Spiritual Growth BasicsSample

Spiritual Growth Demands Nourishment

It often helps to follow a definition with an illustration of what we’re talking about. One obvious way to illustrate spiritual growth is by looking at its physical counterpart. Going back to our topic of newborn babies, I’m sure you know that every infant not only wants but also often demands food. Everything within that child cries out, “Give me something to eat. I’ve got some growing to do!” If you have ever heard a newborn baby cry out of hunger, you can appreciate the apostle Peter’s words of admonition to Christians:

“Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation” (1 Peter 2:2).

This is one of the best one-sentence descriptions of spiritual growth you’ll find in the Bible. We may not know exactly how spiritual growth works, but this verse helps us because it compares spiritual growth to physical growth. The issue for a newborn baby is the development of the life he or she has been given. Now that may seem so simple and obvious that you wonder why I even mention it. But it has been my experience as a pastor that this key principle of spiritual growth is often overlooked for exactly that reason. Spiritual growth is not first and foremost a program or a curriculum, as I said above, but the nourishment and development of a life.

Now I can hear someone saying, “Well, a baby may not be following a program, but her mom certainly is.” That’s true. There is a well-established, proven program of nourishment that any mom needs to follow if she wants her baby to experience healthy growth. That’s why I said there is nothing wrong with various programs or steps as long as they are facilitating the growth of spiritual life. The goal of spiritual growth is to feed the life you were given by the Holy Spirit at the moment of your conversion, or your re-birth, so that you may, as Peter wrote, “grow in respect to salvation” (1 Peter 2:2). Paul put it this way: “We are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:15).

The point is that your spiritual DNA is complete because you received the life of Christ at your conversion, and nothing can be added to Christ. Our challenge as Christians is to maximize what we already have, not run around and look for that which we don’t have.