I had a friend growing up who struggled with a lot of pain in his body. His mom would take him to the doctor, and he would describe pain here, pain there — and the doctors couldn’t find anything. They ran x-rays, MRIs, all of it, and still came up empty. After years of testing, they finally concluded it was growing pains. Most people go through them without much trouble, but he was genuinely feeling them in a real and significant way.
That’s a great picture for believers. We grow in the Lord — there is real work happening in us and through us — but sometimes that growth is uncomfortable. We know that victorious living is ours in Jesus, and we experience that victory in powerful ways. But we also experience struggle. Both things are happening at the same time, and that tension can be confusing and even painful, reaching into the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual.
It raises the question: if God has promised victory, peace, and joy, why does the struggle feel so real?
You Are His Workmanship
Philippians 1:6 is a verse worth returning to often, especially when navigating the tension between victorious living and the very real pressures of life:
I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
As believers, God is always working in us, on us, and through us — and each of those is distinct. He works in us to make us the people He wants us to be. He works on us to build the character that reflects Him to the world around us. And He works through us, using our relationships and our lives as light and salt in the world.
Think about what that means. The God of all creation has looked at your life and said, I am going to work on you. I am going to use you, mold you, form you, and create you into the person I want you to be. Ephesians 2:10 makes it even clearer:
For we are his creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.
That is genuinely good news. God is not passive toward us. He is active, purposeful, and personally invested in who we are becoming.
The problem is that when we get into the struggle, we stop thinking about what God is doing and start turning inward. Why is this happening to me? The awareness that we are His workmanship fades, and the pressure becomes the only thing we can see.
Sometimes the pressure is part of the process. A diamond is formed under pressure. A potter forming clay doesn’t press gently — he bears down, shapes, and works the material. That’s what God is doing in us. It’s uncomfortable, but on the other side of it, He has a plan. And in the middle of the struggle, He is still using us and still wants to use us.
Abraham: Stuck in Haran
Abraham is someone who can relate to this. God was working through him in extraordinary ways, but Abraham was far from a struggle-free life. Genesis 11:31 through 12:2 sets the scene:
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, Haran’s son, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Terah lived 205 years and died in Haran. The Lord said to Abram, “Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the people on earth will be blessed through you.”
Reading Genesis alone, it’s easy to assume Terah was driving the journey. But in Acts 7, right before Stephen was martyred, he addressed the Sanhedrin and made something clear:
Brothers and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he settled in Haran, and said to him, “Get out of your country and away from your relatives and come to the land that I will show you.”
God spoke to Abraham first — in Ur of the Chaldees, before any of the traveling began. Abraham was the one called. At some point, he told his family he was moving toward the land of Canaan, and his father Terah decided to join. They traveled together, and when they reached Haran, they stopped.
The word Haran means mountainous and is also connected to the idea of a journey — fitting for where Abraham found himself. Something caused them to settle there rather than continue. Maybe Terah grew attached to the place. Maybe Abraham was honoring his father. Maybe Terah got sick and couldn’t travel, and by the time he died, they had simply stayed longer than planned. Scripture doesn’t tell us exactly. What we know is that Abraham was supposed to keep going, and he didn’t — not yet.
That is a powerful picture of where many believers find themselves. God gives a clear direction, but somewhere along the way there is a stop. The struggle sets in, the pressure mounts, and instead of moving toward the promise, we settle in the difficulty. Abraham got stuck in Haran, and we get stuck in our version of Haran too. The good news is that God’s plan didn’t die there. He still called Abraham forward, still spoke to him, and still fulfilled everything He had promised.
Abraham is remembered as the father of the faith, and that reputation is earned. He trusted God for a son for a hundred years. When that son finally came, he was willing to sacrifice him. His faith was genuine and extraordinary. But we tend to see the end result without considering the journey. He made serious mistakes — sleeping with Hagar out of impatience, bringing Ishmael into the world in a way that has sent consequences rippling through history. He struggled, he stumbled, and he got stuck.
The path to becoming a person of faith isn’t clean. Until we reach the end and can say with Paul that we fought the good fight, there will be struggles, tension, and pressure along the way. That is part of what the journey looks like for everyone serious about living for Jesus.
The struggle is real — but so is God.
Paul Knew Struggle
Paul is another believer whose life makes this point impossible to ignore. When God commissioned Paul on the Damascus Road, He told Ananias plainly that Paul would be shown how much he would need to suffer for the sake of Christ. Suffering was wired directly into Paul’s calling.
Second Corinthians 11 gives us Paul’s own account:
Five times I received 39 lashes from the Jews. Three times I was beaten with rods by the Romans. Once I was stoned by my enemies. Three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea. On frequent journeys I faced dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own people, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the open country, dangers in the sea, and dangers among false brothers. Labor and hardship, many sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, often without food, cold, and lacking clothing. Not to mention other things, there is the daily pressure on me, my care for all the churches.
Most people would have stopped at the first item on that list. Paul didn’t. He didn’t allow the struggle, the pressure, or the relentless tension to pull him away from what God was doing in and through his life.
What’s remarkable is what Paul said when he returned to encourage the churches he had planted. Acts 14:21-22 records it:
After they had evangelized that town and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch, strengthening the disciples by encouraging them to continue in the faith and by telling them, “It is necessary to pass through many troubles on our way into the kingdom of God.”
That message doesn’t get preached often, because it’s not the kind of thing that draws a crowd. But it is the truth. Paul wasn’t discouraging these believers — he was equipping them. He was saying, what you’re going through is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the road. We pass through it, and we arrive at the kingdom of God.
David said something similar in Psalm 34:
Many adversities come to the one who is righteous, but the Lord delivers him from them all. He protects all his bones; not one of them is broken. Evil brings death to the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be punished. The Lord redeems the life of His servants, and all who take refuge in Him will not be punished.
Adversity is part of the righteous life — and God delivers us from every single one of them. That is the consistent message from David to Paul across the whole of Scripture.
Don’t Give Up — This Is Temporary
As believers, we deal with personal struggles, workplace difficulty, financial pressure, political anxiety, and everything happening in the world around us. All of it piles on. But God uses every bit of it for a purpose.
Romans 5:3-5 lays out the progression:
And not only that, but we also rejoice in our afflictions because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
Affliction produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. And that hope does not disappoint. God is not wasting what we go through — He is building something in us that could not be built any other way.
I got saved when I was 16 years old and never looked back, but I’ve watched people fall away from the faith over the years. People who were faithful when life was easy but walked out the moment things got hard. I remember a woman who lost her mother and couldn’t move past the question of why God would allow it. She left the faith entirely. The struggle, instead of building something in her, became a wall between her and God. That’s what happens when we’re not grounded in the understanding that God is sovereign over the hard things and is using them with purpose.
Paul speaks to this directly in 2 Corinthians 4:
Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Paul could call his suffering — which was staggering by any measure — a “momentary light affliction” because he was holding it up against eternity. When we are in the middle of a struggle, nothing about it feels momentary or light. But Paul is calling us to an eternal perspective. In Christ, we are eternal beings. This life, as real and as painful as it is, is a fraction of our actual existence.
Jesus said it plainly in John 16:33:
I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous. I have conquered the world.
Jesus never promised a struggle-free life. He promised peace, courage, and a Savior who has already conquered everything that comes against us. That is not a consolation prize — it is the foundation everything else rests on.
Fixing Your Eyes on Jesus
The practical question is how we actually live this way when the struggle is pressing in on every side. Hebrews 12:1-2 gives us the answer:
Therefore, since we have such a large crowd of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the source and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that lay before him endured the cross, despised the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of God’s throne.
The cloud of witnesses is made up of every believer who came before us — people who faced their own version of struggle, tension, and pressure, and who endured. They are in eternity with Jesus, having run the race ahead of us, and the author of Hebrews is saying their example surrounds us like a crowd at a finish line.
One of the sins the author warns against is worth naming specifically. It’s the inward spiral of comparison and self-pity — the constant asking of why me while watching someone else appear to thrive. That mindset is a weight. It entangles. It pulls focus from the finish line and fixes it on everything that feels unfair. It needs to be thrown off.
The race requires endurance. There will be moments to stop and catch a breath, but the direction has to remain forward. And the way to keep moving is to keep your eyes on Jesus — not on the bank account, not on the political climate, not on any of the things this world offers as a substitute anchor. He is the source and the perfecter of our faith, and He is the only fixed point that holds.
What makes this more than a motivational idea is that Jesus Himself modeled it. He endured the cross and despised the shame by keeping His eyes on the joy waiting on the other side of it. He was a man on this earth, fully experiencing what it meant to suffer, and He looked past it to what was coming. That is the same posture we are being called to — seeing past the struggle and the tension to what God is building and what is waiting ahead.
James 1:2-4 says something that can be hard to receive at first:
Consider it great joy, my brothers, when you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.
Nobody experiencing a trial naturally feels joy — that’s not what James is describing. The joy comes from the perspective shift, from understanding that the testing of faith produces something real and lasting. When the eyes are fixed on Jesus, the trial is no longer the whole picture. The process He is working through it becomes visible, and the joy on the other side becomes something we can hold onto even now.
That is where the mind shift happens. Without it, the struggle becomes everything. With it, we can see that the God of all creation has looked at us and said, that is my child — I love them, and I am doing a work in them.
He Will Finish What He Started
Philippians 1:6, where we began, is also where we land:
I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
God finishes what He starts. That is not wishful thinking — it is firm confidence grounded in the character of God. The work He began in you will be carried all the way to completion.
Victorious living and struggling are not opposites. They coexist in the life of every believer who is being shaped into the person God intends them to be. Godly living doesn’t come without pressure. Living for Jesus doesn’t mean a smooth road. But every difficult thing — every trial, every season of tension, every moment that feels like climbing a mountain — is in the hands of a God who is actively working in you, on you, and through you.
He will not leave the work unfinished.
Peace,
Todd