FIT CHURCH: Destroying the Division between Following Christ and Living a Healthy Life

By Matthew Gay

Who do you say your body belongs to? As a believer in Jesus, the answer should not be, "Well, me, I guess." Unfortunately, many in the church have conformed to the patterns of this world in the way they treat what the Bible tells us is God's temple. As a result, the body of Christ grows sicker each year while we pray for healing and do little to address the issues poor health habits are creating practically. This is primarily because fitness and nutrition have become secular topics for most church leaders and believers worldwide.

This book jams a wrench in this way of thinking by biblically addressing the major health and fitness topics. This written case for making good health practices a part of the church and Christian culture comes with practical solutions for healthy living from a biblical standpoint. Whether you desire to serve those under your leadership better or to learn a Christ-centered approach to self-care, FIT Church will open your eyes to transformational truths that will help you to accomplish that. This book offers proven solutions for addressing your personal health practices and overcoming years of struggle with food, exercise, and mindset using the concept of faith-inspired training (FIT).

As representatives of the kingdom, it is our responsibility to honor God with our very being, including our way of living. May this book help you present yourself to God with a strong mind and body unrestricted by self-inflicted limitations. May this book help you trust the Lord more deeply as you break chains of physical bondage and poor self-image. May reading this book open your eyes to new possibilities regarding your habits and physical condition. Finally, may you join in the blessing of presenting a "FIT church" to the Lord by putting what you learn from this book into practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890437228

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FIT CHURCH

Destroying the Division between Following Christ and Living a Healthy Life

Matthew Gay

ISBN 979-8-89043-721-1 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89043-722-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Matthew Gay

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

1

My Story

2

The World Is Watching

3

Faith-Inspired Training

4

Healthy Living as a Form of Worship

5

Spirit-Led Behavior Change

6

Identity Analysis

7

Biblical Nutrition

8

Biblical Nutrition, Part 2

9

Purposeful Movement

10

Christian Community and the FIT Lifestyle

11

Church Implementation

12

Lifestyle Transformation

13

Conclusion

About the Author

Introduction

Have you ever considered why God gave us a body in the first place? He could have sent us here as the spirits we are and designed the world to accommodate our spiritual needs. Maybe we would float around like billions of lights tuned into the one light that provides light to us all and have no need for the majority of our human existence. If you think about it, the only reason we have to work, go to the doctor, eat, sleep, heal, find shelter, and do a large percentage of what we do daily is that we each have a body, a vehicle God has given to each of his children, a home in which we are housed, a vessel from which God pours out and into which he can pour.

God chose to make a man out of the dirt and breathe life into him. He made him with the ability to run, jump, carry, and sit. He fashioned him with the ability to heal, learn, feel emotion, and know his heavenly Father. He then proceeded to make a woman's body out of the man's rib and entitled to her both similar and completely different abilities and traits. Our bodies played an important role in our existence on earth and still do today. In fact, without them, we would not be here. The Lord placed each of us on this planet intentionally, and though we are not eternally bound to the bodies we are in, the Father of all creation chose strategically to create mankind with the body.

The human body is one of the most complex and fascinating organisms in the galaxy. I remember when I was studying to become a certified personal trainer, through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, how awestruck I was learning about the various things our bodies do just to keep us alive. I saw God in every little detail from the way antibodies are formed to how the peripheral nervous system works. Our God thought of it all. I can't help but see the human body like a temple, with every detail thoroughly thought out down to the designs on the cutlery. The wisdom that went into designing your body is baffling in its entirety. It is a work of art that allows us to come to no other conclusion after fully considering its wonder than that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Our infinitely wise Creator designed our bodies with an overwhelming purpose. Nothing that God has made was made for no reason. Nothing God gives is insignificant. All that we have from the hands of our Father is a good and perfect gift, including that which we have deemed imperfect or flawed. He creates and assigns each of us a body with a plan. He also has provided us with the tools needed to care well for the body he's given us, namely whole food items and the animals He's given our bodies the ability to benefit from through consumption. He's also blessed us with the most valuable substance on earth aside from oxygen. He gave us water. Everything our well-designed bodies need to thrive was given before the first human ever walked the earth. The natural design of the human body and the human lifestyle before sin entered the world allowed man to live a long healthy life.

Today, we see a very different picture of God's beautiful design, one where those who strive to eat and move as God designed us are treated as the physical elite, and those who have adapted to the culture of comfort and convenience make up the larger population. Some have reserved their lives to the disciplined practices of a healthy lifestyle while the majority drag their feet on the broad path that leads to physical destruction. Christians worldwide have fallen in line with this stampede, not realizing that they, too, have turned from God's will for his people concerning the temples He made with his own hands.

Many have become poster children for the American diet. They have found themselves sitting in the statistics along with the millions who are suffering from chronic illnesses due to poor health habits. They are experiencing the alternative to God's plan for their body alongside those who neither know nor care for the God and Father of all creation.

Herein lies the fuel for the fire in my belly. My fight for the church is a fight that brings many believers to conviction rather than motivation at first. My mission is centered around the gospel and my call as a believer to bear the burdens of my brothers and sisters. I must tell the church what it needs to hear because we have an adversary who may not be able to stop believers from reading their Bibles but will gladly use their forks to take them out.

This book sat in my heart for years, yet I felt so much resistance toward writing it because I feared it would be rejected. After speaking with many pastors and church secretaries who treated me like my mission was insignificant despite the alarming number of sick members in their congregations, I felt defeated. No one told me how important my message was. No one helped me to see the purpose in what I was doing to try and improve the physical health of the body of Christ as a whole.

Then one day, a friend of mine told me that he had struggled for years with what I was fighting against. He loved and served the Lord, but after being released from the military because of a skydiving drill gone wrong, he suffered from poor self-discipline, and he knew it. This mighty man of God felt like a captive in this area of his life, which ate me up. I've committed my life to this mission ever since, and this book plays a tremendous role in my goal.

This book is meant to set the stage for the various cases I will make on healthy living from the angle of church culture, our individual lives, and our impact on the world. In this book, you'll receive a biblical perspective on the whats, whys, and hows of living healthy as believers. You'll learn practical solutions for making health and fitness a part of American church culture and how to change your lifestyle drastically as well. I'll provide you with resources and tools to help you make the changes you'll be inspired to make as you dive deeper into this book. I assure you that change will be inevitable if you commit to reading this all the way through and keep your mind open enough to consider God's Word above your emotions and current habits. In addition to perspective and advice, I'll be speaking life to you. A steady balance of correction and celebration is the best way to inspire change, which is what I aim to provide. Your life means a lot; the better you are, the better we are. As the song says, I need you, you need me. We're all a part of God's body.

You have my respect if you're not a Christian and still picked up this book. That being said, without a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ, much of this book will not weigh as heavily as it needs to move you to action. I encourage you to pursue a relationship with the Lord and other followers of Christ. Join a local church and begin exploring the truths of the Gospel and the Bible.

In writing this, I aim to open the eyes of believers with little to no understanding of why their unhealthy lifestyle is not just unhealthy but unholy. I also aim to empower the church in ways that far surpass our physical well-being, which tends to affect other areas of our lives, including our witness. I want to see the will of God and his fullness evident in the physical condition of God's people. As you journey through this book, you may seek help for your church, a family member, or yourself.

I will offer that help in various sections of this book, which can all be found at www.fitchurchunited.com.

1

My Story

The car accident

It was a warm summer Sunday evening. The sky looked like cotton candy. The conversion van my four colleagues and I were in had overheated three times, forcing us to pull off and allow the engine to cool before we could continue. Needless to say, we were over it and ready to get back home.

Attempting once again to finish our journey from New Jersey to Virginia, steam started rushing out of the vents, and we had no choice but to pull on the shoulder of the interstate. We needed a way to get the van towed somewhere since we would now stop where there was no gas station nearby. Everyone started calling their parents. This was a van full of very young adults.

As we began trekking up the Roth Bridge in Delaware, one of my colleagues received instruction to finish getting up the bridge, turn off the van, put it in neutral, and roll down the other side to be met by someone from AAA on the other side. Though not thrilling, we had a plan, and there was relief among us. We needed to get to the shoulder because the van was overheating, and we were only going about twenty-five miles per hour on the interstate. Cars continued to whir past us until finally, one little dark-green car whipped past us, and we had the clearance to get over and into the shoulder lane.

Being a concerned passenger like the others, I looked into the rearview mirror to make sure we were clear to switch lanes, but we were too late. I looked up only to see the grill of an eighteen-wheeler about to plow into us at sixty-five miles per hour. The semidriver had fallen asleep, but the rest of my colleagues and I were in for a rude awakening.

I leaned forward to distance myself from the impact and let out a startling shout before, BANG! The van we were in was pushed two hundred feet, forcing the van to rebound off of the edge of the bridge and back into the lane we were initially in.

Immediately, there were flames behind me and flames in front of me. I couldn't breathe, let alone shout because the wind was knocked out of me. There was smoke everywhere and seemingly no way to get out since my side had no door. The driver lay upon me in his broken chair, screaming from the flames that covered 45 percent of his body. Our two-day business trip had turned into a nightmare in seconds—that is, for the four of us who lived and the family of the girl who sat behind me. A broken pelvis, four fractured vertebrae, a lacerated spleen, and a lacerated liver paled in comparison to the pain I felt finding out one of us didn't make it. As doctors told my family that my ability to walk and even have kids would be in question, I was considering how unexpectedly our lives could end.

What does this have to do with loving Jesus and living healthily? For me, everything. This was the beginning of my story in many ways as it marked the day that I truly connected to my need for a Savior. Up until this point, I wasn't very considerate of God at all. I had grown up attending an Episcopalian church, serving as an acolyte and singing songs. My relationship with God, however, was lacking.

Until this point, I had willingly succumbed to peer pressure and my desire for acceptance. Partying, drugs, pleasure, and fun were my poor attempts at filling a void and masking bitterness developed from my poor relationship with my alcoholic father as a child. My now wife but then fiancée, Katielynne, had the sense to pray for me after she heard the words they're dead peeling from my tongue as I painfully informed her of what had just happened over the phone right after the car accident. She would be the one to care for me as God restored me and restore me He did.

My Bethel

Before I present to you the concept of loving Jesus and living healthily simultaneously, I believe it is essential for me to fill you in on how I came to faith. For me, this experience was life-changing, though not due to the reasoning the doctors might have expected. I remember walking into the church my wife and I attended at the time, about three months after the accident, and feeling as though I had been hit in the head with a brick as soon as I walked through the door. My head was pounding, my heart had not completely changed, and I still lived on the fence.

Finally, the service was closing, and it was time for the altar call. The conviction came upon me like a wave, and I began shuffling to the front of the church, tears welling in my eyes. After a bit of gentle questioning, I was embraced and prayed for. Then Pastor Andrew said something to me that made the town siren of my heart begin to sound. He looked me in the eyes with love and grace and said, Matthew, God did not save you for no reason. You need to stop playing with God.

Wait, I wasn't playing with God, was I? This statement played through my head over and over for days. I needed to make a deliberate change in the right direction, so I did.

I started reading the Bible more. Habit by habit, God stripped away what I had identified with for years but had no place in his will for my life. Drugs, partying, and even certain friends were removed