Scripture: Acts 28:23-31

Sermon: Clarissa Buurstra

Sermon: Get Fit! by Pastor Todd Buurstra

How many of our New Year’s Resolutions were to get fit! After last week’s Super Bowl I found a schedule of this 6 week NFL training camp schedule, advertised by Mark Sanchez for aspiring pros.  The mornings are dedicated to speed and the afternoons to power:

9 AM Linear Speed Mechanics

10:30 AM Post-workout Recovery Nutrition

11 AM Treatment/Massage—I’d choose massage myself.

1 PM Intengrated Core Training

2:30 PM Post-Workout Recovery Nutrition—sounds like a snack to me

3 PM Wonderlic Prep Workshop

4 PM Treatment or Massage

That’s 8 hours of speed and power training, all for the opportunity to get beat up on the gridiron! 

Since Corinth was the home to the Isthmian Games, second only to the ancient Olympics, Paul has physical training/fitness in mind in v. 24…  How does God fit us spiritually?

Before we answer that, I need to help you see some assumptions behind God’s view of us.

First, God says humans work best when our spirits drive our bodies. Today however, in our secular age, our bodies tend to be in the driver’s seat.  Why do I say that? Well, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word, “fitness?” Body or soul?  Now before secular humanism, the answer might have been soul, but today its body.  Even up until the Civil War, when war, famine, or national calamity hit, what did our presidents often call for?  A day of prayer and fasting! In a pluralistic age you can still call for that, but it doesn’t even occur to us!

In the biblical creation story, God put the spirit into the body to animate it .  Remem-bering that the word for spirit and breath are the same in the Bible, here’s the picture…  So if we’re out of shape, it’s good to join Zumba, but focus more on your outlook.  For God made our spirits to give life to the body.  Paul says,…  Now don’t go out and beat your body up; just understand that Paul is simply trying to say that he disciplines his body for his soul’s sake.

And this is true in sports, also.  After Duke won back to back national basketball championships their swagger resulted in this t-shirt:  the front read: You can talk the game, but can you play the game? The back answered: We can play. As Coach K. preaches: mental toughness beats physical toughness.  God’s way is spirit drives bodies. How’s your spirit?

Second biblical assumption, even beyond this, spirit determines life. Thinking of the Isthmian gold medal, which wasn’t a medal but a wreath that would wither, Paul writes…

Today we act as if our body determines our life.  Just think about our list of critical factors for a longer life.  There’s: eat well, exercise well, play well…  All of them are physical, right?  Very few researchers ever add pray well!  Though Duke University (this must be their week) Professor Harold Koenig writes that researchers found weekly religious service attendees had a 36% lower mortality rate than less frequent attendees!   By that measure, I’d take faith’s odds over even exercise, though both are best!  It’s not the body that determines life, but spirit!

God’s word tells us of the importance of the Spirit, not only in creation, but in Sredemption.  Romans 8 teaches that the Spirit gives life.  Does this mean that God will give spiritual people a longer life?  Maybe.  The Spirit is less concerned about quantity than quality.  Want to live enthusiastically?  Live en theos, in God, to find passion for life’s best, even God!

So the Bible’s conclusion?  Spiritual fitness is at least as important as physical fitness. Then how does God make us spiritually fit? The thumb of our hand vision says that we take hold of God’s blessings through daily prayer and Bible reading. Now this is more than a prayer on the fly.  Rather it’s a set time when you turn off electronics and turn on to God.  I do mine around 6:15 AM.  By exercising my prayer and faith muscles God gets me fit for my life!

Does spiritual fitness really help?  When it seemed that Linda’s mother, Olivia, was knocking on death’s door, I visited her in Weehawkin.  Her tumor on her right cheek was out to about here.   They had quadrupled, or more, her steroids, and more than doubled her pain meds.  In that state I asked her, Olivia, how does your faith help you face, what Paul calls, the last great enemy? Now some people might say, I still believe God can do a miracle! In other words, faith persuades God to do what I want.  Now I believe that faith can help God do miracles, but Olivia acknowledged, in my words, that miracles are by definition rare.  No, this Baptist preacher’s wife, whom I learned had trained for the Methodist ministry herself, and had ministered from the organ and the pulpit in Alabama churches, this woman of great faith didn’t bat an eyelash but said it more like this: My faith doesn’t force me to battle death; it helps me accept it.  It’s in God’s hands. And I could see by the glint in her eye that she knew God was loving and good.  If that’s what her hours of prayer and Bible study did for her wrestling with the angel of death, imagine what spiritual fitness can do for you and I, just trying to pay bills, or raise kids, or live with arthritis.  I can’t think of anything more helpful so, get fit! Amen.

Sermon: A Recovering Loser by Pastor Todd Buurstra

Hopefully the Patriot’s locker room will be dejected around 10 PM because they’re “L”osers.  Can you imagine how dejected Pastor Mark was when his Lions made the play-offs for the first time in his adult life, and they end up being “L?”  When you gloat about the Giants today, have some compassion for the poor guy.  Beyond football, at school kids deride other kids with the “L” sign.  At work you feel like an “L” when you lose your job or promotion.  At home an “L” in marriage tears you apart.  Our nation has been struggling since the housing bubble burst, while we hear how China is winning and we’re a “L.”  How does God renew after a loss?

Isaiah 40 was written when God’s people felt like substantial “L”osers.  God’s chosen had experienced the unthinkable: mighty, evil Babylon had swooped down and destroyed their cities, burned Jerusalem and deported them into exile.  Scripture records  three deportations: 597, 586 and 582 B.C.  No other nation survived this “L”oss.  Why?

The normal thought pattern among ancients was that each locale had a god.  So if Bridge-water bested Branchburg in war, Bridgewater’s god was elevated and Branchburg’s god was vanquished.  Kind of like playoff team losers firing their coach.  Judah was so tempted.

In many ways Americans feel like “L”osers.    As a country our employment is in the pits and our debt is in the stratosphere.  As families, marriage has hit a new low among young adults, and yet children are brought into insecure unions.  So marriage is in the pits and depression is in the stratosphere.  “L”osing takes away our illusion of control.  But then is anyone in control??

Enter Isaiah 40:31: They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles. These most beautiful words that “L”osers ever heard were written in exile; i.e., in loss! How can that be? God is not a fired coach, but a creator-king:

v. 22: God sits above the circle of the earth, and we are grasshoppers!

v. 23: The Creator-King brings princes to naught, and makes rulers of the earth as nothing!

v. 26: So we grasshoppers can lift up our eyes to see the stars, and our Creator above!

The faith that their god was not a local, vanquished god, but the Sovereign of the Universe lifted their heads, and made them believe in renewal after loss.  How you view God effects resiliency!

Just as Isaiah preached this to Judah before freedom was in sight, we often find ourselves in God’s waiting room between “L”osing and renewing.  Past losing, but not yet to renewal.  That’s why v. 31 says…  So in God’s waiting room there are two things we can do:

#1—correct our image of God to Creator-King; and #2—Repeat the faith: God will renew us…

Oftentimes I toss in bed, disappointed with some result, but fall asleep repeating, God will renew

On the strength of a correct and repeated view of God, Israel is the only nation that survived this exile with their identity in tack.  God wants to renew us, too.  The story is told of slaves who could fly.  On St. Johns Island, just off the S.C. coast, slaves were toiling in the hot sun.  The story goes that one mother who was picking cotton with one hand, and stoking the brow of her 7 year old with the other became overwhelmed and fell over.  The boy panicked when he saw the slave driver coming whip in hand.  But just then the old man they called Preacher got there first and whispered in her ear, Cooleebah! Cooleebah! And miraculously she stood up like a West African Queen, grabbed her son’s hand and began to fly.  Soon the old man was whispering Cooleebah! in other ears, and they began to fly.  The slave drivers were horrified.  What was happening?  The weak were mounting up with wings like eagles?  Why?  The word cooleebah is West African for “God.”  And God renews “L”osers to fly like an eagle.

Dona Lee Calabrese and Scott Pontier talk about changes to the Center for Life Transitions and the Keinz People Services Endowment.

Sermon: “When Throwing Your Inkwell At The Devil Is Just Not Enough” by Pastor Todd Buurstra

Sermon: “Science, Stars and Signs” by Pastor Todd Buurstra

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Scripture: Luke 2:21-32

Sermon: “Jesus Is Presented In The Temple” by Pastor Mark Swart