Last month I did one hundred push ups a day. Thirty-one days in May. Three thousand, one hundred push ups total.

I made the commitment on a whim. It had been a while since I’d been in the habit of doing push ups. So I started with sets of ten or twenty, kept tallies in my daily journal. Keeping tallies is a technique I borrowed from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said “There are no shortcuts. Everything is reps, reps, reps.” Not only did he keep count of reps when he was a bodybuilder. He would put tallies at the top of his speeches when he was Governor of California to keep track of how many times he had practiced his delivery.

And I’ve kept it up. I even increased my daily count to 150. It’s a daily habit that helps me build muscle and maintain a basic level of fitness.

Push ups are just one part of my overall program.

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes, “No one is born either naturally or supernaturally with character; it must be developed. Nor are we born with habits— we have to form godly habits on the basis of the new life God has placed within us.”

Habits must also be cultivated which develop character, bringing forth the fruit of salvation God has granted through the completed work of Jesus Christ and the present power of the Holy Spirit.

To have faith is to believe, to trust, to declare allegiance to God. To then exercise that faith is to act in accordance with what one professes to believe. One way to exercise faith is to develop daily habits of holiness, ways of engaging with God and relating to others that develop the character of Christ in us.