Richard Simmons, Weight Loss, and the Gospel

Richard Simmons

I was surprised when I heard Richard Simmons talk about the most important thing that people have to do before they lose weight:

"You have to love yourself. You have to be OK with yourself before you start losing weight."

In other words:

"Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." (3 John 2)

If men and women try to lose weight in their own efforts, then in their own efforts they will have to maintain this weight loss, and such efforts are a crap-shoot at best.

How many people out there have lost weight, only to gain it back, or worse to gain more than they had to begin with? Most people end up weighing more because on top of having failed to keep the weight off, they feel more shame because they could not in their own effort keep off what they had put off in their own efforts.

Man has to deal with the inside first. Forget about focusing on what you are eating. What's eating you? A man's soul cannot prosper if within himself he has no peace.

Man can do nothing in his own effort:

"Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." (Matthew 26: 41)

God has not left us without power, though:

"For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." (Romans 8: 3)

We do not need strength for any endeavor in or life, We need life, and that more abundantly:

"The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." (John 10: 10)

then

"When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory." (Colossians 3: 4)

In any thing that we struggle, let us rather rest in the righteousness which Christ has made us to be (2 Corinthians 5: 21). Righteousness is the status of "perfected", "justified", "fully accepted" in Christ. Because He first loved us, then we can love ourselves (1 John 4: 19), and this love has been perfected for us as follows:

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"Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world." (1 John 4: 17)

"Weight gain" or "Overweight" are some of many judgments which we face in this world, yet we can face even these minuscule problems by resting in the righteousness that we are. Then God's grace flows in our lives, and the Holy Spirit leads us in what we are to do, to eat, and how to walk in Him.

Let Him bear the weight of all your cares, even your weight, and His peace will rule in you as to what do, first by convicting you of your righteous standing in Him.