Developing Spiritual Muscles

How Human Muscles Grow:   Your muscles grow when they recover after heavy stress that you put on them in the gym. Your body 'thinks' that you were running for your life from a lion and barely escaped, and it builds some extra muscle to make sure that you can outrun that lion the next time he finds you! The same story in other words: when you stress your muscle to the limit, it develops micro-injury. When it repairs the damage, having enough time and material, it 'overdoes' a little, to prevent you from having that 'micro-injury' in the future.

To put it short, if you want your muscle grow, you should give it as much stress as possible in the gym, then you should provide it with everything it needs to recover and grow, which is time and food.

As you have heard me whine and complain about for a while now, I feel under tremendous amounts of stress right now.  I feel that there are spiritual battles on every side and am spiritually, emotionally and physically stressed.  When I read the above comments regarding the growth of muscles I could not help but to make a parallel with our spiritual life. 

This concept was quite exciting to me and I have wanted to write about it for a while now but the words wouldn’t come.  But the more I thought about this, the more I tried to put the words together, the more strongly something more came to me.  Our desire and God’s desire is for us to grow and become ever stronger in our relationship with Him so He allows stresses to come into our life.  During the stress of the battle, during the trial, our faith muscles are NOT growing.  It is AFTER the stress that our faith will grow IF (and I can’t stress IF strongly enough) IF we feed our faith with God’s word and allow ourselves to really get refreshed in the Holy Ghost.  During the stress period, we are going through a time of getting “micro-injuries.”  Injuries that with the proper rest (the Holy Spirit which is our rest and our refreshing) and nutrition (God’s word), will cause use us to grow and be strong in our faith.   If we come out of the stress of a trial or battle and do not lose ourselves in God and his word then our faith will not be strengthened but rather weakened and prone to fear and anxiety.  Just like it is important to feed and rest our physical muscles after working out, it is absolutely vital that we do the same thing spiritually with our faith muscles.

So when you are in a fight on every side and it seems that you are just barely getting out of the battle with your spiritual life intact, know that these battles will only increase your faith muscles.  And then once you have gotten out of that battle, lose yourself in the Word of God and allow the Holy Spirit to surround you and to fill you.  Take the time to really bask in the presence of the Lord, during the battle but especially AFTER the battle.