A checklist for
growth
Matthew 22:34
There can be a tendency
in our lives as Christians to stagnate.
We get used to our own routines, our expectations of the Christian life,
and our own experience of God. They become
comfortable around us, like an old blanket.
We feel secure within our faith, and don’t appreciate any change to our
understanding. We have set our limits
on our expectations of what it means to follow God. We don’t expect him to ask any more of us in our understanding
than we have already.
The problem is of course,
that if we are getting to know God, being a Christian is never going to leave
us in the same place for long. We are
followers, not sitters. We are learners,
not arrivers. God is mystery, and
therefore there is always so much more of him to comprehend than we know
already.
If we have ceased from
growing, if we have set our limits, then we perhaps have missed out on the
further riches of his love that he longs to show us. We are perhaps not receiving the gifts he wants to give us for
the building up of his church.
So the question for us is
not “Do we need to grow?” But “How do
we grow in faith?” Where do we
start? If we have become used to certain
limited expectations of God’s activity in our lives, then we may feel pretty
clueless about where we should follow him next. We need spiritual direction.
For each of us, growth will mean different things, but it seems to me
that the phrase, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul, mind and
strength” gives us a pretty good checklist about the various ways in which God
might be calling us to grow.
Whatever else it is
about, growing in our faith is about growing as Whole people, loving the lord our God with all our hearts,
our souls, our minds, and our strength.
So growing in faith is about growing in all these areas. Some of us may feel we are more heart people
than mind people, some of us may feel we are more strength people than soul
people. But a full faith, a whole
relationship with God will only take root in us if we pay attention to all the
aspects of who we are.
So we need to look for
clues about how we can grow in our
hearts-our gift of love to God.
Our heart is the place where we can praise, where we can give thanks,
where we can love. Grow in praise of God
and we can't go far wrong. A mature
Christian is a grateful Christian.
Story about a friend who climbed up a mountain.
We need to pay attention
to our souls-the part of us which burns with compassion and which yearns for
justice and a renewed world again. Our
soul calls us to live the life of discipleship from our guts. To feel compassion for those who are needy,
to see God’s kingdom coming on earth.
We need to pay attention to our minds. Paul writes, "Brothers and sisters, be transformed by the renewing of your mind." We don't naturally see the world as God sees it, or even ourselves as God sees us. We need the discipline of learning to think Christianly to interpret life and events through the scandal of God's love. It is so easy for us to become indoctrinated by the attitudes and expectations of the culture around us. But we need to be people whose view is formed by what God has said and what God thinks. So we need to take opportunities to have our minds renewed-reading the Bible, studying it as best we can, finding ways of making it come alive to us. Reading what other Christians have written, what they have done, how God has spoken to them.
And finally we need to
pay attention to our strength-by which I understand our physical selves, the
way we relate to God's creation as physical people. Finding God in daily life, in the things we see, in the people we
meet, the things we touch and smell.
Don't expect him just to turn up in church or in spiritual moments. The world we live in belongs to
him-everything in it, and so we can meet him there.
Love the Lord your God
with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength. For those who like checklists and
activities, who want to know what they should do, there is a way
ahead. But at the end of the day I want
to qualify what I have said. Because we
can have all the checklists and techniques we like, yet we just need one thing,
and that is God himself. We are not
children, we need to grow up. But the
real truth is that while we don't want to be immature, we need to be
childlike. I want to finish by reading
page 30 of Eugene Peterson paragraph 1.