HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, November 4, 2024 – If you’ve ever been involved in physical training, you know that the best way to build strength and endurance is to introduce progressive resistance or opposition into your exercise regime. Weightlifters (like my sister) well know this. But the resistance needs to be proportional to the person being opposed – too much resistance, and the person is overwhelmed; too little resistance, and the person is unchallenged. Both cases lead to zero growth.

This blog is an effort to build the spiritual strength and endurance of born-again believers through progressive spiritual resistance. It’s meant to challenge you spiritually so that day by day you improve. This blog is not intended to stroke your spiritual ego and leave you unchallenged. You’d be hard-pressed to find even one article on this blog that strokes your spiritual ego.

If you want your ego stroked, go to a church service. Nearly every church service I’ve attended over the past 25 years since my rebirth has been an exercise in feel-goodism. It’s a lullaby from the moment you walk through the door, with attendees lulled into a state just awake enough to reach into their wallets and fork over whatever they’re guilted into forking over. Otherwise, they’re encouraged to nod and snooze throughout the proceedings or wave their arms in the air like they’re at a rock concert. Never are they taught the grittier spiritual facts of life. Never are they scolded for watering down or compromising the gospel message. Never are they purposely convicted of sin. Most of the things that Jesus taught his disciples and followers are glaringly absent from today’s church services. Instead, the sleepwalking attendees are offered cherry-picked scriptural quotes and sanitized sermons crafted to assure them that everything is fine, just fine, and they should continue exactly as they are. No improvements necessary.

Absent, too, are the hellfire and brimstone preaching of yesteryear. Not that those sermons helped much with resistance building. On the contrary, they tended to drive people into submission to God not out of love for God but out of mortal fear of him. It was a physical fear more than a spiritual fear. Contrast these sermons with, for instance, the psalms, where the psalmists write of their love for God’s laws. There’s no fear in their expressed love but only a willing submission to God and his laws that is a manifestation of their deep and abiding love for God. Hellfire and brimstone preaching might have been effective in keeping the sheep in line, but it did little to help build either spiritual endurance or a loving relationship with God as our Father.

This blog is in large part a response to the inadequate offerings of today’s church services. The Gospel from start to finish poses a resistance that challenges us, as does the Old Testament. Scripture is not meant to soothe you or lull you to sleep, nor is it meant to leave you spinning your wheels, patting yourself on the back, cowering in fear, or resting on your lees. Jesus warned us about resting on our lees, but I’ve never once heard that message preached in a church service. Scripture constantly challenges us, and when read through the lens of God’s Holy Spirit (which is the right and only way to read scripture), it progressively and continuously challenges us to do better and be better than we were yesterday.

It’s not a steady uphill climb, though, this spiritual resistance training we undergo as born-again believers. It’s not like that fabled ever-upward line on an earnings chart that’s flashed to investors with promises of significant gains in the near future. No. Our spiritual progression line is more like currency valuations – going up a little and then down a little, and then back up a little followed by a major slide downward and a largish spike upwards, only to be followed by an unexpected plunge and eventual (Thank God) rebound, with a slight but solid gain. That’s how we progress through our resistance training and that’s how God expects us to progress as he allows us to undergo tests and trials that resist us to the appropriate measure, each of us getting tailor-made tests and trials when we need them and the time is right.

Our spiritual progress is never steadily upward because it’s not meant to be. Still, the overall general trajectory should be upward, which is the whole point of resistance training. Little by little, we build our spiritual strength and endurance so that things that used to overwhelm us don’t overwhelm us as much anymore… until one day they don’t overwhelm us at all, because we’ve learned first and foremost and always to lean entirely on God, with Jesus as our one and only example.

This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.

I hope this blog challenges you. I hope at times it’s irritated and annoyed you and left you with what amounts to a virtual thorn in your side that’s pricked at you and made you think twice about something you otherwise would have overlooked or dismissed. I hope it’s made you run to consult scripture or your pastor to prove me wrong. I aim to be like the least favorite teacher at school, the one who makes you work hard in class and then gives you homework, too; the one who’s a hard marker on tests and essays, making her even more unliked. The least favorite teacher tends only to be appreciated (if ever) years later, when you realize you learned something valuable from her and that she actually cared that you learn something valuable. That’s the kind of spiritual resistance training I hope this blog offers because its the only kind of training that will get you the results you need.

As a born-again believer, you need to constantly build your spiritual strength and endurance, but you can’t do that without being challenged and resisted day by day. God challenges us throughout the Bible, and he does so in perfect proportion and measure to what we need at any given time, thanks to his Holy Spirit; it’s up to us to constantly accept his challenge. God also challenges us through our own personal tests and trials, which we then have to endure if we’re to move ever onward and upward, because ever onward and upward is where we need to go. On a chart, our progress might look more like a zigzag than a straight line, but as long as it’s an upward-moving zigzag, we’re heading in the right direction.

As long as we’re trailing close behind Jesus, we’re heading in the right direction.