Faith Firmly Rooted

As a minister of discipleship within a local church, I can relate many stories of people finding a Bible Study within our church, plugging in, and beginning to grow deep roots in God's word and in their relationship with Christ.

For others, finding the right Bible study can be a challenge.  Here are some things to keep in mind about that.

Ask yourself: Whose job is it to see that I grow spiritually?

Here are the most common answers to such a question.

1. It is my pastor's job

Yes and no on this one.  Your pastor is entrusted with shepherding and  spiritual caring for the "flock" that God has placed under his stewardship.  However, if all you do is come to church, sing some songs, and listen to a sermon once a week, you might or might not actually ever begin to grow spiritually.  Most every pastor (and virtually every pastor worth listening to) would agree that if you really want to start growing spiritually, you'll need to be involving yourself with other believers in Bible study and prayer.  Do you know what statistics are showing to be the number one proven way for churchgoers to begin growing spiritually is? It is simply this: Prayerfully study the Bible when you are not at church!  Your pastor can't force you to do that, but he can certainly influence and encourage you to do so.

2. It is my church's job (or my discipleship pastor's job)

Yes and no on this one. Your church (and your discipleship pastor if you have one) are like your pastor in that they are entrusted with overseeing and facilitating the spiritual development of those God has placed under their stewardship.  However, as much as they labor to assist in people's spiritual growth and make it easy for them, sometimes it doesn't seem to happen.  I occasionally receive complaints from people that they are not growing spiritually...some of whom are deeply involved in a Bible study.  I know...it is a head scratcher.  But even though your church and your ministers strive hard to help you grow spiritually, the job is partly your responsibility as well.  Do you show up to church ready to listen and learn?  Do you attend a Bible study at your church expecting to hear God speak to you through the scripture?  Or are you waiting for just the right Bible study to come along with just the right people with just the right teacher?  You might be waiting a long time. 

3. It is MY job

This might be getting close to the right answer.  It's almost there.  As we said before, you should absolutely take responsibilty for your own spiritual growth.  Don't let obstacles deter you from it.  Your pastor will try to influence and the church should provide avenues for spiritual growth, but nothing is stopping you from picking the Bible up or praying.  Every day, spend time in prayer and Bible study.  Don't let your spiritual growth rise or fall on a Bible study teacher or whether you can manage to squeeze in time for a small group during the week on top of serving and worshipping.  Take ownership of your spiritual development.  Make it your priority.  Rearrange your schedule and priorities if you must.  See if you can let God have your heart every single moment of every single day whether you are at church or not, whether you are reading the Bible or doing anything under the sun!  And yet, the responsibility doesn't rest on you alone...

 

4. It is God's job

Here's a very important truth.  God desires that you grow spiritually.  And He is orchestrating it behind the scenes in countless ways - through the experiences He allows you, through the relationships you have, through the sermons you hear, prayers you pray, conversations you have, etc.  Even when you think you are not growing spiritually, God might strongly disagree.  Watch and pray for eyes to see how He is growing you and stretching your faith even in ways you might not see at first glance.  Write them down if you need to.  The Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.  (Philippians 2:12-13)

Notice that there are two things at "work".  We are continuing to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.  The idea is that we strive to live in obedience to God and live for Him.  But the second "work" is God's work.  And it is a different tense.  This is a completed work that is already finished.  Someone once said, "We are in the process of becoming who God already sees us as."  Christ saved us.  We are in the process of living like it and in the process of being saved. (The big word for the process is sanctification...we are in the process of being sanctified or made holy or set apart.)  We do our everything to grow spiritually, knowing that it is ultimately God alone who brings it about in our lives, in His own ways and in His own timing and He who started the work in us will be faithful to complete it...and this is so certain that He already HAS completed it! 

Whose job is spiritual growth anyway?  YES...your pastor and your church play a part.  YES...you are accountable for your own spiritual growth.  YES and most emphatically...God grants it, He does it, He gets the job done in His people's lives.     

-RCW

YES, I HAVE SOME SPLAININ' TO DO
So it has definitely been a while since my last post...(about 10 months to be exact!)  I really don't like making excuses and never have...It's a nasty habit to break if you start getting comfortable or used to doing it.

Nevertheless, I will say that for the past few months, things have been very trying within my household...My wife went into labor just hours after my last post in March of 2011.  We now have a beautiful baby girl and my life has certainly never been the same.  

I also navigated a transition in ministry (that's minister talk for "After 9 to 18 gut-wrenching months of soul-searching and intense prayer, I got a new assignment from God"), relocated my family about 1,000 miles away from where we were, began a new job (still working in the area of adult discipleship for a church), and celebrated my 30th birthday as well! 

But all of this change, pain, prayer, upheaval, and adjusting has been a tremendous positive.  And as a new dad, I am overwhelmed by the transformation that having a child makes.  The birth of my daughter has transformed who I am.  Here's why.  Let the one with ears to hear -- hear:


MARRIAGE MEANS THAT MY DISCIPLESHIP IS ALL AT ONCE EASIER, HARDER, & OF GREATER CONSEQUENCE...
As a follower of Christ, we are called to daily deny our self, take up the instrument of our torturous death, and follow Him (Luke 9:23).  When a follower of Christ gets married, it is as though God reveals three things.

At first, God seems to make it easier to obey Him and die to self.  After all, a married person has a more routine daily need to deny themselves.  This is simply natural to any good marriage...You have to take into consideration the interests of another and compromise sometimes because it's not all about you anymore.  It's now about 2 people together laying aside their own agendas to be one.  It's such an immediate necessity, that it should be easier, right?  Wrong.

Soon enough, we realize that God (and our spouse!) is challenging us.  What was seemingly going to be easier turns out to be very difficult.  God has designed marriage as a process by which we are forced to lean more greatly upon His wisdom, relying less and less on our own ability.  In other words, God designed marriage to make you more like Him.  Our selfishness is quite often exposed and we can fail both God and our spouse rather frequently. 

Finally, unless we surrender our selfishness, our marriage is going to suffer.  In fact, our marriage could be a wreck until we sacrifice our selfishness.  Once wed to another, your spiritual life (or lack thereof) now effects someone else greatly every single day.


...BUT PARENTHOOD MEANS AN EVEN GREATER CALL TO DISCIPLESHIP
The day you become a father--which, by the way, is the day your honey finds out she is prego and not simply the day your child is born--everything changes again.  You are called to an even greater amount of surrender to God.  It is SO not about you any longer.  In fact, it couldn't be any less about you.  "Children change a marriage" to be sure...I read that book.  They also change a person.  For the Christ-follower, parenthood is just an even more serious call to die to self, take up the cross daily, and follow the Master.

God has given me a daughter and entrusted her care to my wife and me.  Thanks, Jesus, for making it both easier and harder to drop my selfishness, deny my self, and follow after you more closely.  After all, the stakes just keep getting higher. 

Keep me broken, Lord.   Amen.

-RCW        

P.S. Yes, I know I failed miserably to accomplish my goal of blogging more in 2011.  But in my defense, the lack of comments on the site doesn't exactly display a great amount of disappointment from anyone!  ;)  Lordwilling, there will be more writing forthcoming in 2012.

Well, 2009 has come and gone and evidently, my informants ESPN alerted me a few days ago (with their "top ten plays of the decade" and whatnot) that a decade has drawn to a close.  This of course should not have been news to me, but somehow my silly brain was imagining that it would be another year (at the completion of 2010) that such a "turn-of-the-page" would come.  Seeing as how I have only lived through a couple of these decade things, and seeing as how the last one changed when I was all of 18, I am hit with the magnitude of the occasion.

Not wanting to let the moment slip by without sneaking in a quick line, I worked to squeeze in time for a post.

I have spoken before of how the Christian life---from our birth, to our spiritual birth or conversion, and throughout our entire life until our dying day---is a process.  It is a spiritual journey in which God is drawing us closer to Himself.  We may not always understand how or why or that it is even happening, but for Christians walking with God, He is perfecting us all the while and transforming us back into the image-bearers He meant for us to be...in the image of Christ. I have written about this subject (sanctification) previously.

With that spiritual and theological reality firmly in mind, let me ask you----could you adequately map your spiritual journey in words or art or music or a line graph or some medium of the sort?  What if you reflected on where God has brought you, what He has done in you, what He has transformed about you and when by the decade?  Where were you spiritually in the early 80s?  What changed about your faith by the mid 90s?  What did God do in your life by 2000 or by the time you had children, etc?  This is a spiritual journey and it is important (even very Hebrew) to walk forward through life looking backwards over your shoulder and recalling the great things that God has done.  This reflection is also healthy, deeply rewarding, and often humbling.  It also happens to be a marvelous spiritual exercise to start any new year.

Have a happy one!

-RCW

P.S. One of the astonishing things about this sort of activity is that you may at times be tempted to think that you had certain times or years when you were far from God or that you felt distant from Him.  Let me encourage you that it is often in our lowest and bleakest of states that God is doing the most refining and bringing about the most spiritual growth in our lives.  If I were to graph the spiritual "valleys" of my life, I doubt very much if God would chart them as valleys...to Him they might be mountaintops.  For it is when we are weakest---when we must lean most closely upon Him for everything---that His power is perfected in us.  To adapt some words from A.W. Tozer: "Before God can use a man greatly, He has to break a man deeply." 

P.P.S. For you theology dorks like me out there, Wayne Grudem provides a good spiritual growth graph of this sort in his Systematic Theology in the section on sanctification.   

Here is another response to some of your questions:

No matter what the preachers on television may tell you, hear this:

If you have given your life to Christ, you have already received the Holy Spirit.

You don't need to pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon you a 2nd time. You don't need to pray for (or fabricate) a religious experience that would prove to yourself or anyone else that you are a follower of Christ. Some churches have a type of elitist mentality among them...they would agree in principle that as followers of Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, etc...that Christians are all equal before God. Yet, within their religious community of faith, they practice a different standard...they elevate those that have had a "tongues" experience as somehow "super-spiritual"; meanwhile, those who have not had such an experience are denigrated to the substrata of the "lesser-spirituals."

There is a boat load of scripture to support what I am saying. If you want to dive into this matter further and better understand the Holy Spirit, I'd order this, this, this, or this for starters.

And whatever you do, don't buy some prayer cloth that you have to pay $19.95 to activate...


-RCW

Tomorrow we'll head back from Missouri to Texas. Flying is a wonderful thing. As I was thinking about the trip, I thought I might blog about one of the Biblical themes that is worth remembering....

The Bible teaches that when someone becomes a Christian, God initiates something within them. It is salvation from death. But when does salvation take place according to the Bible? The answer? Well, the Bible teaches that salvation is something that takes place in the past (when the sinner first faiths in Christ...and that God even foreknew who would be saved from eternity past!). The Bible ALSO teaches that salvation is something that will ultimately take place in the future (either on the day of judgment or when the Christian dies an earthly death). Lastly, (and what is seldom remembered) is that the Bible ALSO teaches that salvation is something taking place right now...that God is in the business of making us perfect. God is making us holy even now. In short, the Bible teaches that salvation is something that is a past, present, and future reality.

As Christians, we should remember that God is still at work within us even when we can't see Him at work. We are all on the "long journey home." Hebrews 11:13-16 speaks of the many Old Testament heroes from the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and says that they looked forward to their heavenly home with earnest expectation. With faith, they recognized that this life is not all there is...that there is a world to come that we are moving toward, waiting for, and to adapt from the words of St. Augustine, that our hearts are restless until we rest in it.

As my wife and I get ready for a long plane ride home, I couldn't help but think of that spiritual reality. That God is preparing His children for a world in which there is no more suffering, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more death! Praise You, Oh God for the victory and the hope that You have given us in You!

-RCW

P.S. * To enjoy a good read about the Christian life as a journey home to "the promised land" and all the ups, downs, struggles, victories, friends, foes, twists and turns along the straight and narrow way that leads to Christ, I recommend John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (but make sure you read the updated and abridged version). *