So, in 1986 at the age of 18, I joined the US Army.  I served for 5 years with the 18th Airborne Corp, and every week  we trained.  We would run for miles, do hundreds of pushups, hundreds of situps and who knows how many other exercises.  It was easy, because we did it all the time.

Fast forward to 2012, and here I am, a man who has had far too many ice cream sundaes.  I’ve been wanting to work on this problem of the growing belly, so I ask my youngest son Donovan to find us a workout we can do together.  My son enjoys his weight set, and seems to enjoy working out.  I told him to find something his old man could do, and he found us a low impact 8 minute ab workout.  I watched the video, and it seemed like something I should be able to do with no problem.

So we broke out the exercise mats, queued up the video, and started to follow along.  The video was broken into several different exercises, with 30 repetitions of each one.  Half way through the first exercise, my body started to complain, a lot!  We progressed through the rest of the video, and close to the half way point of each exercise, I had to quit.  It was simply too painful!  My son, who is much younger, fared better than me and was able to do most of the routine.

So why am I posting about this experience on my ministry blog?  Well, it got me thinking about how often we exercise our God muscle, our faith.  A lot of folks I have seen have what appears to be great faith when they are in church on Sunday.  But Monday through Saturday their faith stays stored away up on a shelf in the closet.  It never grows, it is never strengthened, it just sits there.  God gave us this tool to use, on a daily basis.   And if we don’t exercise it, it will never grow.  YOU will never grow!

We need to exercise our faith daily so that we may grow His kingdom, so that we can be His hands and feet here on the earth.  We need to have faith so that when we see someone hurting, we can pray for them.  If we see someone who is limping, we need our faith to be strong so that we can go to that person and pray for them, and see God heal them!  We need to exercise our faith daily in what we read, what we watch and what we listen to.  If we don’t exercise our faith, we will never be able to witness His kingdom manifest in our life.

I encourage you, pray for someone today while you’re out and about, pray with them face to face.  Pray for a stranger at the grocery store, pray with a homeless person, step out of your comfort zone and do something which will strengthen your faith.

God bless!