S07E004, Running in Circles, Endurance

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This week, Steven and Nathan are talking about cycles of making the same mistakes over and over.

Endurance is your weekly spiritual workout, whether you think of yourself as a beginner, an intermediate, or advanced!

#GoDeeper

It’s not unusual to make the same mistake more than once. Steven illustrates this with a recent example from his own life which involves the heart behind Endurance. He also encourages us with 1 John 1:8-9 which tells us that God forgives us of our sins if we confess them to Him.

He then tells us how to avoid making the same mistakes, referring back to his own repeated mistakes.

#GoDo

Nathan and Steven talk about running in circles, stressing the importance of repentance once again.

They discuss how to break free from those vicious circles, and they consider whether or not God will always forgive us when make mistakes.

Check out this week’s episode to find out how to stop ‘Running in Circles’ in your Faith and Fitness.

Steven and Nathan

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[00:00:00] Do you 

[00:00:15] Nathan: ever find yourself running in circles? It's a common problem both in our physical lives, but also in our spiritual lives. Welcome to another episode of Endurance where faith and fitness meet. And this week we're talking about running in circles, those sin habits, those bad habits that we get into, that we find ourselves unable to break free from.

[00:00:34] Nathan: How do we break free from those and run the race in a straight line towards the prize?

[00:00:47] Steven: So this is GoDeeper. And we're looking at running in circles. So we're looking at kind of like sin habits or bad habits that we might get stuck into

[00:00:59] Steven: [00:01:00] Habits that when we're weak, we just would keep returning to. And these are things that I suppose first and foremost, I wanna say I've gone through myself. So the whole heart behind Endurance is 1 Timothy 4 verse 8 which says, Physical training is good. But training for godliness is much better promising benefits in this life and in the life to come.

[00:01:21] Steven: So exercise is good, but being a Christian and all that that stands for is way more important and that should be our focus. And that is something that I realized I was getting wrong and I repented of it and I made changes. And actually that's what started up in Endurance. The idea of we like exercise and we know it's good, but what's more important is that spiritual training, that training for godliness.

[00:01:42] Steven: And that's where one Timothy 4 verse 8 comes in and it's sort of the heart behind Endurance. And I recently realised that I'd actually ballsed up on that again, that I had gone back on that and made the same mistake. And that's what we can do. We can make mistakes, we can repent of them, and then not too long later, return back to them.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] Steven: And that's what we're looking at. At the end of the day, as it says in 1 John 1:8-9. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So when we make a mistake, God forgives us. No matter how many times we do it, no matter how many times we make the same mistake, God will still forgive us.

[00:02:20] Steven: Now that doesn't give us a right to to make that mistake knowing that God will forgive us. It, it just means that when we do make the mistake, God will forgive us when we repent, when we confess our sins to him. No matter how many times, so if I make the same mistake again, God will still forgive me, but I don't wanna make the same mistake again.

[00:02:38] Steven: I want to make sure that I don't, how do I do that? In order to break the cycle, I don't need to focus on what I don't do. I need to focus on what I do, what I need to focus on. So the heart behind Endurance is physical spiritual training. That's the heart, and that spiritual training is what I need to focus on.

[00:02:58] Steven: Not focus on [00:03:00] not focusing on physical training, cuz that just gets confusing. But to put training for godliness first in my life, to put God first in my life before fitness. So we focus on what we do to prevent us from from making those same mistakes. So whether it's getting into a temper bad mood all the time, maybe your one of those people who easily wound up and they just snap at people and they realize, ah, you repent. And then sometime later do exactly the same thing. 

[00:03:32] Steven: It, it happens. And how we prevent that is we don't focus on not getting angry, but rather focus on being peaceful or focus on being calm. So Romans 3:22-24 says this, The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ, all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall sure of the glory of God, they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. [00:04:00] Now, personally, I always struggle with the book of Romans because it seems to be written in the most complex way possible, but basically what they're saying is that the righteousness that we have is only through God.

[00:04:10] Steven: So the sins that we make, they're our own mistakes on the rest of it, but the righteousness we have is only gonna be acquired through God. So we go to God for out righteousness and we'll get it in faith as long as we are saved, as long as we are Christians and believe in him. 

[00:04:25] Steven: And also the second part, which makes perfect sense. For all have sinned and fall short of glory of God. We've all sinned. We've all fallen short of the glory of God, and we're gonna make mistakes. And some of the mistakes are gonna be repeats of mistakes we've already repented of, but still, God forgives us and that's the main point here. God still forgives us of sins that we keep, when we keep running in circles and making the same mistakes over and over again. God still forgives us and more importantly, we can prevent that from happening. By focusing on the right things, focusing on God. So that is running in circles.[00:05:00] 

[00:05:05] Nathan: So here we are for the final part of Endurance where I ask Steven some awkward questions.

[00:05:11] Steven: Well hopefully not. 

[00:05:14] Nathan: Well, no, hopefully as awkward as possible because then, then we can really draw out the depth in this subject that we're studying. 

[00:05:23] Steven: Okay. 

[00:05:25] Nathan: Okay. So I, I think you made a good point. One was that we, we make mistakes obviously, but God can give us, and that's a really comforting thing to know.

[00:05:35] Nathan: Do you think there are any any mistakes we could make that would, that God would not forgive us for that would bring us too far away that would be scarred for life? 

[00:05:46] Steven: Well, there's nothing we can do that will, God won't forgive us for, but if we continually deny him for all our lives, then we're not gonna experience that forgiveness.

[00:05:57] Steven: But when you repent, when you come before him, [00:06:00] you're gonna experience that forgiveness. I think there's a possibility of it, but I don't think anyone who's willing to repent is gonna experience that. 

[00:06:07] Nathan: Yeah. Well, it's very comforting to know that though we as humans will fail as we try to run forward.

[00:06:14] Nathan: We're gonna fall over, we're gonna end up sometimes going around in circles. 

[00:06:18] Nathan: Running 

[00:06:18] Steven: in circles. 

[00:06:19] Nathan: Yeah, exactly. But it's good to know that God can help us to set us on course, and that's what the Holy Spirit does really when we keep in step with the Spirit as it says in the Bible. We'll keep walking in the right direction at the right pace.

[00:06:31] Nathan: Sometimes we push too far ahead, we fall too far behind, or as we're talking about in this one, we end up running in circles. It's in those moments that sometimes we need other Christians to come alongside us, I suppose, to help us set us on back on the right course. Help us to break free from a vicious circle.

[00:06:48] Steven: Yeah, they, they call them what you call 'em accountability partners or something like that, but we came up with a better one. Christian spotters. Like in a gym, they spot make sure you're not gonna [00:07:00] lift too much weight, you're not lifting too little, and if you need help, then they'll pick up the weight for you.

[00:07:05] Nathan: Yeah, that's good. I, I like that. We talked about that before, didn't we? . A spiritual spotter as they're really important. Also, I noticed one thing you said was we don't want to not focus on what we shouldn't be focusing on, but instead focus on God on the good things. On what is pure and lovely and all that. 

[00:07:21] Steven: Yeah. 

[00:07:22] Nathan: It reminds me of how people who are trained to recognize counterfeit money, they don't study the counterfeit, they study the real, genuine article. 

[00:07:31] Steven: Absolutely. 

[00:07:31] Nathan: That's how they learn to recognize counterfeits. It's the same for us. You don't learn how to recognize lies by studying them because that's not very helpful.

[00:07:40] Nathan: You study the truth and the truth for us, that's the Bible. That's God's word, which is pure truth. And of course, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. So we need to focus on him. Focus on the Bible. And I was wondering if you ended up, ever ended up going out in a vicious circle in your exercise? Like, I've never seen [00:08:00] you. I've, I've never had this where I physically go around into circles. 

[00:08:03] Steven: No, but in the metaphorical sense. Of repeatedly doing the same things, hoping to get different results. So I don't know, doing the same number of reps with the same amount of weight every single day, you're not gonna get any fitter, you're not gonna see any gains.

[00:08:17] Steven: And that would be a vicious circle, as it were. That would be running in circles, metaphorically speaking. I mean, you could literally be running in circles, which again would be metaphorically running in circles. 

[00:08:27] Nathan: Well, it's all right if your route is circular when you're running or cycling or whatever.

[00:08:32] Nathan: But yeah, it's important that we don't end up going around in circles just going, doing the same things over and over and over again. We need to yeah, focus on what is good and when you're running a race, the way to keep on course is to focus on your goal. And our goal, of course, is heaven and Jesus, whatever. 

[00:08:49] Steven: All that Christian stuff.

[00:08:50] Nathan: Yeah, yeah. All that jazz. So go read up on it in the Bible. Yeah. So that's another episode of Endurance where faith and fitness meet.[00:09:00]