“Spiritual growth is, in large part, patterned on the nature of physical growth. You do not expect to put an infant in its crib at night and the next morning find an adolescent. We expect the baby to grow and develop day-by-day, according to the process God established for physical growth. The same is true of your spiritual growth.
“Yes, there are growth spurts in our spiritual development the same as there are in our physical development. There also will be periods of time when, just as in physical development, your on a plateau in your spiritual development. Then one of those moments comes and you hit a growth spurt and find yourself on a whole new level of life and relationship with God. We then begin to experience God in new and different ways. Old things pass away and new things take their place.
“We run into trouble when we mistake the growth spurt for the epitome of spirituality. When we do this, we are not prepared for the long-haul of journeyed wholeness. James 1:3-4 days it like this; “let patience do its perfect work that you may be whole and complete lacking nothing.” Verses 1-2 of that chapter talks about counting it all joy when your faith is tested for its this very testing that produces endurance. So faith, patience and endurance lead to wholeness. We don’t like that. We prefer to simply walk an aisle, attend a service and pretend to be whole. Screw all that patience and endurance stuff. Just give me the God-lite version, less work, less filling will do. At least I can control that version.
“Because we lack patience to trust our journey, we don’t develop endurance. We attempt to replace patience and endurance with an “experiential ” accelerate to speed it up. We hope that we can take shot of religious steroids and prevent such a long time of waiting for another growth spurt. We then try to reproduce the setting in which the last growth spurt took place hoping to create another such experience with same results. Marching around and around the same old mountain hoping to reproduce the fire on the mountain. We prefer mountain-top experiences to plowing, planting seed and waiting, down in the valley. What you don’t realize is that all your so-called, mountain-top water experiences, settles in the valley.
“What we also don’t know or trust is that God, by grace, is doing a lot of unnoticed prep work within us. He hides his work in a seemingly insignificant sequence of events. Perhaps even in a crisis. You might never assume these events to be a powerful work of the spirit. What’s actually happening is that you are refusing to trust the author and finisher of your faith. Therefore you don’t trust that a deep nurturing work is preparing you for another quantum leap forward. You don’t realize that the “quantum leap” is the smallest part of an ever ongoing process of grace, working “beyond what your able to think or ask” (Ephesians 3:20).
“Wholeness is NEVER the instantaneous process of putting your quarter in the right slot and seeing you spiritual formation drop down where you can reach it, whole and complete. So stop all The whining about “I don’t get it”, “I don’t even know god anymore” “I don’t know what I believe” and on and on the whining list continues. If you can’t trust Him to finish the work he started, just as he promised, why trust him about anything? Your whining because your impatient and have an addiction to being spiritually high. You need and want a fix now!
“Our culture has taught us to put our quarter in the vending machine, make a selection and presto, instant gratification of something desired. And if it doesn’t drop down, we are pissed! We start screaming at and kicking the machine trying to make it grant our demands. And if what we demand doesn’t drop down, we go find another machine and start the process again. God is not your genie in a bottle.
“The idea of spiritual growth as a continuous life-long and perhaps eternal process, (of the increase of his kingdom there is no end), rubs against our deeply ingrained instant gratification mode of life.”
Stan Tyra