My name is Doug and I have a confession to make! I ate too much at Thanksgiving! Of course it was not my fault, since the sheer weight of familial peer pressure is beyond my control. Right? Wrong. Just as it is easy to grow flabby physically, it is just as easy to grow flabby spiritually. Or, I believe it is even easier, because your soul is not evidently in ill health from looking in a mirror on jumping on a scale. As the band Casting Crown puts it: "...it's a slow fade, when you give your life away..." Sliding spiritually is a subtle affair that we can be lulled into before we realize it (if we ever do).
So how do you keep spiritually fit. You start with the body. What? That makes no sense from our perspective. But our problem is that we have inverted God's order of things. God has created our bodies to serve our soul and spirit. But in our fall, when sin come into play, we began allowing the needs of the body to direct and coerce the soul and spirit.
Why do we fast as a spiritual discipline? Is it to lose weight or purify our bodies? Although it can be of benefit in these areas, the main reason it is practiced as a spiritual discipline is to realign our body's role as the servant of our soul and spirit. Through our control of what we do with our bodies, we train it to hunger for God's presence as much as we do for a donut when we see a illuminated "Hot Now" in neon!
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I noticed you’re reading “Pagan Christianity?”. Great book. Thought you might be interested to know that the sequel is out now. It’s called “Reimagining Church”. It picks up where “Pagan Christianity” left off and continues the conversation. (“Pagan Christianity” was never meant to be a stand alone book; it’s part one of the conversation.) “Reimagining Church” is endorsed by Leonard Sweet, Shane Claiborne, Alan Hirsch, and many others. You can read a sample chapter at
http://www.ReimaginingChurch.org .
It’s also available on Amazon.com. Frank is also blogging now at http://www.frankviola.wordpress.com .
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