I know plenty of Christians who do yoga or tai chi exclusively for the health benefits. They ignore the spirituality that surrounds it, and focus only on the strength, balance, flexibility, and calm it can bring through the isotonic/isometric exercise.
But it’s important to at least be aware of the spirituality that most yoga practitioners espouse. Because in the pursuit of mind/body balance, they often encourage Eastern meditation: emptying your mind and focusing on your body or on nothing at all.
The Bible never calls us to empty our minds, but always to fill our minds with God’s word.
That’s Christian meditation. Reading the Bible one verse at a time (or even one phrase at a time if you’re reading something really dense), and stopping, and thinking, and praying about it. Praying for God to help you understand it. Praying for God to help you apply it.
That’s the kind of meditation that will do the most long-term good: listening to what God says, and respond to God in prayer.
Yoga might be a tool that can help with stress and anger, just like an internet filter might be a tool that can help with lust, or a swear jar might be a tool that could help with obscene language.
Tools can help, but it’s important to remember that they’re still just tools. They have limited usefulness. Try turning a flat-head screw with a Philips-head screwdriver and you’ll see what I mean.
We need something much better than an external tool. We need internal transformation. And that can only happen through Christ living inside us.
As Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Think about each of those phrases:
I have been crucified with Christ.
Christ died a bloody, gruesome death on the cross for you, and that shows how ugly and horrifying your sin really is. You were tied up to it. Enslaved to it. But then you died to it.
I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
This isn’t a loss of your personality. It’s a transformation of your personality to become what it was originally intended to be. It’s not that Matt disappears, It’s that Matt comes under the influence of Christ so I’m not the distorted, selfish Matt I used to be. I’m the humble, faithful, generous Matt I was supposed to be.
And the life I now live in the body…
This isn’t some psycho-mystical experience, like yoga can be. This isn’t for monks living in monasteries, praying and meditating for 18 hours a day. Living in the body means I’m living the same busy, chaotic, confusing, earthly, everyday life I led before. But…
I live by faith in the Son of God!
I’m still the one living my life, but I’m living it by faith in Jesus. I’m living it with the knowledge that Christ is living inside of me. Why? Because …
He loved me and gave himself for me.
It starts with Christ, and it ends with Christ. It’s all about Christ! He kills me so he can bring me to life and live inside me.
Only Jesus brings the kind of transformation that will address our stress, anxiety, and imbalance in life like nothing else in this world, including yoga.