Spiritual Training

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. (25) Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. (26) So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; (27) but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

"I do not box as though beating the air," says St. Paul, and all the boxers in the congregation say ... Amen!

OK. I'm conscious of the fact that not everybody here would have chosen this passage as his or her choice text for the sermon this morning, but I am sure that you can appreciate that, for me, this is one of the few times where boxing gets an explicit wrap in the Bible, and when it comes leaping out of the lectionary at us like this it is hard for me to overlook it.

In my defense I note further that this is only the second time I have ever preached on this text. Going back over my sermon notes from some years ago, I noted too that on the last occasion I dealt with this text I actually had a black eye, which served as an excellent opening illustration.

I no longer have a black eye. I'm no longer competing quite as vigorously as I once did. Indeed, I am conscious of the fact that I am a fair bit older and flabbier now than last time I dealt with this passage. Having said that, while I readily acknowledge that my physique is in steady decline, I would like to think that my spiritual six-pack, as it were, is tighter now than it was then!

For that's the real thrust of the passage, isn't it? It's about spiritual training, and the development of the spiritual athlete. And in as much as Paul seems to be drawing upon his own experience as a ring-fighter, his application is to the spiritual arena, where he sees the real fight taking place.

I must say though that I do in all seriousness believe that St. Paul had genuine first-hand experience as a ring-fighter (and quite possibly as a runner too). And if he did it wouldn't have been in the relatively sanitized style of modern pugilism either. There were no 'Queensbury Rules' matches back then. The 'boxing' St. Paul would have been familiar with was that practiced in the ancient Pankration - the greatest of the sporting contests of the ancient Greeks.

The Pankration, in St. Paul's time, was the final climactic event in the early Olympic games. The Games used to conclude with this event - featuring two naked men tearing each other to pieces in centre ring. Legend has it that when Ulysses returned from the Trojan wars his own mother couldn't recognise him. According to my friend Kon (Vice-president of the Australian Pankration Federation), when the Pankration champion returned from the Olympic games, his own dog couldn't recognise him.

The traditional Pankration was not a sport for women and children. It was designed for hard men who were just a little bit crazy - and that fits St. Paul to a tee I think. Indeed, it's one of my quiet hopes that when the Kingdom comes I'll get the opportunity to do a few rounds with St. Paul. I suppose that might not be everybody's idea of Heaven but ...

The reason I'm so convinced that St. Paul knew the fight game first hand is that he understands what fight training is really all about. It's about self-discipline.

"Athletes exercise self-control in all things ... So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air." I do the hard yards so that I might develop self-control or self-discipline.

People outside of the fight game generally don't understand the fact that self-control is the most fundamental thing you learn through fight training. Some think it's about learning to be more aggressive and uncontrolled. Far from it!

I had to go through this again with a new student I had last Thursday night. She was a 15-year-old girl- not our typical fighter profile! Even so, this girl was very keen and very aggressive. I don't know exactly what baggage she was carrying with her, but she seemed very keen to start hitting me. Ironically, she wasn't at all keen to be hit herself. "Couldn't I just hit you?" she said "without you hitting me back. Shouldn't I learn how to hit first, and learn how to take a hit a little further down the track?"

"No, no, no" I said. "No one boxes as one beating the air around here". It's unbiblical! "We pummel our bodies so that we might enslave them," I said. Well, I didn't really quote St. Paul, but I did say to her that learning to get hit was even more important than learning to hit, because it was through getting hit that she would learn self-control.

Fighting is about self-control. It's about controlling your fear. It's about learning to function under pressure. It's about learning how to repress your natural instincts either to run away from danger OR just to hit back mindlessly. It's about putting yourself at risk and experiencing the pain, but maintaining your focus and keeping your cool under pressure, so that you can make a serious and reasonable response to the force that opposes you.

Let me say that again in case you missed it. Real fight training is about putting yourself at risk and experiencing the pain, but maintaining your focus and keeping your cool under pressure, so that you can make a serious and reasonable response to the force that opposes you.

That's what real fight training is about, as against the 'beating the air' type of fight training, and I'm repeating it because I think that this is more or less what the apostle believes real spiritual training to be.

For let's face it friends, there are plenty of forms of spiritual training that we can engage in, but I suspect that the vast majority of them don't prepare us at all for the real fight! There are plenty of spiritual gurus out there who will take our money and who will teach us how to contemplate our navels or how to separate our minds and hearts from all things painful in this world, but these are not disciplines that will turn us into the sort of spiritual warriors that St. Paul is urging us to become.

Engaging in a cheap and easy form of spiritual training isn't too hard. We can even spend time reading the Scriptures and admiring their beauty and their historical significance. In itself this is about as valuable as punching the air!

Real spiritual training doesn't come from reading the Scriptures and admiring them, but from allowing ourselves to be pushed by them, to be changed by those words, so that we put our lives at risk, experience the pain, but make a real and effective response too!

Real spiritual training isn't just reading Jesus saying "blessed are you poor" and admiring the beauty of His words. It's hearing those words and then making the deliberate decision to become one of those poor. It isn't listening to the story of Jesus touching the leper and thinking 'oh, wasn't that sweet of Him'. It's allowing the story to penetrate us so that we begin to think about people we need to touch, barriers that we need to break down, people that we might be able to bring healing to.

That's why we gather together to listen to the Scriptures read today isn't it? We don't gather round to listen to the Bible simply because we believe that this book relates significant historical events that are worth remembering. We read the Scriptures together because we believe that those words still have the power to change us.

That's one of the reasons we come to church, isn't it? We're come for a spiritual workout. OK, we're come to worship primarily, of course we do. And we're come to take our place as part of this spiritual community too. I appreciate that. But we do come looking for a bit of a spiritual workout too, don't we? We come with a desire to immerse our minds in the Scriptures so that our perspectives on life might be changed, so that our lives might be further radicalized.

We come to be further challenged and inspired as we hear our sisters and brothers share about their spiritual pilgrimages, and so we share our pilgrimage with them so that we might help them lift their game.

We come looking for real opportunities for ministry with one another, and we come looking for people that we can team together with on specific projects designed to bring healing, light and life into our world.

I trust that we do come together in church, looking to flex our spiritual muscles.

I trust we have moved beyond the perspective of that one ex-parishioner who was good enough to tell me why he no longer attended church. He said, "Well, sometimes I'd leave the church feeling worse than when I came in."

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I've left the fight club gym feeling worse than when I walked in - for every time I've stumbled home bruised and bloody and aching all over, but going home and sleeping soundly in the knowledge that I had come home stronger and more ready to handle the fight that lay ahead of me!

"I do not box as one punching the air," says St. Paul. Why not? Because he takes his fighting seriously. Those who take their fighting seriously train hard, and what's more they train often. Serious fighters don't just turn up to training once per week. They turn up two or three times per week. And serious spiritual warriors likewise tend to find that church once per week is not really enough. They look for other training opportunities - for mid-week Bible-study or prayer groups. And serious fighters find themselves supplementing those training sessions at the gym with regular sessions hitting the pavement in the early mornings. And serious spiritual pugilists likewise find themselves setting aside time each day for prayer and spiritual reflection.

Now I must be honest with you. Not all the fighters I have had in my stable have taken their fight training that seriously. I can think of two fighters in particular who were both very gifted athletes, but who were convinced that they could get by on a minimum of training. In the old days I still used to let guys like that fight, hoping that the ring experience would change their perspectives on training. But every time I've done that the result has been the same: the fighter lost, got hurt, and never came back.

There is a parallel here in the spiritual arena. Don't underestimate the seriousness of the fight friends! Don't be fooled about the strength of the enemy. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you can live the life Jesus is calling you to without it costing you in every area of your life.

The enemy is strong and the enemy is clever. He will be at you from the moment you leave this building today. He'll be at you through your car radio on your way home - through pop songs that try to sell you some cheap version of love and through adds that tell you to sell the kids for the sake of some new car. He'll be at you on the Tele again if you can't resist to turn it on a little later. He'll be telling you that 'Coke' is what you really want and that you deserve to have more food and drink than you can possibly consume, even while half of Zimbabwe is starving at your doorstep.

The evil one will be at you when you return to work, driving suspicion and bitterness into you through office politics, chipping away at your integrity subtly through the values that you find your forced to espouse because they are the values your company is committed to. He'll be at you when you get home again, using your lack of focus and exhaustion to bring unnecessary tensions into your most significant relationships so that you gradually become a failure as a father, a mother, a partner and a friend.

He'll be at you 24 hours per day, and the only way to stand up to the force of evil that opposes us is to fight back, and to fight back hard. And the only way to condition ourselves to become hard enough for that fight is to put in the hard yards in the arena of spiritual training.

I always warn my boys in the Fight Club: 'Fighting is glorious, but training, after a while, is just plain hard work.' Perhaps that sums up how some of you are feeling about church and Bible study at the moment. Well, you don't have to enjoy every session, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be there. For we didn't join Christ's church because of its entertainment value, just as we didn't decide to follow Jesus because we thought it might be fun.

We look around our world today and we know that the battle for the Kingdom of God is not a fight for the faint-hearted. We know that if we are truly going to follow Jesus in this world that it is going to cost us everything that we have got. But we know, too, that if our resolve is firm and if we have trained hard, if we have developed our spiritual muscle and self-control, if we can endure the pain and keep our cool, that we will survive until the last round is over.

We will hear that final bell, we will see the enemy at our feet, and we will receive that imperishable wreath that the apostle speaks of, reserved for those who have fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith.

Fighting is glorious, but training is just hard work. It's true. But the other side of the equation is equally true: if we do put in the hard yards in training, we do get to glory!

Improve Your Spiritual Connection

Maintaining a spiritual connection is very important in my life, and hopefully in yours too. Regularly taking positive action in this area helps keep you centered and focused, and refreshes mind, body and spirit. Religion differs from spirituality in that it is more dogmatic. Spirituality concentrates on your own personal relationship with whatever Higher Power is most relevant to you.

Naturally, you may call your Higher Power whatever you want to, like Mother Nature, God, the Universe or perhaps Bob! The name or label is much less important than the quality of your connection and your willingness to allow it into your life.

What follows are some basic tips to help you improve your spirituality as well as help you develop a more solid connection with your own concept of spiritual connection. Work on spiritual aspects of your life gradually and consistently. Doing so keeps you from being overwhelmed.

- Engage in the practice of meditation

In a consistent fashion, try to establish a time and place where you could spend a quiet moment in the morning or during the evening. Ten to fifteen minutes is all it takes. This is also a good time to assess how your life is going or to simply focus and quiet the mind. Your mind needs space to relax too. The key to effective meditation is controlling your breathing. Breathe deeply and rhythmically and when thoughts intrude, simply focus on your breathing again.

Praying is a form of meditation. A mantra, or meditation phrase, helps you focus on your breathing instead of on the random thoughts that come and go. My personal favourite is "Om Mani Padme Hum", which is a Buddhist mantra that is not readily translated into English. (For more information on this mantra.

-Don't isolate yourself, be with people.

You could try taking a class or joining a hobby club. For some, having positive relationships and interacting with different people can alleviate that feeling of loneliness. Personally, I play ping pong with a group of friends every week which combines socializing with exercise!

-Keep your mind active, keep learning

It is never too late to go on learning. The mind needs nourishment, so make sure you continually feed it. Keep it active by reading books and watching DVD's related to psychology, spirituality, self-help or whatever you would like to learn. Exercise your mind with crosswords and puzzles.

-Have fun

I like this part. Believe it or not, being spiritual does not only mean being serious all the time. Don't take yourself too seriously and develop the ability to laugh at yourself.

Why not engage in some hobby or activity for the simple fun of it? You could begin by exploring sports, hobbies or whatever it is that intrigues you.

-Be of service to others

For some people, doing some volunteer activities or doing some acts of random kindness works best to help them become more spiritual. Giving for the sake of giving and not for some ulterior motive makes you feel good inside. This is how we make the world a better place and increase our capacity for compassion.

-Practice non-judgment

This is hard because everyone makes judgments all the time. When you judge someone you are really comparing them to your own standards. If they do not meet your standards you can look down on them and feel superior. If they exceed your standards you could feel jealous or envious or inferior, all undesirable emotional states. This is a lose-lose situation. Again, awakening your compassion allows you to view others with empathy rather than judgment.

-Show gratitude

There is actually a lot to be thankful for, and acknowledging the bounty in your life allows more to enter. I also regularly express gratitude to my body for supporting me.

Again, try to practice each day appreciating an aspect in your life for which you are grateful. Thank the universe for another day to spend and another day to make yourself, your life, or the lives of others better. In conclusion, making room for spirituality in your life will greatly enhance your feeling of well-being and connectedness. And don't forget to breathe, breathe, and breathe again!

Success In Life By Spiritual Thoughts And Deeds Of People

I don't recall one school lesson that taught money management skills. My guess is that your experience is quite similar.

The lure of money pulled me out of sixth form early. I'd found a job and the thought of stacking money up in the bank had a massive appeal to me at seventeen.

I worked hard and soon became the best sales person I could be. With the commission I was soon able to buy myself a car. I found a girlfriend and later began to enjoy things like beer and clubbing. When the appeal of all that died away I settled down: got married, got a monthly repayment - commonly known as a mortgage - and had my first child. All fairly typical up to this point.

I bought a mortgage because I'd heard that a house was an asset. As no one had ever shown me what an asset looked like on a financial balance sheet I fell for it, hook line and sinker, because the truth is a mortgage is not an asset to me. But it is to my bank. My mortgage was in truth a liability.

What's an Asset?

Good question. An asset is something that earns you money. How much does your mortgage earn you? Most likely your mortgage costs you. For example an £80,000 mortgage over a normal period at a usual kind of rate will mean repayments of around £ £around £210,000.

Does that sound like an asset?

Sure you can argue that your home will rise in value. But does that earn you money? Probably not. Here's why.

Your bank knows that you won't complete the term. They know that in 6-8 years you're going to move on and take out another loan, usually a bigger debt and a bigger loan.

A Mortgage is 'For Life'

The word mortgage is derived from the French word 'Mortif' which literally means 'For life.' And this is most likely where your bank has you… for life.

Why the Rich Get Richer…

The rich get richer because they understand more about money than most people do. They got educated. They know that working for a living means you get taxed and pay your NI contribution before you get your hands on the money. So they go into business. This means that they take their legitimate expenses off pre-tax, pay less tax and end up with more disposable income from the profits.

Why Become Self-Employed?

When I became self-employed - and this may be true for you too - it wasn't for tax breaks, but to get out of the rat-race and do something I loved, while at the same time creating freedom of time. The tax breaks are a bonus, well they are if you can earn enough.

The problem for many self-employed people is that they know how to do their task, say massage therapy or homeopathy, but don't have the marketing skills to drive a stamped of customers through the door. That's why so many businesses end up closing within three years.

I’ve put together my top tips for spiritual people on earning money. These are below. They cover business as well as personal expenses.

1. If you pay money out on loans, a mortgage or a credit cards, you do not have assets, but liabilities. You are therefore the banks asset.

2. Begin to educate yourself financially. Is it your wish to see your money be put to uses you approve of. There are some excellent books on making money from money. Start to read them and edge towards financial freedom rather than financial control.

3. Reduce your expenses to a minimum. Find 10% of your income and use it to reduce your loans. Wealthy, financially fr>ee people, know to always clear their debts as early as possible. Once your debts are paid you can invest in the kind of good, ethical business you believe in.

Self Improvement Through People's Spirituality

Did you ever see something go wrong around you and suddenly burst out, “How on Earth did I create that?”

Really, how can bad things happen, even to the sweetest, kindest, most spiritual people on the planet? Where’s the fairness in that?

The root of the question lies partly in the fact that we live in a state of polarity consciousness. This is a point of view where life is seen as a contrast between opposing forces, and that events are either good or bad. Good or bad is a judgment issue. Judgment belongs in third-density, physical consciousness. Yes, in physical consciousness, bad things do exist, and they appear that way because they’re designed to.

Life is like a stage, or a movie set where scripts are acted out for the experience that they will bring. The ‘props’ upon the stage of life consist of good ones and bad ones because we are here to experience duality consciousness. But, when you rise above judgment to a higher vista of consciousness, you begin to view the arrival of an unpleasant occurrence in your life as the challenge that it was intended to be.

Challenges are designed, at a soul level, to give rise to change. Change then opens the door to the opportunity for transformation, and transformation is our main purpose in life.

Your soul thinks very much in terms of service to others, so your purpose in life is to transform, not only yourself, but all of humanity to a higher level of consciousness. As a member of the group mind of humanity on Earth, everything that you do is reflected within the whole. Many challenges are undertaken, more for the transformation that they will bring to others, than for the change they will bring to you.

Transformation itself – the natural progress of the spirit - can be effortless. But when a blockage to that transformation exists, pain may be the price necessary to dissolve that blockage. People often take on pain in their lives, not because they need to transform themselves, but because their souls see that society needs to work through certain major issues and they volunteer to be a part of that transformation.

In some people’s lives, challenges come thick and fast. In others, they do not, at least for that lifetime. When a person completes a particularly challenging lifetime, they may follow it up with a quiet, pleasant and restful incarnation, one where nothing outstanding happens at all.

Challenges are the tools of transformation

Without that tension in life, nothing moves, nothing progresses. Huge issues are worked through by millions of people at a time. Take any issue - equality of the sexes, equality of race, control issues, abuse, violence, equal access for the handicapped - and there are millions of people working through each issue at any one time in history.

Sometimes people make obvious progress in helping shift the paradigm. Sometimes they pass away before their time, a seeming victim of the old reality, having made no apparent progress. However, whatever they do in their lives, the experience of just being alive in their situation is added to the massive paradigm shift in consciousness which is occurring at that time. No effort is wasted. No one fails. Everyone contributes to the experiences which follow each challenge.

What about the December 2004 Indonesian tsunami, the largest natural disaster in recorded history? What exactly did more than 170,000 souls join together to achieve? Did they soften the psyche of a world fixated upon terrorism and war? At a conscious level, we don’t know exactly why they agreed to such a monumental sacrifice. At their all-knowing soul level, however, they did plan to be a part of this massive event, because that is how life works.

Souls do not experience accidents, they create realities

When you reach the deepest level of sleep at night, you move into your fully-aware, soul consciousness. When you reach this level of consciousness you may then join with your extended soul family and with all of the other soul families on this planet to plan, quite literally, what tomorrow will bring. Even if the focus of your attention does not reach this inner level on a particular night, your soul level of consciousness is still fully aware and functional in its own right. You then, as part of the whole of humanity, create that tomorrow. To your conscious mind the next day, some of these plans may even appear as surprises and wake-up calls as they unfold before your daily, waking consciousness.

It is not by chance that, when your time comes to leave your physical body and pass on to the spirit world, your guides will be there to meet you. Your guides, along with friends and relatives who have passed on before you, will meet you at the exact moment of your passing. They will be there because, as the event draws near, they know exactly when to expect you. This is because souls do not experience accidents, they create realities.

Not all challenges in life are a part of massive societal shifts. A challenge may just as easily be personal. Something that is, perhaps, chosen as a tool to break up a long-standing blockage within a person’s psyche. It is almost surreal to hear a cancer survivor reflect on their new-found health and say, “Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.” What they mean is that the challenge transformed them by releasing old blockages which were cheating them of a fuller life.

We may never know all of the reasons why bad events happen. What we do know is that, in a world which habitually contrasts light and dark, the events which appear bad can often be the greatest opportunities for transformation within ourselves, for those around us and for humanity as a whole.

Who is to say that, at a soul level, we didn’t volunteer to carry a heavy load purely for the love of others? Certainly the most spiritual people can, and do, carry the heaviest loads, and they do so in such a way that their service fills the world with the light of their love.