“I have said these things to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33.

This summer I made the decision to splurge and buy some personal training sessions. I’ve been in a group boot camp for about a year and I have loved seeing how my body is pushed harder and harder. Our bodies are very resilient and can do much much more than we realize when pushed past our comfort zone.

To me, physical training isn’t just about how you look when you see results. There’s a spiritual component to it. If we have accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts, we have the power of the Holy Spirit inside us. Our bodies carry God’s spirit. That makes me want to take care of something that belongs to God.

There’s also a mental part to physical training. When pushed enough, the pain of it is unbearable and you think you cannot endure one more thing because if you do, you just know your arms or legs will snap off. Or worse, you might die from the workout itself and you want to give up. These are some of the things I’ve said and will say again: “This is too hard. I can’t do anymore. It’s too much weight. Can you just lift it for me?” That last one is pretty pathetic, right?! This is honestly how I feel every session. No session is ever easy, which is very frustrating. But mentally I keep in mind there is an end result that will pay off and will be worth it.

My trainer said something like this to me one day that didn’t fit with my concept of getting stronger. “Good, I wanted you to reach failure”. What? Failure? Isn’t he supposed to be encouraging me and not pushing me to fail? He explains failure when training like this: “When you’re working out, failure is okay so long as it’s not just flat out giving up. It means you pushed yourself hard to the absolute max and you couldn’t possibly do one more rep. Those last few reps before failure are the most important because they do the most damage to the muscle, then when they repair they come back stronger…. But most people want to quit before reaching that point.”

Wow! So it is when God allows something in our lives to shake us and put us through a time of testing. Not to make us fail, but to build us up stronger than we were before. It’s a refining process to develop us further into Christ’s image. It’s when you’ve endured a hardship or a desert season long enough that you don’t think you can take one more minute of it, and if you have to, you might just snap in two. You want to give up because you don’t see how this process could possibly result in anything good. The last part of that long season is the hardest because it feels like it’s never going to end.

However, if we’re not being pushed out of our comfort zone, then we remain stagnant. It’s about hanging on and letting him accomplish his will in our lives for his glory. He never promised the Christian life would be easy. If it were, we wouldn’t need faith and we wouldn’t need God. He has a spiritual race for all of us to run. The end of that race isn’t about reaching success in this life. Once one trial is over, there will be another. Then another. We’ll have seasons of fruitfulness, and seasons of drought.

Like physical training, living a life for Christ requires a cost. But the end result in this life is joy and peace, even in our circumstances. The ultimate prize comes when we reach eternal life with him in heaven. It is then we are made perfect only through the sacrifice of Christ dying on the cross for our sins.