Dear friends,
Except you wish to remain where you are forever, your aim in life has got to be to move forward always. To progress. To stretch or expand. To enlarge your territory. To reach forth and touch greater things. In two words, "to grow."
Now, this is not just about any type of growth. It's about the most powerful growth direction we can ever have. It's about growth in Christ. Today, we have a post from an anonymous writer on this subject. May this touch someone's heart, and more than anything, may it be a word in season for that special someone whose heart God has been pulling closer.
What It Takes to Truly Grow in Christ
| Image by Sarai Rachel on Flickr. Creative Commons License. |
You will always have the opportunity to be busy...
...to be focused on work or career or friendships or any other thing that the enemy has gradually made or is making your identity. And before you dismiss the notion that your identity couldn't possibly be wrapped in something that sounds as shallow as work or career or friendships or a certain status or persona, or being spiritual or being an intellectual or being a theologian, pastor, etc., please be objective.
Here's the thing: it is possible to know scriptures and to say the right things, and yet not know the heart of God. And it is not enough of an excuse to point to hypocritical Christians and say because I don't want to be like that, I'll lead a life where I don't pour myself into God as much. I do not want to be weird or alienated.
Step back and fight away the automatic defiance or reasoning that says you are doing enough, or the impulse to compare yourself to another and conclude you are better. It's time for a change in the way you've been thinking. It's time to do more. It's time to grow.
What It Means to Truly Grow in Christ
To truly grow in Christ is to pay attention to Christ and the Holy Spirit. To truly grow is to make your interactions/devotions more about Him than your list of what you want (I am not saying you shouldn't ask for what you want). To do the above though, you must be brutally and rigorously honest with yourself. You need a daily desert to detox from the toxicity of the day – words, ideas, impressions, etc., that paint a wrong view of who you are and who God is.
"We truly live at the mercy of our ideas, especially our ideas about God." (Dallas Willard)
1. You must be willing to see the darkness within to see your utmost need for Christ.
2. You must be willing to not excuse your missteps. Any excuse or reason you come up with doesn't change the fact that you did do A or B or that you felt or thought in a sinful manner.
Let us all get off our high horse. We are...
...the woman caught in adultery
...the betrayer called Judas
...the one with a blackened Heart in Jer 17:9
...both the Pharisee and the Sadducee
...the rich fool whose focus was building bigger bans
...the rich man that ignored Lazarus
Your Call to Action Today
Please carve out time to be attentive to God. Be ruthless about it, carve out time and mental space – ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your lives. Do not mold your day whereby you are so busy and even when you want to spend time with God, you sleep off.
It’s not that you can’t make time, it’s that you chose not to.
Daily carve out time and space with God. Interact with God beyond your devotional time, even a few minutes of interaction does your soul good. Do not see your time with God an item to check off.
His yoke is easy and his burden is light. If your day is too filled for you to fully turn to God for a few minutes, then something is wrong somewhere. You have too much on your plate. This is not to say what’s on your plate is somehow evil, it could be all noble tasks and interacting with great friends. However, to truly grow in Christ, you might have to reduce your commitment to those people and/or things so you can spend a bit more time with your Creator.
Selah.
