In preparing for the third installment of our small, inadequate attempt at reviewing Tozer, I remembered an old question that some of you have heard me ask. You'll forgive me if I repeat a portion of it: "Would you forfeit your health for the Lord? More specifically, would you give up your fitness lifestyle if God asked you to?"

Maybe you're a runner. An avid runner. Your calendar is marked -- not with holidays and birthdays -- but with 10Ks. Or perhaps you're a fitness junkie. You lift, you sprint, you jump rope, you sweat and you repeat it...six days a week. What if God asked you to give it all up? And no, He doesn't give you His reasoning because He doesn't need to explain Himself to you. All you know is that the one passion you have in life -- that ONE thing that fulfills you and makes you...you -- He wants you to relinquish. No more gym. No more road. How would you feel? Sad, confused, both? What would you do? Well, before you say, "Jimmy, I doubt God would ever ask me to give up something like that," with the help of Tozer, let's look at someone who would beg to differ...

Tozer writes, "The baby (Isaac) represented everything sacred to his father's heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the years. As he watched Isaac grow, the heart of the old man was knit closer to the life of his son till at last the relationship bordered upon the perilous. God stepped in to save both father and son, "Take thine son and offer him..." The sacred writer spares us a close-up of the agony that night when the aged man had it out with his God, but possibly not again until One greater than Abraham wrestled in the garden of Gethsemane did such mortal pain visit a human soul. This was Abraham's trial by fire, and he did not fail in the crucible. God let the suffering old man go through with it up to the point where He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade him to lay a hand upon the boy. And then says in effect, It's all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the lad. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there."

-Jimmy Peña

For Discussion: The temple of your heart. Does God reign there unchallenged? Has the stitching between our heart for God and our passion for fitness grown indistinguishable? Too many days - let alone workouts - have I spent attempting to allow other things challenge God for His rightful place...