Spiritual Growth

Someone said, I believe, something to the effect that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”. And so it is. Self-examination has got to be an ongoing part of our lives, not merely a few moments each week as we notice the bread and wine creeping towards us. As I come up to 40 years old, I can just about start to look back, as well as look forward. In departure from my usual expositional style, I decided to share with you what I understand by spiritual growth. For each life lived in Christ, it will be somewhat different; but the essential processes are the same. The body of believers will ultimately manifest the fullness of Christ, the glory of God. I suggest this happens by each believer coming to reflect some particular part of that glory. One may develop wonderful patience with others’ weaknesses; another may develop faith in prayer for others’ illnesses. Between us, over history, we finally reflect the full body and character of Jesus. And when we’re done, He will come, as He finally sees His reflection here on earth. The temple was laid out, like the tabernacle, as a man’s body (when seen from a bird’s eye view); as if God’s intention was to look down upon His people and see Himself reflected in them. The Lord Jesus looks down upon His people, for all of them live unto Him in some sense, and wishes to see Himself reflected in us.

I once did a Bible School, comparing the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Samson, Job, Paul and Peter. I discerned some common elements in their drive to spiritual maturity. Over their lives, they all display an increasing appreciation of the Name of God; a growing sense of the certainty of their salvation, as well as an ever finer conviction of their own sinfulness; a deeper appreciation of God’s promises and the basic doctrines of the Gospel; a marvel at grace; and an ever deeper Christ / Messiah centredness.

The Way of the Cross

It was the late, great Bro Jim Broughton who gave me good advice in my teens. His recommendation was to try to imagine the crucifixion of Jesus each time I broke bread, and each time to try to realize some new insight into His sufferings and achievement. I’ve indeed tried to do this, and I commend it. It’s been a factor in my growth. The margins of my Bibles are full of scribbled notes around the chapters relating the crucifixion. It’s midnight in Minsk as I write this. I’m still thinking of the little insight I had last Sunday. It was a reflection on the observations of many that what a man needs most as he dies… is not to face death alone. To have someone with him. The way the Lord sent Mary and John away from Him at the very end is profound in its reflection of His total selflessness, His deep thought for others rather than Himself. It also reflects how He, more than any other man, faced the ultimate human realities and issues which death exposes. He met them totally alone, the supreme example of human bravery in the face of death. And He faced them fully, with no human cushion or literal or psychological anaesthesia to dilute the awful, crushing reality of it. Remember how He refused the painkiller. And through baptism and life in Him, we are asked to die with Him, to share something of His death, the type and nature of death which He had... in our daily lives. Little wonder we each seem to sense some essential, existential, quintessential… loneliness in our souls. Thus it must be for those who share in His death. I’m grateful to Cindy for a quote from a wise doctor: “What you can really do for a person who is dying, is to die with him”. How inadvertently profound that thought becomes when applied to the death of our Lord, and to us as we imagine ourselves standing by and watching Him there. “What you can really do for a person who is dying, is to die with him”.

The Way of Personal Failure

Sin, both our own and the sins of others against us, is actually used by God in a wonderful way. Not that this of course justifies sin. But it is a fact that through our experience of the sin-repentance-forgiveness process, we grow hugely. Here we have the answer to those who cannot forgive themselves for past sins. God works out His plan of salvation actually through man’s disobedience rather than his obedience. As Paul puts it, we are concluded in unbelief, that God may have mercy (Rom. 11:32). It was and is the spirit of Joseph, when he comforted his brothers: “Now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45:5). And again, speaking about the sin of Israel in rejecting Christ: “Their trespass means riches for the [Gentile] world” (Rom. 11:12). Or yet again, think of how Abraham’s lie about Sarah and unfaithfulness to his marriage covenant with her became a source of God’s blessing and the curing of  Abimelech’s wife from infertility (Gen. 20:17). The righteousness of God becomes available to us exactly because we have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23,24). If we lie, then through our lie the truth and glory of God is revealed (Rom. 3:7). The light comes into the world - the light of hope of salvation, forgiveness of God in Christ - but this light reveals to us our verdict of ‘guilty’ (Jn. 3:18,36).

David was aware that God didn't really want sacrifice, or else he would so eagerly have offered it (Ps. 51:16,17). Instead, David perceived that what God wanted in essence was a broken and contrite spirit. The Bathsheba incident was programmatic for David's understanding of God, and his prayers and psalms subsequently can be expected to have constant allusion back to it. We meet the same idea of God not ultimately wanting sacrifice in Ps. 40:6-9: "Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire [but instead] mine ears hast thou opened [Heb. 'digged'- a reference to a servant being permanently committed as a slave to his master]: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required. Then said I, Lo, I come... to do thy will... thy law is within my heart". In Ps. 51:17, David had reasoned that instead of sacrifice, God wanted a heart that was broken and contrite. Here he reflects that instead of sacrifice, God wants a heart that has the law of God within it. This ultimately is the effect of God's law being in our heart- it creates a broken and contrite heart. But how? In the experience of most of us, the law does this through convicting us of our inability to keep it. And so we see how guilt and grace work so seamlessly together. David's broken heart was a heart which knew he had sinned, sinned irreversibly, and condemned himself. But this, he perceived, was the result of God's law being within his heart. But the words of Ps. 40:6-9 are applied in the New Testament to the Lord's death upon the cross. What's the connection, and what's the lesson? In essence, through David's experience of sin, and the work of God's law upon his heart, he came through that sin to have the very mind of the Lord Jesus as He hung upon the cross, matchless and spotless in His perfection, as the Lamb for sinners slain. Again and again we see the lesson taught- that God works through human sin, in this case, in order to bring us to know the very mind of Christ in His finest hour of glory and spiritual conquest. We must not only let God's word work its way in us; but we need to recognize when dealing with other sinners that God likewise is working with them. He doesn't shrug and walk away from sin; He earnestly seeks to use our experience of it to bring us closer unto Himself.

I’ve often asked myself how exactly the Mosaic Law led people to Christ. Was it not that they were convicted by it of guilt, and cried out for a Saviour? “The law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: that… grace might reign… unto eternal life by Jesus” (Rom. 5:20,21). This was the purpose of the Law. And thus Paul quotes David’s rejoicing in the righteousness imputed to him when he had sinned and had no works left to do - and changes the pronoun from “he” to “they” (Rom. 4:6-8). David’s personal experience became typical of that of each of us. It was through the experience of that wretched and hopeless position that David and all believers come to know the true ‘blessedness’ of imputed righteousness and sin forgiven by grace. The suffering and groaning of which Paul speaks in Rom. 8:17, 22-26 is in my view, probably a reference to the ‘groaning’ he has just been making about his inability to keep the Mosaic Law. Our helplessness to be obedient, our frustration with ourselves, is a groaning against sin which is actually a groaning in harmony with that of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, who makes intercession for us with the same groanings right now (Rom. 8:26). Indeed, those groanings are those spoken of in Heb. 5:7 as the groanings of strong crying and tears which the Lord made in His final passion. In this sense, the Spirit, the Lord the Spirit, bears witness with our spirit / mind, that we are the children of God (Rom. 8:16). This clinches all I am trying to say. Our inability to keep the Law of God leads to a groaning against sin and because of sin, which puts us into a unity with the Lord Jesus as our Heavenly intercessor in the court of Heaven. But that wondrous realization of grace which is expressed so finely in Romans 8 would just be impossible were it not for the conviction of sin which there is through our experience of our inability to keep the Law of God. Our failure and groaning because of it becomes in the end the very witness that we are the children of God (Rom. 8:16). God thereby makes sin His servant, in that the experience of it glorifies Him.

And then there’s intellectual failure: the way we misunderstood Scripture, had wrong ideas which, over the years of prayerful Bible study, are being corrected. But my observation is that what I’m calling intellectual failure- e.g. a Bible reader believing in the immortality of the soul - usually has a moral reason behind it, subconsciously. We so often wilfully read Scripture the way we secretly want to understand it, willing ourselves to the same conclusions as our fathers. Prayer before daily Bible reading is essential; but it must be genuine prayer, an utterly sincere desire to be taught the way of God whatever this requires us to jettison.

The Way of Preaching

The experience of preaching leads to our growth. Paul Tournier in The Meaning Of Persons perceptively comments: “We become fully conscious only of what we are able to express to someone else. We may already have had a certain intuition about it, but it must remain vague so long as it is unformulated”. This is why anyone involved in preaching, public speaking, writing or personal explanation of the Gospel to someone else will know that they have gained so much from having stated in so many words what they already ‘know’. And in the course of making the expression, our own understanding is deepened, our personal consciousness of what we believe is strengthened, and thereby our potential for a real faith is enhanced. Tournier’s observation is validated by considering the record of the healed blind man in Jn. 9. Initially he says that he doesn’t know whether or not Jesus is a sinner, all he knows is that Jesus healed him. But the Jews force him to testify further, and in the course of his witness, the man explains to them that God doesn’t hear sinners, and so for Jesus to have asked God for his healing and being heard…surely proved that Jesus wasn’t a sinner. He was sinless. The man was as it were thinking out loud, coming to conclusions himself, as he made his bold witness (Jn. 9:31,33).

The parable of the sower leaves us begging the question: ‘So how can we be good ground?’ Mark’s record goes straight on to record that the Lord right then said that a candle is lit so as to publicly give light and not to be hidden. He is speaking of how our conversion is in order to witness to others. But He says this in the context of being good ground. To respond to the word ourselves, our light must be spreading to all. The only way for the candle of our faith to burn is for it to be out in the open air. Hidden under the bucket of embarrassment or shyness or an inconsistent life, it will go out. We will lose our faith if we don’t in some sense witness to it. Witnessing is, in that sense, for our benefit. When the disciples ask however they can accomplish the standards which the Lord set them, He replied by saying that a city set on a hill cannot be hid (Mt. 5:14). He meant that the open exhibition of the Truth by us will help us in the life of personal obedience to Him.

Discussing Scripture with others has been invaluable in my own experience of Bible study. Particularly is it valuable to discuss with Christians and even non-believers who come from a totally different culture from your own. Thus discussion of the parables of the lost in Lk. 15 with Middle Eastern peasants raises a number of issues which few Western expositors have hit on- e.g. the ways in which the elder son's refusal to attend the banquet was such an insult to the father; the way an older man never runs in public and humiliates himself by doing so. The problem is, we come to Scripture through the lenses of our own culture and background. Leslie Newbigin, a lifetime missionary in India, commented: "We do not see the lenses of our spectacles; we see through them, and it is another who has to say to us, ‘Friend, you need a new pair of spectacles’"(1). Newbigin  had some thing of my own experience of the value of discussing Scripture with people from other backgrounds; he speaks of the need of "the witness of those who read the Bible with minds shaped by other cultures"(2). This is not only true in a world-culture sense but it is helpful to discuss with all manner of folk. Even though we may not agree with them, an hour spent in discussing Revelation with a JW, or Paul with a radical Christian feminist who thinks Jesus is a woman... all this sows stimulation in our subsequent reflections.

More than anything, preaching has taught me the immense value of the human person as an individual. The Lord’s parable of the strange shepherd who leaves the 99 and gives his all for the one - the foolish one, the lost one, the antisocial one - is programmatic for me. The need is the call. If one person needs fellowship, forgiveness, love, the teaching of the Gospel, baptism, encouragement, re-fellowship, support, money, whatever… the value of them as an individual must be paramount. No matter what it costs us, how far we have to travel [in whatever sense], how much ‘trouble’ we get into, how foolish we look, how out on a limb we put ourselves. The value and meaning of the individual person was paramount in the Lord’s teaching and example, and it must be in our worldviews too.

John Thomas wrote at the end of his life about his regret for the “theological gladiatorship” of his earlier years. Likewise, looking back, I see that, initially, I understood 'preaching' as merely debating and combating theological ideas opposed to my own - with no significance placed upon the value of the person with whom I was in discussion. It’s not that I think the doctrines of our faith are any less important now than I did then. Actually, the opposite. It’s just that that person on the other side of the fence to you has, just like you, their inner traumas and struggles, their secret conflicts and dramas... and yet all this becomes hidden behind the facade of doctrinal debate and argument. I’ve learnt that it is to the person we must appeal if we are to win them for Christ, or win them closer to Him as we seek. If we are to convert and help others to Jesus, rather than to ourselves, we need to find "another mode of relationship" than mere intellectual argument. Such argument alone will not convert or persuade towards the cause of Christ. And yet, sadly, so much of our collective preaching effort has been taken up with exactly this kind of fruitless debate. Doctrinal argument tends to divide; whereas it is the common areas of experience which tend to unite. And so a woman reaching out to other women, perhaps other young mothers, will be a far more likely case for conversion than knocking on the doors and engaging all and sundry in doctrinal debate. But that woman, if she is to bring about an authentic conversion, must all the same convert her fellow-woman to something. And she likely will have to talk around all the host of misunderstandings and wrong ideas which her friend has been exposed to in this sadly confused and lost world.

The Way of Biblical Study

Daily Bible reading from the Companion has been a blessing to me. And pray, fervently and intensely, to really understand and respond; that the word may become flesh in us, as it was in the Lord. I can’t recommend these habits strongly enough. Through all the ups and downs, failure and success, sin and righteousness, the light and the black, and all the shades of grey, this is a habit I have rigidly kept up. And of course, serious prayer. I am grateful, and maybe in a literal sense it will be ‘eternally grateful’, that my dear mother taught me to pray on my knees as a little boy. Little could she have imagined what she was doing for me by setting me up in that way from which I would not depart. How in sin, in danger of my life, under arrest by Moslem fanatics, in rejection, in adulation, alone in so many lonely hotel rooms in the service of the Gospel... serious prayer on my knees was my salvation. Who am I to really give advice?... but all I can say is: pray to God, and hear His voice in His word, daily, seriously, intently. And develop habits that enable this. Set your alarm clock just 10 minutes earlier, or whatever is required.

The Way of Grace

That salvation is indeed a pure gift from God, unattainable by our own efforts, becomes more and more clear and awesome to me. But His grace works out in other ways, apart from in our salvation. So many times I have been saved from death or serious injury by grace. It is grace that we have what health we have, life itself. Grace that we were born into a situation whereby in the end we heard the Gospel. It was God’s grace that gave me wonderful parents and the finest wife, that preserved me in ways great and small time and again. And you must surely know the same sense of grace.

Realizing that we are in the grace of God, justified by Him through our being in Christ, leads us to a far greater and happier acceptance of ourselves as persons. So many people are unhappy with themselves. It’s why they look in mirrors in a certain way when nobody else is watching; why they’re so concerned to see how they turned out in a photograph. Increasingly, this graceless world can’t accept itself. People aren’t happy or acceptant of their age [they want to look younger or older], their body, their family situation, even their gender and their own basic personality. I found that when I truly accepted my salvation by grace, when the wonder of who I am in God’s sight, as a man in Christ, really dawned on me, I became far happier with myself, far more acceptant. Now of course in another sense, we are called to radical transformation, to change, to rise above the narrow limits of our own backgrounds. This is indeed the call of Christ. But I refer to our acceptance of who we are, and the situations we are in, as basic human beings.

Duncan Heaster