Spiritual Fitness Training

BECOMING THE PERSON & PEOPLE YOU WERE CREATED TO BE

All athletic games are played upon the fundamentals.  Professional players practice the basic skills according to who they are in every practice.  A baseball player will practice baseball related skills, not soccer and they will practice on their specific position, not another.  This is their general and specific identity respectively.  They practice in order that they might be able to utilize those skills without having to think about them.  By not having to think about if and where they are suppose to play or how they are suppose to play their specific position they can fully attend to the current situation they find themselves in:  a hit and run, sacrifice bunt, suicide squeeze or a bases loaded jam.  In other words, they practice in order to solidify their identity and increase their ability to best contribute to the team's success.  Training produces the freedom to engage the game more effectively and efficiently so that the player can make the most of every opportunity they face.

Spiritual Formation is similar.  When we attend to the right Story and the right position and the right skills to work on, we will engage life more fully and with more freedom.  A spiritually fit person will engage life more fully and with more freedom than a spiritual unfit person because they are engaging life the way God intends and expects us to - through Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We only become fully alive and spiritually fit in vital union with Jesus.  We only come into vital union with Jesus by grace through faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior and the sender of His Holy Spirit to empower and equip us to live as his image bearers. 

Every person is part of God's Story and has both a general and specific identity within that Story.  Every person engages both their general and specific identity through five basic questions that operate to define what it means to be a normal human being:

     1.   Who is God?  Who are we? 

The more we mature at understanding and responding to the basics of God's Truth, the more freedom we will have to live life to the glory of God as the person and people God designed us to be.  Because no one ever perfects this, training in the fundamentals is for a lifetime.  Spiritual Fitness Training continually works on and develops the essential aspects of what it means to be human in relationship to God, to each other and to the world.  We do this so that we might engage life fully alive (free) to who we are in Jesus and be his witnesses of grace. 

Because Story is the stuff life is made of, we would expect to find the core questions of life related to God's Master Story.  And we do.  The Biblical narrative has five storylines that correspond to the five core questions.  Each storyline webs itself amongst the others.  Spiritual Fitness Training organizes itself around each storyline:

     Storyline 1:  Tales of Reigning (Who are we? Who is God?)

Thus, Spiritual Fitness Training seeks to engage life by understanding God's transforming Story and applying it to our own in our particular place and time in history via these five storylines (R5). R5 is the way spiritual formation is structured (as a story).  God's Story is defined and expressed most clearly in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is the image of God par excellence and who grows us into his likeness by grace and through our faith in him.  The giving of his Spirit (the Holy Spirit) is the power that empowers the transformation as new people in Jesus.