Spiritual Growth
(Bible Study - April 2000) Previously we have looked at various aspects of faith as they contrasted with that same aspect under the law. For instance, we considered the topic of "sin" as understood in the covenant of grace versus sin in the legal realm. We have continued using this device of contrast because the Bible establishes the contrast and demands that we understand faith in its contradistinction from law.
However, the topic of spiritual growth has no counterpart in the legalist system. Just using the idea of spiritual growth removes us from the realm of law. We can only have spiritual growth in the covenant of grace. As we shall soon see, the idea of "growth" carries implications that cannot exist in a legal approach.
Job’s perspective
In the previous article, we noted that Job had a limited measuring system of
righteousness. If he did right and eschewed evil, he was fine. Having done nothing wrong,
he was righteous. By his own admission, he had no room for growth. Whatever God required
of him, he did. His testimonies (chapters 29 &31) lacked, as the last article pointed
out, any reference to faith. He related to God not as a student to a teacher, but he
envisioned God as a judge whose function was to reward Job for his righteous deeds. At the
end of the book, Almighty God queried Job about his ability to create ex nihilo
(out of nothing), and being found wanting in that category, Job learned something
important: he didn’t know much about God, after all. He knew much about the self-made
God of his own creation, but he didn’t know much about the one real God. His most
important learning was this: he needed to be a learner and beneficiary. Humbled by the
dramatic display of his human limitations versus the unlimited power of the Almighty, Job
found the perspective of life he needed. No, a limited human could not expect to come up
with a rational explanation of evil visited upon the "righteous." It
could only come from the mind of the Eternal Creator.
Sometimes we can’t see things, whether in life or in the scriptures. Sometimes we need years to learn a lesson of life or understand a passage of scripture. Nevertheless, that’s our calling, to learn and to grow. Job’s theology had it that one arrived at a state of acceptability, a status of goodness to which God responded with blessing. By dramatizing the vast chasm between the eternal wisdom and power of the Creator, and the minimal wisdom and minuscule power of the created, God set the perspective for Job, and for us. Job’s problem wasn’t that he was a bad person as his friends made him out to be, but that he was incomplete. He didn’t know his role -- one who would learn and seek help.
The eternal quest for knowledge
We never come, as we unfortunately often hear, to a "knowledge of the Truth."
Certainly, we understand basics of the gospel, and we become baptized in that belief. We
proclaim the baptism to be a birth. If so, whence is the growth that comes afterwards?
Does it ever stop? Do we ever really know enough about God and Jesus? Can that which is
mortal ever truly say it knows all about the immortal? If we could fully understand God,
would He really be God?
We understand that our knowledge is always incomplete, and therefore always growing. We seek more than just book knowledge, however; we desire the knowledge that builds faith and love. Of that knowledge we can never have enough. We need to grow, not in the sense that we need to know more to achieve some level, but because it is the process of growing itself that marks the disciple. The kingdom of heaven has neither a minimum entrance requirement nor a "full" line on some spiritual dipstick. To think either "I need to know more" or "I already know enough" means you have replaced spiritual growth with a legalist construct, especially because such statements invariably focus on academic Bible knowledge.
We should accept the truth of our need for lifelong learning, but not in the sense that we need to know more to "get into the kingdom." We do need the constant input of scripture, lest one’s mind revert, as Robert Roberts so pungently stated, "to its original swinishness." If we think we know enough, we will quit learning, and then what knowledge we thought we had will erode, leaving us in our fleshly values and affections.
Another problem with thinking we know enough is that knowledge can block further learning. This "knowledge barrier" had particular application to the Pharisees. The Pharisees couldn’t see the Messiah because they already knew about Messiah. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" "Is not he the carpenter’s son?" Because they "knew" all about Messiah, when Messiah came, they had no room for new learning. They left themselves no room for growth. The possibility of undiscovered truth was forever lost on them.
When we think we know, we close our minds to new options. A closed mind gathers no new insights, and ceases to grow. In that sense, we never come to a "knowledge of the Truth."
Building on the past
Does this mean we periodically abandon our fundamentals in search of new teachings and
new behavior? Not at all. Growth, whether natural or physical, builds on itself. By its
very nature, spiritual growth continually builds on the spiritual foundations to increase
our knowledge and performance as disciples. We do not look to jettison our past, but
continually to refine and elaborate, standing on our own shoulders to reach further into
the mind of the spirit. In nature an organism grows by expanding on its original genetic
blueprint. Likewise, in the spirit we grow by expanding on God’s blueprint, in an
endless pattern that starts with the smallest flicker of faith.
We don’t reject our past; we use the past as the foundation for the next step. This is also a key to understanding the nature of spiritual growth. Every time we think we "have it," we realize the "it" we have is another plateau on which to stand to see a new horizon, and move on to the next higher level of spirituality. We never sit on that plateau, thinking we have arrived at our destination. We have no final destination regarding our spiritual development, as our goal is not complying with a known and finite set of rules and regulations. Our goal is Christlikeness, and we never can say we’re there.
Three areas of growth
We grow spiritually in three ways:
First, and most basic, of course, is in our knowledge of scripture. Being the reflection of the Divine mind that it is, scripture never fails to offer more of its treasures to the diligent seeker. Read any portion for the hundredth time and still new lessons emerge.
Applying God’s word to our lives is the second way we grow. Any Christadelphian child knows dozens of memory verses. Yet how old must we get until we really appreciate and act upon "the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord"? Ask a fifty-year-old and an eighty-year-old who have known this teaching from their youth if it still has the same impact as it did decades ago. Hundreds of other passages and teachings are the same. The more experience we have with life, the more meaning and fuller application we can realize.
The third area of spiritual growth sets us apart from the legalist model more than anything else in the whole area of learning. This third area covers what we call "expanding horizons," or the paradox of learning. As we plan to discuss in a future article, the New Covenant contains many inherent paradoxes. The nature of the New Covenant requires paradox, and the paradox appropriate to this article concerns the principal of knowledge and learning.
The nature of man constitutes one of the principle teachings of scripture. We learn from the Bible that we are, as one brother elegantly stated, "a sackful of sin." We learn of our faults, our limitations, our frailty, our utter dependence on the Almighty. We could cite again the last few chapters of Job, in which the Almighty "reminds" Job of these truths. So we learn that we really don’t amount to much, by nature. We learn that we really don’t know much. The more we learn about human nature, the more we learn how limited it is. Thus, the paradox: the more we learn, the more we don’t know. At least if we study aright and use our Bible knowledge for its intended purpose, we grow in the realization of our ignorance.
Under the legal framework, the more one knew, the more one knew. In the realm of the spirit, the more one knows, the more one becomes aware of how much one doesn’t know. This is the expanding horizon mentioned above. When we learn spiritual truth, we learn the relationship between man and God. We learn how much we don’t know. We develop humility and meekness as side-effects. The young, inexperienced brother who has done a little studying believes he knows all about Romans. The old, wise brother, with decades of reading and study, knows how much he doesn’t know about Romans. If a human could fully appreciate and understand the word of God, would scripture truly reflect the mind of an omniscient Deity?
Spiritual growth means we do learn more and more. But this learning should teach us more and more that we are indeed less and less. Each time we climb higher we realize a bigger and broader picture of God, Jesus, man, and the kingdom. Our absolute knowledge grows, but our relative knowledge shrinks. We thus diminish self and magnify the Creator and His son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Contrast with rules
As we said at the beginning of this article, the Old Covenant had no contrast of
spiritual growth. The Old Covenant system, the principle of law, couldn’t contain a
concept of expanding horizons. It had absolutes: a set of rules to follow. One didn’t
grow into new sets of rules. They had one set, one standard, one expectation. You met it
or you didn’t. Because only behaviors count in rule-based theology, spiritual growth,
which affected values, character, and identity, had no relevance.
Practical applications
If we all grow, it is a given that we’re all at different places along the way.
We all have the same goal, but we’re all at different places in our journey to that
goal. No one achieves the goal. It’s impossible for humans to achieve perfection.
Some of us will get further than others, but no one "wins" the race.
Jesus said, in one of the many teachings on spiritual growth, that some would produce
thirty-fold, some sixty-fold, some a hundred-fold (Mk. 4:20). God accepts all these. He
excludes only those who don’t grow at all.
So we accept our variations. We never alter our one standard, but we do understand that everyone is at a different level and moving at a different rate. That leads us to the realm of patience, longsuffering, tolerance, and forbearance.
Against such there is no law
Bible teaching on spiritual growth uses the natural world as its basis. Going back as
far as the creation, we can see the elements of a pattern. On the third day (Gen. 1:9-12),
dry land appears out of water. The dry land bears plant life. The plants sustain their
life, bearing fruit containing the seeds for the next generation. The spiritual parallel:
when we emerge from water (at baptism), we begin the process of bearing spiritual fruit. "First
the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear" (Hymn 323). The
fruit of our faith, like its natural counterpart, sustains itself. The more faith we have,
the more we can grow. No seed, no fruit. No fruit, no seed.
Scripture often uses the natural world to illustrate spiritual growth. The first psalm speaks of those who love God’s word as being like a tree planted by a river that flourishes and "bears fruit in its season." Psalm 92:12-14 describes a similar picture, likening the righteous to palm trees which bear in their old age. Isaiah 5:1-7 (the basis of the parable of the vineyard) likens the righteous to those who bear good grapes, but unfortunately the vineyard (sinful Israel) only yielded bad grapes. Many of Jesus’ parables involved pictures of plants growing and bearing fruit -- or not. All these figures of speech involve something living, thriving, growing, and, ultimately, bearing fruit. Without fruit, a plant cannot survive. It must reproduce itself. Jesus cursed the fig tree because it only looked alive, but bore no fruit. Bearing fruit is the ultimate goal of natural and spiritual growth.
Fortunately, we have no need to guess the identity of spiritual fruit. Paul lists the nine aspects of the singular fruit in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. In a letter filled with his most direct appeals about the vanity of following laws, Paul gives this wonderful example of spiritual growth. If we don’t develop this fruit from our Bible study and walk in the Truth, we have contravened God’s intent for His word.
Paul concludes the list of characteristics of spiritual fruit with the phrase, "against such there is no law." We could hardly ask for a more cogent teaching concerning spiritual growth and legalism. No law, says Paul, can substitute for the development of spiritual fruit. No law can condemn a person who bears spiritual fruit. No system of law can have spiritual fruit as its outcome. The phrase might mean any or all these, but whatever exactly Paul meant, we do know that he placed spiritual growth outside the realm of law. Spirit can produce spiritual fruit, but law can’t. Law can’t give life, it can’t build character, it can’t contain the ever-increasing perspective one needs for continual growth. Only spirit-mindedness can do this. Love, faith, an awareness of our utter dependence on God the Creator, an appreciation of our debt to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the ever-increasing awareness of our own humanity -- these are the bases of spiritual growth. None of them can develop through legal and ritual observance.
The topic of spiritual growth can take us to many places and lines of thought. If we put it all in perspective of something that exists entirely on a higher level than the principle of rules, we will have a framework to gain the benefits of our study in this area. To grow, we must inhabit (theologically) a system that allows for growth. The system of grace and faith, the New Covenant of our Lord Jesus Christ, provides the framework we need. We have the seed. We need to cultivate the soil.
Lord, help us grow and bear fruit forever in your Kingdom.
Next: Lessons from Hebrews
David Levin