Exercise Your Heart

The heart is a muscle.  Muscles, like other tissues, adapt to the demands placed on them.  Did you know the heart of a weightlifter and the heart of a distance runner are different due to the adaptations from the different kinds of exercise?  The weightlifters heart would be thicker from the increased pressure it undergoes while the runner's heart would expand in volume.  This is an example of the SAID principle: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.  The muscle adapts to the demands it is placed under.

There are many principles that apply to training and tissues.  Another is the principle of reversibility.  Use it or lose it!  The same way muscles can hypertrophy (grow larger) due to exercise; they can atrophy (become smaller) from excessive rest, detraining, or injury.  I have a bunch of volleyball girls who will return to training this upcoming week and realize that while they were at the beach playing in the ocean for the last 9 days the callouses on their hands will have vanished.  When their hands are reintroduced to the barball it will not be a reunion of long lost friends.  The skin softened because the stimulus of the abrasive barbell was removed for too long and the acute adaptation made by the skin (callous) reversed.   Maybe you can remember a time when your body, your muscles were bigger or harder or I hesitate to use the word... toner.  Maybe it was the last time you played an organized sport and you loved that sport but hated exercise so when you stopped playing, you stopped exercising and as a result your body softened.

I know, where I am going with this?  Remember your heart is a muscle.  However, from a spiritual sense it doesn't react the same as your physical muscles.  When you don't train a muscle physically it softens, but when you don't train you heart spiritually it hardens.  When you spend time with God, you allow Him to soften, change, and mold your heart but when you don't selfishness, bitterness, anger, resentment, jealously, and hate creep back in and callous your heart.  The Bible records several people, Pharaoh  for example, who intentionally hardened their hearts against God.  We have a tendency to do this when we don't get our way or God does something we don't understand.  The Bible also warns of slowly drifting away from God, the same way missing 1 workout quickly turns into 2 and 3 and before you know it you haven't exercised in months.  The result of this is a hardened heart that is resistant to God and His will.  Not many people intentionally wander away from God... it happens little by little.  The world will erode away at your spiritual walk if you let it.  We must train our hearts.

Time to spend with God will not be found, it must be made... it must be a priority.  No one regularly stumbles upon large amounts of free time in their day.  If they did, they would probably schedule something during that time (even if it was a nap or video games).  I find that training with God, much like physical training, is best in the morning.  Get it in when you are certain you can get it in before your day becomes too chaotic and allow it to give you energy to last you through your day.  The result of not exercising your heart is similar to the result of not exercising your body... disease and death, except spiritual death is for eternity.

"For this people’s heart has become calloused;
   they hardly hear with their ears,
   and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
   hear with their ears,
   understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them."
- Matthew 13:15, NIV