The life of discipleship: The apostle Paul and training for godliness

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1 Timothy 4:7–8; Romans 6:13, 22

Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer . . . every part of yourself to God as an instrument of righteousness. . . . But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.

A little green worm makes its way slowly, carefully, across the ground. This is not a pleasant place to crawl, eating dust, dodging children on bicycles, watching out for hungry birds. But the worm crawls, through the grass, across the sidewalk, up the trunk of a very large tree. It fastens itself under one of the leaves and begins to build a little house.

Then, when the house is completed, the worm crawls inside and shuts the door. For weeks it lives inside that confined space. We don’t know what happens while it is in there. But we do know that, eventually, it emerges.

And this is the shocking thing: what went in as a little green worm comes out, no longer a worm but a butterfly, stunningly beautiful, marvellously graceful.

Somehow, inside that little house, with no room to move, that worm was transformed.

Transformation is also what we’re after in the spiritual life. The question is, how does transformation happen?

Paul gave his answer, in part, in 1 Timothy 4:7–8: “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (my emphasis).

Paul always chose his words carefully, and here he said “Train yourself to be godly.” Train is a word that means exercise; it’s the Greek word from which is derived the word gymnasium, a place for exercise and training.

Did Paul really mean what he wrote, or was it just a lofty concept? More importantly, can we understand what he meant, and can we do it ourselves?

There is no question that Paul shaped the history of the world. He was a theologian, a church planter, a church organizer, a doctrinal scholar, an ethical thinker, even a mystical visionary.

He was all of these things, but the central pursuit of his life was to know the real presence of Christ within his experiential life as a believer. He put it this way in Philippians 3:10–11: “I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”

What did Paul do? How did he enter into the real presence of Christ?

So often we read the words of Paul, or the words of Jesus for that matter, and they remain as writing on a page. We sermonize about them, we have Bible studies about them, we read commentaries that tell us what they mean.

Our goal should not be simply to learn the words of Jesus and Paul, however, but to learn how they lived, to share their behaviour. Otherwise, we end up talking about them and trying to apply their language to our experience without much success.

An assignment

When Paul told Timothy to train himself to be godly, this was not a generalization; it was an assignment. People in Paul’s day knew exactly what discipline was, what exercise was. The original readers of this book had no trouble understanding it. Paul was telling Timothy to discipline himself to be godly.

It isn’t often that discipline is associated with godliness. But Paul knew it was. Paul was a disciplined man; he was trained a Pharisee. His legalism relaxed after his conversion, of course, but his discipline didn’t. Note how many times in his writing he uses the word “self-control” – five times in just the first two chapters of Titus, for example. He makes it part of the fruit of the Spirit.

Paul knew discipline. After he met Christ on the road to Damascus, he fasted and prayed for three days. Then he went into the desert for a long period of time, without other people as far as we know. When he was commissioned for ministry, it was through fasting and prayer.

In 1 Corinthians 9:27 Paul wrote, “I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave. . . .” These words do not mean Paul was abusing himself; that is nonsense. He was training for godliness, exercising in the gymnasium, just as he told Timothy to do.

In Romans 6, Paul makes some statements that, taken at face value, are astounding. “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, . . . offer every part of yourself to [God] as an instrument of righteousness” (13). “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (18). “Offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness, leading to holiness” (19). “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life” (22).

Listen to those words: slaves, slaves, slaves, with the result being holiness and eternal life, now and forever. When we read these verses, we often skip over them quickly, assuming Paul is merely using word pictures. But he is speaking quite literally. His intention is that we bring our bodies into slavery to Christ!

Training the body

What does all this mean? Paul is saying (and this was his own experience) that we consciously train our bodies so they come to serve righteousness as naturally as they once served sin. The result of that kind of natural living is holiness, holiness to such a degree that sin is no longer interesting, because we have experienced something much more attractive.

If transformation is to take place, it will be necessary that we exercise our bodies to train them for godliness. This kind of exercise is not easy; if it were, we’d all be holy in all we do. But when our bodies are disciplined, we will experience power that leads to holy living. God planned for it to be that way.

Why is there so much emphasis on training the body? The answer is simple: our body is the only part of our life over which we have control. We cannot change ourselves on the inside, but we can choose some things we do on the outside. In God’s plan, as we will see in subsequent articles in this series, those bodily exercises will lead to spiritual change.

Remember the little green worm? Why does it crawl across the sidewalk, through the grass, and up the tree? Wouldn’t it be easier just to stay at home and be a worm? Of course it would, but that worm knows, deep down inside itself, that it is destined to be a butterfly. Knowing its destiny, nothing else will satisfy.

We are destined for godliness, but it takes exercise and discipline. Jesus’ yoke is easy, but it takes training to put it on.

Next issue: exercises that transform

For reflection

• How does my life story resonate with the story of the little green worm?
• How am I reacting to “exercise,” “discipline,” “slavery” as an assignment for godliness?
• I take a few moments to consider Paul’s habits and mine. What new habits is the Spirit prompting in me?

Jim Holm is president of Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, Fresno, Cal.