1 Timothy 4:8

1 Timothy 4:8. Bodily exercise. The figure is continued. We can hardly suppose that Timothy ‘trained,' as the Greek athlete did, with a view to the prizes for which the athlete contended. But the example of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 9:25-27) might well suggest a like discipline with the aim of bringing the body under the control of the higher life, and the glimpse we get farther on of Timothy's habits of abstinence (1 Corinthians 9:23) indicates that he practised it. From St. Paul's point of view, the training was useful as a means to an end, and that end, godliness. When it was made an end and not a means, it sank to the level of the training of the athlete (just as circumcision, when it had come to belong to the past, sank to the level of the mutilation of some forms of heathen worship, Galatians 5:12), and was profitable only ‘for little,' as a condition of health, and nothing more, sometimes not even as that.

All things outward, inward, bodily, spiritual, and as the words that follow show, temporal and eternal.

Of the life that now is. The genitive of possession: ‘the promise that belongs to the present life, and also to the future.'