By Phil Sarpong
Have you ever felt like your Spirit was in dire need of rejuvenation? Perhaps you feel like your spiritual willpower has depleted. We all go through situations in life that seem to drain us of our energy physically and spiritually.
Understand that a big part of finding spiritual motivation is realizing when your energy depletes. Just being aware can be the difference in initiating that desire to get back in the fight and re-energize!
Spiritual motivation doesn’t often come from the physical but the spiritual. Our physical bodies run out of energy all the time. Our body continually needs ATP to power the functions in our cells. Without ATP, there would be no energy left inside our internal bodies, and in fact, we would die because organs like your heart, lungs, and renal system need ATP to keep you alive.
Imagine how much work it takes for your body to exercise. Exercise might seem like a reasonably healthy condition for your body, but several factors go on inside your body to successfully help you to train safely.
For example, when you exercise, it’s impossible to fuel your body with oxygen if you breathe at the rate you usually would if you were resting. For compensation, your body needs to get more oxygen into your lungs so that oxygen can effectively diffuse into your muscles.
The first thing that your body can do is to start in the medulla. The medulla oblongata is an anatomical structure in the base of the brain known as the brainstem. It sits right above the spinal cord and is responsible for functions in breathing. Neural information can be sent from the medulla down the spinal cord and target respiratory muscles known as the diaphragm and the external intercostal muscles.
These muscles are responsible for initiating the inspiration of air. When the body begins to exercise, oxygen is low in the tissues. Low oxygen is a stimulus that sends signals from the brainstem to the diaphragm, and the external intercostals start to contract. Contracting these muscles does a few things.
One is that the rib cage pulls down while the chest pushes out. This action creates a tremendous amount of thoracic volume. The physiology of respiration can be pretty complicated, but for simplicity’s sake, understand that when thoracic volume increases or your chest wall goes out, the pressure within your lung decreases, so there is an inverse relationship between volume and pressure.
In other words, once there is more volume in the thoracic chamber of your lungs, this decreases the pressure within your lungs. That decrease in pressure allows air to flow into your lungs. Once the air is within your lungs, it transports into what are called alveolar ducts. These air sacs take the oxygen from the air and diffuse it into the pulmonary capillaries.
The capillaries are small vessels that take the air that is now oxygenated and transport it to the heart, pumps through all the body tissues, giving them the oxygen they need.
So not only is your respiration working when you exercise but so is your heart. Your heart pumps a higher volume of blood to effectively pump through different areas of your body that need this oxygen.
Your metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy that the body uses, also goes up. This change means that the work in your body will cause the internal temperature to go up.
As your body’s internal temperature goes up, increasing your metabolic rate, you need measures in which to cool yourself down. This increase in temperature is why you sweat. Sweat is your body’s response to cooling itself as you exercise.
All this is going on as your muscles are firing several motor neurons to initiate muscle contraction and keep your muscles working while running or jogging.
Running a sprint compared to a marathon makes the body utilize energy in different ways. For example, a 100-meter dash usually only requires your phosphagen system. The phosphagen system is a type of anaerobic way of using power. Anaerobic means it doesn’t need oxygen. That’s why professional sprinters don’t breathe in a lot of air when they run short distances.
They don’t need that oxygen in that short timescale. So you’ll often see runners holding their breath, maybe taking in a few gulps of air at different points when they run. It’s the same for swimmers. The truth is they are utilizing oxygen and ATP of what is already in their muscles before running.
This utilization helps them to run or swim at peak capacity for a limited time. The body has to slow down after time because it has run out of ATP and needs to increase its ventilation to restore the oxygen debt. So the diaphragm and external intercostal muscles start working a lot harder to bring in more air. The more you breathe in oxygen and improve your ventilation during exercise, the slower you run.
That also explains why marathon runners can run for so long. They have trained their bodies to run at a specific speed so they can ventilate and diffuse oxygen efficiently enough that they don’t need to slow down or stop. They can keep at a steady pace as long as they give their muscle tissues the required oxygen from inspiring air.
Exercise physiology calls this the VO2 max, the maximal amount of oxygen the body can utilize when exercising. If you raise your VO2 max, in other words, if you increase the point in which your body can use more oxygen faster while your muscles haven’t yet depleted their energy stores, you can run for hours and hours and not stop.
A person that eats a granola bar or any energy-loaded food while running is also practical for long distances. This adaption gives your body access to more power and will utilize that for ATP to keep you going.
The longest distance ever ran by a human being at one time is 350 miles in 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep. To think that a person can push their body in this way is insane.
What if I told you there was spiritual ATP for you to access. Unlike our physical reservoir, spiritual energy never gets depleted and is eternally abundant if we understand how to tap into its sources.
Jesus lays the groundwork for getting this spiritual ATP through the kingdom. By living in the Spirit and bringing a piece of Heaven to earth. We can all find this spiritual energy if we know where to look, and it’s by going to Jesus.
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore, I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27 No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. 1 Corinthians 9: 24-27
How do you get spiritual energy? By understanding why you’re training in the first place. To run a spiritual race takes discipline. Spiritual discipline, just like physical discipline, is like a muscle.
The more you train it, the stronger it grows. But just like professional runners have meal plans, workouts, and a specific plan to run their best times, we also need a plan for how we will run this spiritual race.
The beautiful thing about spiritual races is that you don’t run them alone. In fact, because of the kingdom, you have brothers and sisters that are not just cheering you on but running with you. And just as Jesus promised, he gives us the Holy Spirit, the ultimate reservoir of spiritual ATP that never runs out and never gets depleted. Planning how you will run your spiritual race gets more manageable when we utilize the spiritual people in our lives and go to God for his spiritual power source.
Getting spiritual energy is all about focusing on spiritual discipline. It’s about training your Spirit to make energy for itself. Just like that marathon runner that ran 350 miles, there is a point where your body kicks into autopilot and does the work for you as long as you continue to feed it.
That is the whole point of spiritual energy. Putting spiritual practices in your life initially takes a lot of work, time, and energy. But the product is that these spiritual practices will become their reservoir of spiritual fuel that keeps you going when you can’t go any longer.
That’s the difference between physical and spiritual. Eventually, the body will get depleted of energy unless you fuel it with food. Spiritually, God is the one that can fill us up while we run. He is the one that can give us our spiritual energy when we need it as long as we go back to him. We never have to be thirsty or hungry again. He is the everlasting energy that can constantly fill us up and take us into our spiritual prize, which is eternity with Him.
Get filled up today, and keep your spiritual muscles not only alive but healthy and thriving as you dive deeper into the kingdom.
Sutton, Brook. “What’s the Farthest Anyone Has Ever Run Without Stopping?” Adventure Journal, 18 Nov. 2015, www.adventure-journal.com/2015/11/whats-the-farthest-anyone-has-ever-run-without-stopping/.