Spiritual Growth

We talk a lot these days about Spiritual Growth. It is an important part of our Christian experience, i mean Jesus gave us the orders to "go and make disciples of all nations." Christianity is about more than just evangelism, it's also about seeing ourselves grow and helping others grow. i have been thinking a lot about spiritual growth lately.

Walk into any Christian bookstore and you will see rows of shelves packed with books to guide us in the process of spiritual growth. Many of those books encourage us to follow a program for growth, many paint a picture of growing from spiritual point A to spiritual point B and so on. But does any living thing grow from point A to point B?

i think of my 3 kids. i don't think any of them have grown the same way. There is no prescribed method for growing kids. There is no "one-size-fits-all" method for raising children. ( i know, there are hundreds of books out there that say there is, but anyone with kids knows on a gut level that it just does not work like that.) How many "measurable markers" do my children grow towards? Other than grades in school i can't think of many. They just grow. They eat, and grow.

Growth is a pretty messy process. You build a wardrobe for you kids and what do they do? They grow out of it & you have to buy them more clothes. You feed them breakfast and what comes next? Lunch - then Dinner - then Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner... it just does not stop. You buy them toys to entertain themselves with and what do they do? They take them apart to see how they work. You enroll them in some sports program and what happens, they get bruised and bumped, skin a knee and bleed on their new uniform. You cut their hair, wash their clothes, wash them, teach them how to clean up their mess, tell them to clean up their mess, yell at them to clean up their mess, ground them for not cleaning up their mess... Woah! this whole kids thing is just a MESS!

You put up with all this because one: you love them and two: you want to see them grow up and be healthy productive adults. So you watch them, and you know what... you just don't see them growing. i mean just look at the same kids day after day waiting for them to grow and you know what you will notice- nothing. It's not until one day, let's say early to mid-winter, when the first snow of the season falls that you see something. It happens like this: snow is on the ground, school is canceled, and the kids are itching to roll around in the white stuff. So what do you do? you dig in the closet for their snow-suits (or as we here in VA call them: "Cover-alls") You pass out the gear and tell your children to put it on as you go get there snow boots. And when you return: there they stand, wedged into tiny suits with pants that come up to their mid-shins, sleeves that only cover down to the middle of their fore-arms and you realise: Man have these kids grown since last year!

That's so often how it is with us. We want our spiritual growth sanitized and measured out, we want it disinfected with mile-markers along the way. But really you keep walking, keep reading the Word, praying, going to church, struggling to be like Jesus... & so often it just feels like nothing is happening. It's messy, we fail, stumble, get confused...

Then one day a situation arises, some crisis point of life and... you have the wisdom to handle it correctly; or you keep your temper under control; you resist the urge to spread that juicy gossip; you tell the truth even though it's embarrassing. And you realise that spiritually, your old coveralls are knee-high, the sleeves half way up your fore-arms... You have grown.

Sometimes the only way to see our own spiritual growth is to look back at who we have been and see who we are now becoming.

Jesus?

Have you ever wondered what Jesus is really like? i'd venture to say that many of us haven't asked ourselves that question in a while.

When we are first saved we ask that question a lot. "i wonder what Jesus would do in this situation?", "If Jesus were here how would He handle this?", "What would He say to that person?"

After a while we begin to think we have things figured out pretty well. We don't ask those questions like we should. We begin to assume that we just know how Jesus would react in certain situations.

But reading the word i find that He often acts in ways that don't fit with my view of who He should be. He turned water into wine.... He hung out with the wrong crowd... Mary Magdalene was one of his most faithful friends- Mary a woman who tradition paints as a reformed prostitute! Hardly the way that i think Jesus should act!

Another problem that i have with Jesus is this: Sinners loved Him! People with some real sin issues followed him around, climbed trees to see Him, washed His feet with their hair... Sinners WANTED to be near Jesus. i think that's great! The problem i have with it is this- if we are supposed to represent Jesus on earth... Then why don't sinners like to be around us? Why don't they like to come to church?

i know that you may say it's holiness. A holy lifestyle makes them uncomfortable, and i am sure that's true on so many levels, it was true for me. But Jesus lived a totally non-compromising lifestyle of holiness. Scripture says He was without sin! When He preached He preached a level of holiness that few dare preach today: To hate is murder, to lust in your mind is adultery, yet still people loved to be around Him.

my question to you is this: What are we doing wrong?, it's the same question that i ask myself almost every day- it's that question that haunts me, that keeps me up at night. Instead of turning the world upside-down for Jesus, why are we simply turning the world away?