Is It Wrong for Christians to Do Yoga?

Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

J.D. Greear

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Ask the Pastor, Pastor J.D. answers a question that has actually been asked by two listeners, Lillian and Jesse: “Is it OK for Christians to do Yoga?”

A glimpse inside this episode:

In this week's episode, Pastor J.D. explores the historical roots of yoga in Eastern religions and how it contrasts with Christian meditation. He emphasizes the importance of individual conscience in making decisions about practices that may have spiritual implications while also introducing a framework for categorizing theological issues and highlighting the need for unity in the church while allowing for personal convictions.

* Yoga has historical roots in Eastern religions like Hinduism.
* Christian meditation differs from Eastern meditation in purpose.
* Believers should wrestle with their own conscience regarding yoga.
* Not all practices with pagan origins are off-limits for Christians.
* Unity in the church is more important than strict conformity on disputed matters.
* The framework of essential, important, and indifferent matters helps navigate faith issues.
* Personal convictions should guide individual practices like yoga.
* Jesus' authority supersedes the origins of certain practices.
* Engaging with differing opinions requires patience and understanding.
* Practices should honor Christ and align with biblical principles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, welcome to Ask the Pastor.
0:09.8	My name is Matt Love.
0:11.8	I am here with Pastor J.D. Greer.
0:15.2	And, you know, J.D., time honored tradition with Ask the Pastor since we started recording it.
0:19.5	I'm not where I normally am.
0:20.7	You are the, you're just so consistent and I'm just.
0:23.2	I'm evergreen, always in one spot.
0:25.0	And I'm somewhere else.
0:26.0	I, you know, so I apologize to everybody for the lack of consistent.
0:28.1	You look like you're in the computer lab of a middle school.
0:30.4	That's exactly where I am.
0:32.1	That's exactly.
0:33.0	Now, I'm in, I'm in my office office, so good stuff. But, all right, Jady, we have a good question today
0:40.3	that was asked, I believe, by multiple people sent this end. So clearly it's on to people's
0:45.7	minds. And it's a question I've heard, kind of dealt with or engaged with in different times.
0:50.7	So, Jady, is it okay for Christians to do yoga? And I'll just say,
0:57.3	my wife waits with bated breath to hear your answer. As long as LeBron James is the one leading it,
1:02.9	the answer is yes. No, that is a great question. I actually have heard on it a lot. We've touched
1:08.0	it on Ask the Pastor before briefly. Mostly, we use it as an example of talking about a bigger issue, which is the issue of how to
1:15.4	handle issues of conscience that aren't spelled out directly in Scripture, which I'll actually
1:19.3	talk about that a little bit again at the end here.
1:21.8	But let's just take a couple of minutes and talk about why this is a controversial topic,
	...

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