There is a gap between what we mean to do and what we actually do, and anyone who has ever tried to live a Christian life knows exactly where that gap is.
You come home from a camp or a conference full of good intentions. You are going to pray more seriously. You are going to read your Bible faithfully this time. You may even decide you are going to be nicer to your wife. Then the days pass, and somehow the gap seems to get wider instead of smaller. Before long, you are reading Paul in Romans and recognizing yourself with some discomfort: I really want to do what is right, but I can’t. I do what I don’t want to do — what I hate.
Much of the teaching on Christian growth approaches that gap by telling us to try harder. Paul did not. He told the Philippians something quite different, and it is the sentence this whole subject rests on: he who began a good work in you will continue it until the day of Jesus Christ, developing and perfecting and bringing it to full completion.
He began the work. He will finish it. Our part is real, but we are not the ones supplying the power that makes it happen.
→ God’s Going to Get It Done In You! — and here is a suggestion I would take myself: read Philippians aloud every day for a month, nineteen minutes at a time, putting your own name into it wherever Paul is speaking about the Philippians.
Why Does the Word Work Like a Seed?
Because that is the way Jesus said it works, and He spent a whole day teaching about it.
A seed is put into the ground and disappears. For a while, nothing seems to be happening. Then, under the right conditions, it produces thirtyfold, sixtyfold, or a hundredfold. The harvest is not produced by the soil straining to make something happen. The life is already in the seed.
That also helps explain the two things that most often interfere with the Word.
The enemy comes immediately to take the Word away because he knows what will happen if it is allowed to remain. Then there are the cares of life, the distractions, and the false glamour of the age. Those things crowd in and choke the Word. That is not nearly as dramatic as the first problem, but it is probably the more common one.
So the first discipline of spiritual growth is not particularly glamorous: keep putting the Word in, and guard what has already been planted.
Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. There is no shortcut around that sentence and no substitute for it.
What Does It Mean to Meditate?
It does not mean emptying your mind. It means filling your mind deliberately with one subject.
Starr Daily, whose teaching is in this library because someone had the good sense to record it, described the practice about as plainly as it can be described.
First, become still. Quiet the senses and the clamor underneath them. Slow everything down until you reach a place of peace. Starr Daily believed that if you could learn to become that still, you could pray adequately. This is the kind of prayer that gets answers, he taught, because by the time you reach that place there is very little left that needs asking for.
Then choose a subject. And the subject is Jesus Himself — as He was in history, as He is now, and as He is in the Father and the Spirit. Everything else begins to arrange itself around that center.
Then comes confession, and here Starr Daily becomes more searching than most of us are comfortable with.
The real enemy in us is the imagination, but the imagination is also one of the highest faculties we have. It is how we form our picture of God. It is how we recognize His image in the faces of people passing on the street. It is how we bring something we are praying about into focus until it becomes real to us.
It is also where our secret sins can live.
So confess the secret things rather than merely the outward ones. Jesus said that what defiles a person is not what goes into the mouth.
→ Meditation by Starr Daily — an evening session, transcribed from the recording.
Is God Actually Pleased With People Who Get It Wrong?
The Pharisees had a saying that there was joy in heaven over a sinner being brought low before God. They meant it, and they had built an entire way of life around it. You did not lend such a man money, accept his word as evidence, travel with him, eat at his table, or allow him to eat at yours.
Then Jesus sat down and ate with them.
When the Pharisees began to grumble, He told them the story of the lost sheep and ended by saying that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.
That is not a sentimental little lesson. It is the difference between a religion you perform and a relationship in which you are held.
If you have spent years trying to construct a version of yourself that you can be proud of, this is genuinely offensive. But if you are somewhere in a far country, having made a mess of things, it is some of the best news you will ever hear.
The son who took his inheritance and wasted it did not earn his way home. He rehearsed a speech about no longer being worthy to be called a son, but his father would not even let him finish it.
→ When Rebellion Turns To Obedience — the Pharisees, the prodigal, and the brother who stayed.
Is Hearing Enough?
No. James is blunt about it: do not fool yourself into thinking you are a listener when you are doing nothing with what you hear. Act on the Word.
This is where growth is either real or imaginary.
A person can know a great deal of Scripture and still do very little of what it says. The result is a particular kind of Christian — well informed, confident, and yet powerless. The New Testament has little encouragement for that condition.
Wesley’s converts included miners who could not read the sermons that had converted them. They heard the Word, and they acted on what they heard.
If you want something to work through rather than simply read, I have one.
Seven of the eight parts of my outline The Foundation for Faith deal with the Word itself — where its authority comes from and how it works for healing, for victory over sin, for cleansing, and as both mirror and judge.
There are 136 Scripture references and very little prose. That is the point.
→ Download the outline for The Foundation for Faith — free, and it goes with the audio series of the same name.
Why Does Any of This Matter?
Because the goal was never simply to give us more information. The goal was transformation, and that transformation was purchased for us.
You are not growing in order to become acceptable to God. You were made acceptable at the cross, by the blood of Christ, before you knew anything about it. The new nature you are learning to live from is something Christ bought and put in you.
Growth is not a matter of climbing your way up to Him. It is the slow process of learning to live out what He has already done.
He began the good work. He will finish it.
Our part is to keep putting the Word into our lives, to do what it says, and to refuse to quit while He does the rest.
Still to come in this series: Developing Spiritually · Do What the Word Says · God Speaks: The Seed of His Word Is Sown · Jezebel: Woman Trouble in the Church · Keep the Word in Your Mouth · Lead Us Not Into Temptation. Each will be linked here as it publishes.
