are completely out of our control. And sometimes it was or they were: but God created us in His image and likeness. We get to choose how we respond, and our choices matter. “For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Gal. 6:8). If we want good, eternally significant results, then we need to choose to walk by the Spirit (cf. Gal. 5:16).
Now, walking by the Spirit is different than running on a treadmill. There’s no button to press to make us go faster. There’s no built-in computer measuring our distance and calculating our pace. Yet, we can know when we’re making gains: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). These characteristics are the gains that show when we’re training for godliness – and they’re worth more than everything else in the world. “But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into this world, and we cannot take anything out of the world” (1 Tim. 6:6-7). Bodies age and possessions decay but becoming who God created you to be is eternal.
But to get those gains, we have to keep after it: “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). Like the early days of a new fitness routine, change is hard. Results may seem slow at first. Yet when God is truly the focus of our efforts, one way or another they will bear fruit.