Should Christians Practice Yoga or Martial Arts? by David K. Bernard Podcast recording (no venue stated in the delivered transcript) Kind: teaching Source: https://acts238.life/repository/sermons/david-k-bernard--should-christians-practice-yoga-or-martial-arts Published by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon transcript on that page. Free to copy and share with attribution. ------------------------------------------------------------ That's a good question. And I was raised in Korea, so I'm which was and still is a non-Christian nation. And so I'm well aware of these connections and I certainly would advise caution. But as with so many things a lot depends on how you define it. So yoga as a spiritual practice as you said would be associated with Hinduism and Buddhism. We should not participate. Uh many martial arts have a component of meditation and honoring spirits and we should not participate. But but yoga that term is all is also used in western culture to mean uh strictly certain forms of exercise. And of course, martial arts can be used in a very secular context uh simply for self-defense. And so if you're talking about exercise or self-defense, I do not find those contrary to scripture. But if you're talking about spiritual meditation, for example, some yoga practices require you to chant certain things. Well, find out what you're chanting. what you're chanting is mantras or um Hebrew or Buddhist phrases that are supposed to have spiritual power. Well, obviously we wouldn't want to do that because we're not being connected to the true God. We'd be either uh connected to a false spirits or we'd be connected to a fake fakery. And either way, we don't want to do that. So, uh I think there's an area of Christian liberty uh of personal choice. So here's what I would say. If you're talking about these things as spiritual techniques or associated with spiritual meditation, then Christians should absolutely stay away from them. If you are talking about various forms of exercise um or self-defense that derive some some of these examples of years gone by from folklore folk examples then I think that it's not it's not sinful to participate in exercise techniques or self-defense techniques. Um now where the area of Christian liberty might be somebody might say well I'm absolutely not involved in any kind of uh spiritual meditation. I'm not involved in any kind of spiritual tanting. I'm not involved in any kind of worship of gods but I don't want anybody to misunderstand or I don't want uh to inadvertently may endorse something. Well that's where you'd have Christian liberty to say so therefore I'm not going to participate. But somebody else may say I'm just exercising. I'm just um conducting uh learning how to discip myself. Well, then I don't think we should condemn that person. You're not doing anything spiritually wrong. You are simply learning to defend yourself. So, for example, as I said, I grew up in Korea. So, as a teenager, I briefly studied and it was in a Christian context, by the way, uh judo. And the first thing they taught me was if there is any situation of confrontation, rule number one is to escape. If you can run away, diffuse the situation, always do that. Never counterattack, leave. That's interesting. Uh the second thing they taught you is how to fall without hurting yourself. Um then the third thing they taught you was how to use your opponent's u momentum to um defeat himself. So, in other words, you're not trying to counterattack and seriously injure that opponent, but let's say somebody lunges at you. Well, you side step and you uh trip them and they they fall down and then you run away. Or they come at you with their fist and you just take their arm and use their own momentum and just pull them in the natural trajectory of where they're headed and they go flying off of the distance. Then you run away. So, it's hard to say there's anything wrong with that. In in fact, the way I described it, and maybe not all martial arts are that way, but really the way they taught us is to be very respectful of other people, respectful of human life, diffuse controversies, not you know, we sometimes get the idea the martial arts person is just violent, uh, you know, always fighting. Well, that's not that was not the original intention of these martial arts. it was more of um self-preservation, self-defense and even military use. So um and of course today uh military um personnel are sometimes trained in these techniques. So actually what I learned were some very helpful techniques of diffusing a situation. If you can't diffuse a situation, defend yourself with minimal harm to either you or the other person. uh uh thwarting the person and using their own aggression, their own momentum to work against them uh to buy you time to again escape. So it's hard to say that those specific techniques would be wrong. And in fact, you there's much to be said even for uh a young person or a woman to have some self-defense techniques um that could preserve give them time to get help or to escape, preserve their life in times of danger. And so I think we should take um a judicious approach to that. If you're if you're interested in anything like this, study it. Make sure that what you're doing will not in any way connect with any false spiritual practices. But if you can do something for the purpose of wholesome exercise, that is a scriptural, you know, stewardship of the body is a scriptural principle. And self-defense, I think uh God is not in favor of aggression or hurting someone without cause. And so sometimes we get in situations beyond our control. If we can find the least uh violent or least destructive means to extricate ourselves, I think that would also be the will of God for us. So I think uh we have to consider the whole subject and really the answer the question to a great extent depends on what are you defining as the actual practice that you're interested in pursuing.