No one wakes up an Olympian. No athlete competes against the world’s best by natural ability alone.
Among other things, the Olympics display the plasticity of human bodies and skills. Granted, many of the world’s top competitors may have been born with some unusual abilities and proclivities, but nature alone did not get them to the highest level. Rather, training separates Olympians from natural athletes. And this is by God’s design. He made the human body to be formed and re-formed through the gift and grit of training.
Human Plasticity
It is a wonder that God made us both fixed and pliable creatures. On the one hand, you cannot grow a third leg. There are basic givens to our humanity that cannot be altered, no matter how much we’d like it otherwise. But on the other hand, you can significantly strengthen and condition the two legs you have. Our bodies are trainable. You cannot train yourself to breathe underwater, but you can train to greatly increase your VO2 max.
Athletics offer a fresh, vivid, concrete reminder of the power of human plasticity, and not just of our bodies but also of our minds and hearts. And as Christians, recipients of the priceless gift of delighting in God through regeneration and Spirit-indwelling, we now do not just spontaneously delight in God or not. Every day we are conditioning our souls, in at least some small degree, to delight in God or be indifferent toward him.
To be clear, “plastic” in this context doesn’t mean cheap or easily breakable. The plasticity we’re focusing on here is how neuroscientists describe the human brain. That is, our brains flex and shift. They re-form and re-grow. They learn and adapt and change — not simply in what information they store, but in their actual makeup and shape. They are not static but plastic, ever changing in small increments and degrees that are not easily discerned in the moment but produce vast effects over time.
And as with our brains, so also with our souls. Our hearts and desires are not givens but pliable and plastic. We are ever shifting and re-forming in tiny increments that snowball over time. Our choices not only express who we are but also affect who we will be.
What gets our best attention and affection today profoundly conditions what we will desire and delight in tomorrow.
Condition Your Soul
Strange as this plasticity may sound to modern ears with our mechanistic metaphors for our humanity (like “hard-wired” or “processing”), the concept was not foreign to the apostle Paul.
In 1 Timothy 4, he writes to his protégé Timothy about conditioning his soul. That is, he assumes Timothy’s mind and heart are pliable, bendable, plastic. His inner person, like his outer, is re-formable and re-shapable within the bounds of God’s created order.
Both for the health of Timothy’s own soul and for his effectiveness in Christian ministry, he needs to give attention to himself and to his teaching and persist in these things (1 Timothy 4:16). He is to devote himself “to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” He should not neglect the abilities he’s been given but “practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:13–15).
Over time, the disciple will not stay the same. He will either get better or get worse. The health of his soul and his spiritual abilities and inclinations will either grow and mature (“progress”) or deteriorate and atrophy into spiritual lethargy, dullness, and apathy.
More Pliable Than Your Body
Most memorably, Paul says, “Train yourself for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7). Here he likens the conditioning of the eternal soul to the conditioning of the physical body:
While bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. (1 Timothy 4:8)
Running, weights, and HIIT workouts train and condition the body for the present life — and indeed have “some value.” But training in godliness — that is, conditioning the soul in spiritual likeness to Christ — reshapes the inner person for eternity and “is of value in every way.”
Not only is the soul, like the body, malleable — with its various likes and dislikes, its delights and disgusts, its preferences and apathies — but the inner person is even more trainable than the physical body. The shape of our objective bodies is more stubborn than the shape of our subjective desires and delights. We may be quick to overlook this countercultural reality since we cannot see (with physical eyes) the inward changes like we can with outward changes to the body.
What’s Your Five-Year Trajectory?
What, then, might we do about this truth, demonstrably biblical, yet lost on so many of us in the modern world — that our desires and delights are condition-able and not simple givens?
The question is not whether we are training our souls right now or not. Oh, we are training them. Unavoidably so. With every new day, in every act and choice. With every thought approved and word spoken and initiative taken. With every desire indulged or renounced. With every meditation of our hearts in spare moments. With every click, like, and share. With every podcast play, video view, check of the scores on ESPN, or browse of the headlines news. With every fresh opportunity to show love and compassion received or rejected. In all the little moments that make up our human days and lives, we are constantly becoming who we will be and ever reshaping what our hearts pine for and find pleasing. The question is not if we’re reshaping our souls but how.
And if you wonder how, you might start with an audit of your habits and patterns and ask, Am I conditioning my soul to delight in Jesus in five years, or to be apathetic toward him? The way I go to bed, and how I rise. How I approach meals, and the calendar, and commutes. The way I work and rest, my vocational labor and recreational leisure. And in it all, how I treat and take initiative toward others, or seek to minimize and avoid them.
Perhaps today, if someone were to ask you, “Do you trust in Jesus and delight in him?” you could quickly answer, “Yes, I delight in him.” But what do your patterns say? And what kind of heart will your habits produce in time? This week, this month, even today, are you conditioning your soul to delight in Jesus five years from now or to be indifferent to him? What will be the long-term, heart-effects of your investments in Netflix or social media or your garden or house-projects or favorite team?
You might ask, right now, in this season of life, am I feeding and growing and strengthening my delight in Jesus or starving it? And what lesser joys and delights am I feeding that will, in time, eclipse and choke out my delight in God if I continue to shape my soul in these ways? Am I daily putting my soul within earshot of God’s grace? Am I seeking to shape my heart to the texture of Scripture? Am I re-forming and re-consecrating my desires before God by lingering in prayer? And who am I spending most of and the best of my time with? How will my heart be reshaped by the hearts of those people whose opinions are coming to matter most to me?
You will become more like what and who you fawn over. So, do you continue to fawn over Jesus, and prioritize others who do the same?
Morning and Evening
Especially significant in this regard are our morning and evening routines. Where do you turn first in the morning to meet and direct the desires of the new day? Do you put the world’s horizontal demands first or “go vertical” with God? Do you open his Book to hear from him, see his Son with the eyes of faith, and continually, one day after another, shape your heart to delight in the truly delightful?
And what typically occupies your attention, the musings of your heart, once the day is essentially done and you move through the routine of “gearing down” for bed?
Rome wasn’t lost in a day, nor is Christian faith — typically. The dulling and disappearance of faith is usually the effect of spiritual conditioning not just yesterday but through yesteryears.
Saving faith hears God’s word, sees him as true with the eyes of the soul, and embraces him as desirable. Saving faith is not indifferent to what it sees or apathetic toward who God is and what he has said and done in Christ. There is in genuine faith an eagerness, a desire, a thirst, a hunger, and a foretaste of satisfaction. Faith says to Jesus, “I want you. I delight in you.”
And saving faith perseveres. It keeps wanting — meaning it makes choices today that condition the soul not for indifference to Jesus but for delight in him.
Desiring God