Something your gym and your church might have in common …

As a fitness professional — but especially for my personal fitness and health — I’m in the gym every day of the week.

A couple nights ago, I wound up doing an impromptu fitness consultation with the overnight customer service rep. His story is common in gyms: He’s unfit, overweight, and doesn’t work out even though he works in a gym. Because he works in a gym, he has a free membership to use the gym like every other member. He has access to nine different certified personal trainers who would likely be a little helpful, without a fee, since he’s a fellow employee.

But he doesn’t work out and has remained unfit.

I’m hoping our time together, along with equipping him with training resources, will encourage and inspire him to start a new journey toward personal fitness. He’s certainly in the right place — the gym he works at contains everything he could possibly want or need to physically train his body, become physically fit, and improve his health.

But he is not an anomaly. Many people who are employed by gyms are people who are unfit and disengaged from any activities to improve their personal fitness.

That’s a little like the churches we find across America.

What better place to grow spiritually, to seriously live out being a follower of Jesus Christ, than the local family of God available in your own community? Everything you need for becoming spiritually fit, maturing in Christ, and growing in the knowledge and grace of the Lord can be found in the fellowship and relationships available to you in the body of Christ, also known as your local church.

Yet, so many of the people on church membership rolls are biblically illiterate and spiritually unfit, even though they’re in a place that is a “gym” for the Christian life.

Just as an unused gym membership provides no benefit to a person working at, or joining, a gym, a church membership that isn’t put to proper use is of no benefit to a person as well. How are you putting to use your membership with your local church? How is it helping you mature in Christ, grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord, put to use your spiritual gifts, provide opportunity to serve the body of Christ, stir you to good works, and equip you to live as an ambassador for Christ?

Or, like the overnight guy at the gym, have you become content with neglecting the real benefit of membership in favor of being content with being spiritually unfit?

Scotty