Is Yoga Sinful?
00:00:00.000 | We have a stack of about 60 emails from listeners in Scotland and the United
00:00:10.020 | States and India who all want to know about yoga. Is yoga a mere physical
00:00:15.720 | exercise or is it unavoidably a participation in Eastern spirituality?
00:00:20.880 | One of our listeners named Todd writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, as a
00:00:24.560 | healthcare professional, I am interested in the benefits of Eastern practices
00:00:28.960 | like yoga and Tai Chi for the documented health benefits they offer. Can a
00:00:33.680 | Christian practice such things with roots in mysticism in good conscience?"
00:00:37.840 | What would you say, Pastor John? One of the first things I would say is that
00:00:43.400 | there are two kinds of approaches to questionable practices in life. One I
00:00:50.440 | would call a minimalist approach to holiness and godliness, and the other
00:00:55.760 | maximalist. In other words, in the first case your typical question is, "Well,
00:01:01.520 | what's wrong with it?" You know, and it would apply to movies and music, and
00:01:05.960 | kids often ask their parents, "What's wrong with it?" And the other approach
00:01:10.080 | is not to ask what's wrong with it mainly, but "Will it make me more Christ-like?
00:01:16.960 | Will it make me more devoted to Jesus? Will I be more powerful and full of
00:01:22.920 | the Holy Spirit? Will I be more effective in prayer because of it? Will it make me
00:01:27.960 | more bold in witness or weaken me? Will it help me be spiritually discerning of
00:01:33.240 | the ways of Satan in the world? And will it help me lay up treasures in heaven?
00:01:38.120 | Will it help me find joy in God and all that he is for me in Jesus?" You can see
00:01:41.940 | that there's these two kinds of approaches to life. I want to maximize my
00:01:48.600 | godliness and my holiness by drawing nearer and nearer to God, and the other
00:01:54.200 | one is just trying to do as many things as you can do without being tripped up
00:01:59.600 | explicitly by sin. So I don't mean to suggest by that that every time you face
00:02:06.600 | a questionable activity you will opt for renunciation because you have weighed
00:02:13.360 | things that way. I just want people to approach questions with the greatest
00:02:18.720 | passions for godliness, the greatest passions, and not think minimalistically.
00:02:24.560 | That's the first thing I'd want to say. Secondly, I would want to say that yoga
00:02:30.760 | and Tai Chi, the little I know and the little research I've done, both have
00:02:35.760 | their roots in Eastern worldviews and are profoundly, in those roots,
00:02:43.320 | antithetical to Christian understanding of God and the way he works in the world.
00:02:48.080 | So yoga is to the body—I'd put it any way—what mantra is to the mouth. One
00:02:57.440 | explanation says that the mantra, quote, "One has to chant a word or a phrase
00:03:04.560 | until he or she transcends mind and emotions, and in the process the
00:03:10.800 | superconscious is discovered and achieved," close quote. So the use of word
00:03:16.440 | in that mantra-like way in order to move into the superconsciousness. In other
00:03:22.520 | words, yoga exercises are spillover from that kind of verbal repetition and
00:03:30.800 | philosophy of how one moves physically and emotionally, intellectually to this
00:03:36.680 | superconsciousness. So yoga focuses on harmony between mind and body. Yoga
00:03:44.360 | derives its philosophy from an Indian metaphysical belief, and the word "yoga"
00:03:51.280 | comes from the Sanskrit language and means "merger" or "union," and the ultimate aim
00:03:57.120 | of that philosophy then is to strike a balance between mind and body and
00:04:01.440 | attain a kind of self-enlightenment through the use of mantra and
00:04:04.920 | through the use of certain kinds of physical exercises or meditative stances.
00:04:10.280 | To achieve this, yoga uses breath, posture, relaxation, meditation, in order to bring
00:04:19.160 | about healthy, lively, balanced approach to life. That would be more or less the way
00:04:24.000 | they'd say it in a lot of places on the web. So if you go to the
00:04:28.320 | Minneapolis YWCA website and click on "fitness classes," you get 22 references to
00:04:33.880 | yoga, including beginning yoga, MS yoga, youngster yoga, youth dance and yoga, yoga
00:04:40.880 | for everybody, and it's the same thing with Tai Chi, a little less so.
00:04:46.200 | Tai Chi has Chinese religious or metaphysical roots, and one definition
00:04:51.600 | says that Tai Chi is understood to be the highest conceivable principle from
00:04:56.880 | which existence flows. The supreme ultimate—that's what the word
00:05:02.400 | Tai Chi means—the supreme ultimate creates yang and yin, movement
00:05:09.320 | generates yang, and when its activity reaches its limit, it becomes
00:05:14.080 | tranquil, and through tranquility, the supreme ultimate generates yin, and when
00:05:18.920 | the tranquility has reached its limit, there is a return to movement, and
00:05:22.680 | movement and tranquility and alteration become each the source of the other, and
00:05:27.480 | the transformations of the yang and the union of the yin produce everything, and
00:05:32.880 | these in turn produce and reproduce, and that makes the process never-ending.
00:05:37.800 | That's more or less what I've learned in my little bit of research. And Christians
00:05:43.720 | have a radically different worldview than either of these, or the view
00:05:50.640 | shaped by yoga, the view shaped by Tai Chi. Our approach towards history and
00:05:57.440 | towards God and towards well-being is radically different. In Christianity,
00:06:03.360 | progress toward wholeness moves from a God who communicates intelligibly
00:06:09.720 | through language to be understood, through a person, Jesus Christ, who
00:06:14.240 | becomes fully human and speaks to be understood by the mind—not the
00:06:19.640 | canceling of the mind—through his death and resurrection, objectively overcoming
00:06:25.800 | a real Satan and real guilt before God, through a real gospel message for us,
00:06:32.920 | once for all in history, with historical events behind it, through an
00:06:37.680 | understanding of that message in our minds consciously, through faith in
00:06:42.320 | Christ, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, through the promises
00:06:45.840 | understood and believed, through joyful meditation on those objective promises,
00:06:51.640 | through the transformation of the Holy Spirit, through objective Word
00:06:56.640 | understood as we meditate in progressive likeness to Christ as we see his glory
00:07:03.680 | in the Word and in the gospel, through practical deeds that lead to help other
00:07:09.440 | people, and through a life of transformed godliness into eternal life where God is
00:07:15.920 | our joy forever. That's Christianity, and it's totally different than the
00:07:21.840 | kind of worldview that lies behind the meditative, physical, and emotional, and
00:07:27.080 | intellectual practices that flow out of yoga and Tai Chi. Christians'
00:07:33.000 | wholeness of the health and the body—if you ask, "Okay, how does that relate to
00:07:38.160 | the body? How does that relate to exercise and stuff you do with your body?" I would
00:07:42.640 | say Christian wholeness of the health of the body is a chastened and realistic
00:07:51.480 | view marked by these facts. Number one, we are fallen and physically under a curse
00:07:57.920 | and emotionally and intellectually under a curse on the whole creation, and
00:08:02.320 | therefore we will all die. Second, we will be raised from the dead if we have faith
00:08:09.800 | in Jesus, and this is the health we are ultimately aiming at. Mainly, we would be
00:08:15.920 | perfectly healthy, body, soul, and mind in the new heavens and the new earth after
00:08:22.200 | the resurrection, and that is our glory. That is our hope. And third, in the
00:08:27.280 | meantime, our outer nature is wasting away, but our inner nature is being
00:08:32.600 | renewed day by day. And fourth, so bodily exercise is of a little value, as Paul
00:08:40.160 | says, but spiritual exercise is of value in every way in the way I described it a
00:08:46.240 | minute ago. And fifth, we should not necessarily, unnecessarily, damage our
00:08:53.960 | bodies, which are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and we should seek their maximal
00:08:59.000 | usefulness in the goals that God has given us. So physical health is wonderful,
00:09:04.680 | but it's not the goal. It is a means to much greater goals, and a qualified means
00:09:11.360 | at that, because they're more important means than having a body that is super
00:09:17.000 | fit. We may—this would be number six—we may accomplish our greatest goals by
00:09:23.800 | dying, by risking our lives in getting Ebola or malaria or river blindness in
00:09:28.760 | some missionary activity. We don't strive for maximal physical well-being.
00:09:35.160 | That is a subordinate useful goal as a means to something greater, and it may be
00:09:41.800 | compromised intentionally by risking our lives for the sake of somebody else. And
00:09:47.280 | the last thing would be, so any physical regimen that begins to take the
00:09:53.640 | place of the pursuit of holiness and sacrificial service by which we may lay
00:09:58.520 | down our lives is starting probably to become a religion for us. And it seems to
00:10:04.560 | me that yoga and Tai Chi have already declared themselves by their very names
00:10:10.360 | on that score. They have run up the flag. They've run up the flag of the Eastern
00:10:15.680 | worldview by the very name yoga and Tai Chi. So for my money at this point, as I
00:10:22.560 | assess maximizing rather than minimizing my pursuit of God's goals and the
00:10:29.440 | flourishing of my own soul, I'd go another way and find another kind of
00:10:34.240 | exercise. Well there you have it. John Piper on yoga and Tai Chi. Thank you,
00:10:40.240 | Pastor John. No doubt there's going to be follow-up questions on this one. You can
00:10:44.200 | send your follow-up questions to us on this episode or any episode. Send us an
00:10:48.080 | email at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. And we now get about 1,500
00:10:53.920 | emails a month, so we cannot respond individually, but we do get them. Good
00:10:58.840 | questions that are specific and concise are essential to this podcast, and we are
00:11:03.360 | grateful for those of you who send them in to us. And we have a question coming
00:11:07.000 | in from Ireland on the table tomorrow. "What is love? In fact, it's the most
00:11:12.120 | often asked question at Google." That's tomorrow on the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:11:17.360 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.
00:11:21.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]