P.O.W.E.R. Morning RoutinesSample

Exercise: Orient Your Body

After orienting your heart through prayer and the Word and orienting your mind through journaling and reading, now it’s time to orient your body to the day ahead. This is the “E” in your POWER morning. We’re talking about exercise.

In the previous chapter, we looked at 1 Corinthians 6:20 and talked about the implications of being bought with a price. The principal conclusion was that your life belongs to God, but in the immediate context, the apostle Paul was specifically pointing out that our physical bodies are a stewardship. “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). God cares about what we do with our hearts and minds, but He cares about our bodies as well.

Part of the responsibility of every Christian is to care for his or her physical body. This comes through nutrition and physical exercise. Concerning yourself with your physical body is not an unspiritual pursuit. Physical exercise, in fact, is commended by the writers of Scripture (1 Tim. 4:8). In the ancient world, unless you were outrageously wealthy, physical exercise was baked into your day-to-day life. Walking was the normal mode of transportation, and most vocations involved a lot of physical labor. In our age of cars and computers, however, most of us need to be more deliberate in stewarding our physical bodies.

The trouble is, we live in a society that idolizes physical beauty. So when we think about exercise, our minds sometimes jump to images of vain gym rats, doing three-hour workouts daily in a quest to get six-pack abs or beach bods. And not all of us have the time or inclination to be that dedicated to working out. So we figure, why bother? But exercise does not need to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. Just as Christians think about productivity differently than the world, so our motives and aims in exercise probably won’t be identical to those who don’t know Christ.

If your objective is merely to be a better steward of your body, then simply taking a little bit of time each day to stretch, do some pushups, or get some cardiovascular exercise in can do wonders for your energy and mental clarity for the day. Even just a twenty-minute walk each day is better than nothing. And these little steps will have tangible benefits for your overall health in the long term. You can certainly do more than this. But my point is that for the Christian, the objective of physical exercise doesn’t necessarily need to be weight loss, improved athletic performance, or getting our bodies to look a certain way. You can of course pursue those things to the glory of God, but in terms of productivity, I’m more interested in the immediate benefits of getting my heart pumping in the morning.

Regardless of what other exercise I might have planned for the day, I like to at least include some jumping jacks or pushups at the end of my morning routine. Getting my heart rate up and breaking a sweat is the last push I need to be fully awake. It also puts me in a great mood. After exercising, I feel more ready to meet the challenges of the day.