After you have suffered a little while, [God will] restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. (1 Peter 5:10)
Expanded Passage: 1 Peter 5:6-11
I needed three credits to finish my physical education requirement for college. Unfortunately, the only open classes were weight lifting and basket weaving. So, at 115 pounds soaking wet, I signed up for weight lifting.
To say the least, it was a painful and humiliating experience. Everyone else in the class seemed to be steroid-stoked Olympians. While they were “cleaning and jerking” hundreds of pounds, I was struggling to hoist the bar. One muscle-bound brute delighted in coming up behind me and lifting me up by my gym shorts. Painful and humiliating!
Even though I looked like the “before” picture in Muscle magazine, I kept showing up for class, kept working with ever-increasing weights, and kept being picked up by my shorts.
However, the class was graded on improvement, not on the amount of weight lifted. So I earned an A in weightlifting, while the guy lifting my weight got a C.
That summer I worked at the Kellogg’s cereal company lifting fifty-pound boxes of raisins into the chute that dropped to the Raisin Bran packing room. After weight lifting, I could crack open the boxes like an egg with just one hand.
After I had suffered a little while, I was now strong, firm, and steadfast. In the same way, “the God of all grace . . . will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”
Take up the cross and experience for yourself the most productive weight lifting.
James N. Watkins is an author, editor, and ordained minister in The Wesleyan Church.
© 2026 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
