1 Timothy 4:8 “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” Note that godliness not only has promise for the life to come, but also for the present life. The thrust of the verse is not to point to the virtue of physical exercise or all that it may imply, but to use it as a contrast to something which is really valuable -- godliness. An application of the verse today might be as follows: a pretraining stress ECG for a middle-aged man is of some value, but if you really want value now (physically) and in the hereafter, be exercised in godliness.
Medicine can certainly teach us something about body maintenance, yet it is godliness that has the most to do with the maintenance. Somehow, things have gotten turned around. Christians routinely seek physicians' advice on health maintenance while remaining heedless of ungodliness in their lives. Christian physicians routinely bypass obvious ungodly behavior which has possible adverse health consequences in their patients -- a quick temper, unforgiven sin, unconfessed guilt, etc. We don't even think of these as health issues, or, we put them aside as “not in our field.”
Excerpt from "How Would God Have Us Practice Preventive Medicine?"
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