September 24, 2025

Fr. John Riccardo

But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness. Compete well for the faith. Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called when you made the noble profession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus, who gave testimony under Pontius Pilate for the noble confession, to keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ that the blessed and only ruler will make manifest at the proper time, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, and whom no human being has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal power. Amen (1 Timothy 6:11-16).

My dad was 41 years old when I was born. Doing some quick math, he realized he would be nearly 60 by the time I was 18 and so made a decision that day to commit himself to working out every day so as to be able to enjoy those years with me playing sports. I watched that commitment every day, and he instilled in me the same habit, without ever having to explicitly tell me to exercise. He also taught me, without having to say it out loud (though at times he did, to be sure), that a real man makes his relationship with God his number one priority. He taught me this by starting his day reading Scripture and going to daily Mass, and ending his day at the foot of his bed on his knees.

Those two things, exercise and faith, are front and center in Paul’s exhortation to Timothy. “Pursue…Compete well…Take hold of…” — these are all words that flow from the world of athletic competition, something that both the people in Paul’s day and ours love. But whereas our modern culture is often preoccupied by the outward appearance of the body, Paul is exhorting Timothy to spend even more time on the inner man, on the heart, the mind and the will. These areas, more than pecs and abs and glutes, are what most need to be “in shape” if we individually and collectively are going to flourish. And is that ever obvious reading and listening to the rhetoric being thrown back and forth in our culture right now.

Paul’s words this week remind me of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew. In a passage that lends itself to being misunderstood, Jesus says, “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” What in the world does that mean?

Is Jesus somehow telling us to take up arms against those who are resistant to the message of the Gospel? Hardly. Instead, He’s telling us to take up arms against ourselves.

Commenting on this passage, Erasmo-Leiva Merikakis, in one of the all-time best commentaries on Scripture, writes, “The Kingdom of God does not fall on us like rain.” In other words, becoming a disciple of Jesus, being recreated by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, is not a passive exercise. It doesn’t “just happen,” anymore than the body gets in shape by merely walking into a gym. You have to do the work. And the work is hard! Merikakis goes on to say, “It takes violence to run counter to the fashions and pressures of the worldly city in order to clear a space for the advent of God’s Kingdom in our heart and in our midst.’

To open virtually any newsfeed right now, to turn on almost any channel, is to be powerfully reminded of how “out of shape” are the hearts of so many in our culture right now, for it is “out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks” (or posts). But the Holy Spirit through Paul is not speaking “to them.” He’s speaking to me. And to you. Am I daily going into battle against my passions which are so prone to lash out, to judge, even to condemn, at least in my thoughts if not in my words? Am I daily doing violence against my often terribly out of shape will so as to compete well and genuinely grow in love, both for God and for my neighbor? Am I daily “in the gym” that is time with God in prayer so as to lay hold of an ever greater and more genuinely human life than the one I so often allow myself to settle for?

We are living in urgent, though not desperate times right now. The cultural discourse is like a tinder box, waiting to erupt in flames. This is a prophetic moment for the Church, which means it’s a prophetic moment for disciples to step into this space that is so ugly and transform it. Let us, then, take Paul’s and Jesus’s words to heart. Let us ask the Holy Spirit, the best ”personal trainer” there is, to gently show us those areas in our inner man or inner woman that are flabbiest and most out of shape. Let us cooperate with His grace so as to become who we were created to be and who we want to be. And let us be intentional about modeling for the culture around us a different way, a better way, a more human way of speaking.

The Importance of Getting in Shape

First Things First