Spiritual and Physical Resistance Training

In just a few weeks, I will reach the second anniversary of the day I began exercising regularly. Looking at me, you might not think that’s a significant milestone. I take after the men in my family (who were all tall and relatively thin), so I relied on genetics for far too long to project an outward appearance of physical health. In my youth, I stayed active through sports and dance, but I have always hated exercising for exercise’s sake. I avoided physical discomfort like the plague. As I reached college, adulthood, marriage, pregnancy, and postpartum, I did very little to move my body regularly, exercising in spurts for a week or two before slacking on it yet again. This was my pattern for the better part of a decade.

I can’t exactly say what finally clicked for me when it came to exercise. I believe it was a, somewhat morbid, conglomeration of things: feeling my body change in less-than-positive ways as I passed the age of 35; dissastisfaction with how I looked after birthing giant children; the yearly conversation with my doctor about deteriorating bone density; observing my aging family and friends and recognizing a difference between those who had stayed active and those who had not¹; an increased urgency to stay healthy for my growing kids.

What may truly have flipped the switch for me, though, was the hard work the Lord has done in me spiritually over the last decade. I believe it’s all tied together.

Use It or Lose It

I have written about this some before, but the last decade of my life has looked somewhat like an inverse bell curve of spiritual health. It’s an imperfect analogy, but bear with me. While in seminary, I would say I was closer to the top of that curve. But then a combination of my particular sin struggles, a lack of discipline, and some eccentricities of my personality (plus some major life changes like getting married, moving, becoming a mom, and the pandemic) led me to a real low in my spiritual and emotional health. It’s not a coincidence that my physical health had suffered, too. I had begun to neglect every part of myself, and became too depleted to do hard things, spiritual or physical.

At the end of the day, the main problem wasn’t my circumstances, or my personality, or even my particular sin struggles. Though sin is the root of it all, the real problem was the lack of discipline that I had let seep into every realm of my life. Physically speaking, I hadn’t stopped moving my body altogether, but I certainly wasn’t doing anything to make it stronger. I just happened to be young enough that I didn’t have to pay attention to the consequences of inactivity yet.

Spiritually speaking, I hadn’t stopped praying or reading my Bible, but I was just going through the motions. I had stopped truly working out my heart and mind in the truth of Scripture. I was not disciplined throughout the day to meditate on things above. And so, when the pressures of life (or so I perceived) set in, I was not equipped to deal with them. I had made my heart vulnerable to the schemes of the devil, and I was an easy target.

Just as our muscles atrophy without use, so does our spiritual maturity suffer when we neglect the disciplines laid out for us in Scripture to keep our hearts and minds alert and tuned to the Lord. This is where I found myself: weak and unable to hold up to pressure of any kind.

How to be Strong

The Lord is truly kind and faithful, and through His grace working itself out in my life, that bell curve has slowly begun to trend upward again. But spiritual strength, like physical strength, does not come without hard work, perseverance, and resistance (as in resistance training, not resisting the Spirit). That’s why sanctification is so hard, because it is only through trials do we develop what my pastor calls “spiritual toughness.”

For me, the trials have been mostly self-inflicted, as I have often fought against the sanctifying work the Lord is trying to do in me. Too often I have given in to my flesh, to my sinful desires, and lacked the discipline or strength to fight against it. For other, trials come from external circumstances. In either instance, though, we must recognize that God is both sovereign over and working in the difficulties to make us who He wants us to be.² God has created both our bodies and our spirits to grow stronger in the same way: under load, never under ease. This is a lesson I have often had to learn the hard way.

How often I have wished there was another way to get both physically and spiritually stronger. But it only comes through what is hard. Walking through trials, fighting against sin, and practicing spiritual disciplines are the spiritual equivalent of lifting weights. Only through that pressure do we become stronger. It doesn’t come all at once, though. It’s a slow, nonlinear progression that drives the perfectionist in me crazy. But I have been walking this road, of both exercise and regaining spiritual maturity, long enough now, that I can see progress in places where I feared I would never change.

A Work in Progress

As the Lord helped me grow spiritually stronger, I began to see other disciplines, like exercise as vital parts of a disciplined life. He has given me a body, and health, and I must steward that to the best of my ability. The more I exercised, the more I began to enjoy it, the more willing I became to push myself, and the more confident I became in my ability to do harder work. After two years, I can say I am probably in the best physical shape of my adult life. But there are things I still can’t do (like a full push up) and there are days where I feel weak. These are the days I show up and trust that doing something is better than doing nothing.

The spiritual realm is not so different, but it’s a longer process. I can look back on the last seven years of my life and see just how much work the Lord has done. I am stronger, tougher, than I was. But I still fall into that pit, and ironically, that fall feels so much harder and deeper than it used to. My husband tells me that’s how it works. As the Lord works on us, our sin begins to look so much worse than it did. It’s why Paul, at the end of his ministry, calls himself the chief of sinners. Sanctification is hard, and I have days where I am real mad about it, days where I feel so weak, days where I want to lean back into the laziness of my flesh. And on those days, I have to remember that while I’m responsible for showing up, it is the Lord working out his power in me to make me into the kind of person he wants me to be.

_{Photo by Juls P on Unsplash}