Put It Down First

I started Disciplines of a Godly Man yesterday. R. Kent Hughes takes his title from 1 Timothy 4:7, and the first chapter quoted that verse. I was reading and taking notes and I could not get past the words right before it. Before Paul says train yourself, he tells Timothy to have nothing to do with the pointless stuff, so the putting down comes first in the sentence and the training comes second. Nobody talks about that half. I felt called to write about it before I read any further.

Paul picked a gym word

But have nothing to do with pointless and silly myths. Rather, train yourself in godliness. For the training of the body has limited benefit, but godliness is beneficial in every way, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

1 Timothy 4:7-8, CSB

Hughes points this out in that first chapter. The word for train there is γύμναζε, gymnaze, which is the same root we get gymnasium from, so Paul picked a gym word on purpose. It is a command too, and it is in the present tense, which in Greek means keep doing it rather than do it once. Then in the very next line he uses the same root again for bodily training, γυμνασία, gymnasia, so he uses the gym word twice on purpose. He puts it on godliness, puts it on the body, and then says which of the two is worth more.

I manage a gym, so I see people show up day after day, doing the boring repeated work and changing their physical fitness because of it. Imagine if we put that same effort into our spiritual lives.

Read the first sentence again

Before Paul gets to train yourself, he tells Timothy to have nothing to do with the pointless stuff, so the first instruction in the verse is a put it down rather than a pick it up.

Almost everything I hear about godliness is adding. Add prayer, add Scripture, add patience and gentleness and generosity, and stack up enough good stuff and eventually you are a godly man or woman. Paul puts something else ahead of all of it.

The enemy cannot create anything, so everything he has to work with is stuff God already made good, and what he does is get in the way of it. He puts things in front of you and he keeps you sitting in situations that are already working against you, and a lot of the time that is all it takes. It might be something left where you are going to trip over it, or a setup nobody ever gets around to changing, and years go by with you stuck in the same place wondering why nothing is moving. So most of getting free is clearing something out, and you are not going to train your way past something that is still standing right in front of you.

The chips

I struggle with gluttony, and I do not mean that as a cute way of saying I like food. I mean that if there is a bag of chips in my house I am going to eat the whole thing.

I have written elsewhere about the years I spent fat and what was underneath it, so I will not go back through all of that here. The part that matters for this is that late night snacking was the thing doing the most damage, and it is still the thing that gets to me. The weight came off. The pull did not go with it.

So I do not keep chips in the house, and I do not keep junk in there at all, because I have proven it to myself enough times that access is the entire fight. If it is in the pantry I lose, and if it is not in the pantry there is nothing there to lose to. I am just removing the situation that would have taken willpower in the first place.

Gluttony works against the way I am trying to live, which is lean and healthy and taking care of the body God gave me so I can serve him well with it.

Picking up stuff that is not mine

I avoid confrontation, and when somebody around me drops something my instinct is to pick it up and carry it and never say a word about it. It looks like being nice, but it messes up two things at once.

I go silent and start running a tally in my head against somebody who has no idea they owe me anything, and meanwhile they never find out what they did, so they take it somewhere else and do it to somebody else, and the whole thing keeps rolling.

So this one is weird, because the thing I am putting down feels like a good trait.

Running out before I get home

I give out emotional energy all day, at work and with people and with all the little stuff that comes with running something, and I am generous with it, which sounds good until you follow me home. If I spend it all out there then I walk in my own front door with nothing left and my wife gets the short version of me, so she is getting the leftovers of a guy who was warm and patient with everybody he is not married to. That is bad math, and Maddy has the first claim on that energy rather than the last one.

So I have started budgeting it, giving out less during the day so there is something left when I get home, so the person who has first claim on me gets some of it.

Those are three I can name. There are plenty more, and I am sure there are some I cannot see yet. You do not get handed a list, you find them one at a time, usually by noticing you keep losing in the same spot.

What keeps the adding from working

Scripture tells you to put on compassion and kindness and humility and patience, to add to your faith, to grow the fruit. All of that is commanded and all of it is good, and I have seen it change me.

What I see in myself and in the people around me is that nobody gets stuck from forgetting to add something. They stall because something they will not put down keeps eating whatever they add. You can read your Bible every morning for years and stay stuck in the exact same thing if that thing still has access to you.

You do not rise to the occasion

You cannot fall into lust over and over for years and then expect to stand on the day it counts, and you cannot swallow every hard conversation and then suddenly find your voice when one really matters, and you cannot lose to the bag of chips every single night and then go looking for discipline in the middle of a crisis. Whatever you have been practicing is what is going to show up. That is why Paul grabbed an athlete to make his point.

Three in the morning

I want to be a dad one day, so at some point there is going to be a night, and probably a bunch of them, where a baby will not sleep and neither will I, and somewhere in there is a moment where I am past exhausted and a tiny person who cannot help it is making it worse.

Who I am in that moment is not something I get to decide in that moment. It is getting built right now, in a quiet house, with nothing on the line. If I am careless with my mouth when it is easy then I am going to be careless with it then, and if I cuss freely when nothing is at stake then that is what is coming out of me when everything is, and if I have never once managed to say a hard thing gently while calm then I am not going to manage it while wrecked.

What you get for it

Every time I have taken something out, the fight stopped being a fight. I am not standing in my kitchen at ten at night deciding about chips, I just do not have chips. The decision got made once instead of three hundred times, and all the effort I used to spend holding that line went somewhere else.

It also lets the adding do something. Prayer and Scripture and everything else I am trying to build stops getting eaten by the thing I would not deal with, so the growth stays instead of leaking back out.

And it goes right at what the enemy is doing. If most of what he has is putting things in your way and keeping you parked in situations that are bad for you, then taking the thing out of the way is a direct answer to that. You are not out-muscling him, you are removing what he was using.