In the service of love, we want to get (and keep) our bodies, depending on our season of life, in the condition needed to serve God’s callings on us to love others. We want to be the kind of people who desire to do good for others, knowing that such good often requires exerting our bodies in ways that are uncomfortable in the moment and even unthinkable if we are lazy and unfit.

Christian Fitness

A Christian motivation for exercise is the good of others. Or we could say, for love’s sake. I exercise to make myself a better servant of others, to be fit for good works.

When my life is joyfully active and less sedentary, when I feel strong—when it seems clear to me that a happier life comes from activity, not passivity—I’m more ready to spring into action to help others. I’m ready to move. Ready to respond. Ready to hear. Ready to help. I believe that exercise makes me a better servant of others—a better husband, father, pastor, and friend.

Regular bodily exertion not only assists our personal pursuit of joy in God and fights against joy-destroying sin but also readies us to move beyond self-focus and have our hearts primed to meet the needs of others. Here’s how John Piper explains why he has set aside time to exercise for more than fifty years:

My main motive for exercise is purity and productivity. By purity, I mean being a more loving person (as Jesus said, “love your neighbor,” Matthew 22:39). By productivity, I mean getting a lot done (as Paul said, “abounding in the work of the Lord,” 1 Corinthians 15:58). . . . In short, I have one life to live for Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:15). I don’t want to waste it. My approach is not mainly to lengthen it, but to maximize purity and productivity now.1

Precisely because “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10), we want to adequately condition our bodies so that they are a help, rather than a hindrance, in the daily cause of love. We want our bodies to be an aid—not an obstacle—in readying us to sacrifice our own comforts and energy to do good for others at home and for the church and beyond.

Fit for What?

From this perspective, Christians can appreciate the term fitness. To call an active, able, healthy human body fit implies that the body is not an end in itself. The body’s “fitness” is not for posing on camera or on stages but for doing something—accomplishing tasks in the world. The goal of fitness is not to look good in the mirror or on Instagram. True fitness serves other purposes. The body is fit to do something. The question is: Fit for what?

In Christ, we have far better answers to that question than secular workout culture and its false gods. Twice Paul uses a phrase that could be our rallying cry for a genuinely Christian call to fitness: “ready for every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21; Titus 3:1). In Christ, we want to cleanse our bodies “from what is dishonorable” (that is, from all forms of sin, including laziness) and “be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21).

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1. John Piper, “Brothers, Bodily Training Is of Some Value,” in Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, exp. ed. (B&H, 2013), 186–87.