Stay Spiritually Strong

“Sometimes the miracle of moving mountains is God granting you the strength to keep shoveling.”

—SHANE LITTLEFIELD

The strong spirit of a man sustains him in bodily pain or trouble.

—Proverbs 18:14

Don’t wait until you are in the middle of a terrible ordeal and then try to quickly get strong in spirit. It doesn’t work that way. You must build up your reserves over time by spending the necessary time with God regularly, praying and studying His Word. It’s foolish to wait until you need to pick up something heavy and then quickly try to build some muscle. You would never start working out at the gym one day and expect to lift three times your weight the next. We know we must build up muscle to pick up heavy things, and we should also know we must build spiritual strength to endure the trials of life without weakening.

I have discovered if I stay spiritually strong, many things no longer bother me, and in some cases, these were things that once upset me for days at a time. They were able to upset me because I wasn’t strong enough in God to resist them properly or to even look at them in a right way. Our mind-set toward life’s challenges has a lot to do with how we handle them and how they affect us emotionally. A man in the Bible named Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers, but he said that what the enemy meant for his harm, God intended for his good (see Genesis 50:20). He had a right attitude because he had a great relationship with God. He stayed spiritually strong at all times and experienced one victory after another.

Always being under condemnation, having a burden, or experiencing loss of peace or joy is very complicated and requires all our attention. It may seem like hard work to stay spiritually strong, but it is actually much simpler than always feeling overwhelmed by what is going on in life. Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might (see Ephesians 6:10).