It Is Not Hard

In my sophomore year in college, I agreed to help my friend and workout with him through Spring Break. The first day, we went to the football field to do the first of three workouts for that day. We went and did agility drills followed by a two-hour break before we went to the gym and did an hours’ worth of weight training. Then we had an evening skate at the rink that lasted for about three hours. Then we did that same routine from Monday through that Saturday. There are a lot of physical benefits to working out, and training like that can really accelerate your conditioning. The biggest hurdle that I ran into while doing this week of conditioning and training was that on the third day I hit the wall. I thought that it was too hard to keep doing it, but luckily for me, I had my friend there who pushed me on.
There are a lot of things that the Bible tells us that we are to do, but we do not want to do them because it is hard. We see that Jesus said to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39).Yet there are a lot of people who do not do that. In Luke 6:27-42, Jesus tells us to do a whole list of things that many in the world today would say is hard. The issue is not that it is hard to love your enemies, but rather that we are not used to this. It is the same in working out. It is hard in the beginning, but gets easier as you go. As we practice these things and get used to doing them, they are no longer hard, but they become easy. They could become so easy that they would be second nature if we were willing to practice them and not give up on working to make ourselves better.