Spiritual Growth

2245 words long.

Published on 2024-04-13

The articles in this section of the website are devoted to individual spiritual growth. They generally steer clear of prophecy and history. Topics covered include:

• long term strategy for plotting your whole life (a Growth Pattern)
• short term tactics for facing specific challenges (a Harvest Pattern)
• getting grounded (a Law Pattern)
• spiritual values
• the big questions of life
• how to communicate with God (the spiritual disciplines)
• how God knows our material and spiritual needs and meets them
• emotional healing through the Psalms
• dreams
• spiritual warfare
• living by the Golden Rule

Growth Patterns

Jesus used different analogies to describe the life of faith. Some refer to inanimate objects, like our body being a temple, but most relate to growing things. That is why we speak of spiritual growth as being important to believers. We must obey what the Apostle Peter said:

Like newborn infants,

long for the pure spiritual milk,

that by it you may grow up into salvation...

- 1 Peter 2:2

After I finished writing Job Rises: Thirteen Keys to a Resilient Life, I pondered how to distill a simpler action plan from the thirteen lessons that I learned. I had in mind preparing and leading a Bible study to communicate these ideas. Some points in Job reminded of ideas I had seen elsewhere, in Matthew. They appear in Jesus' Parable of the Soils and his temptation in the desert. Thus I dove into Matthew and discovered the seven-step Harvest Pattern.

Since then I have discovered other patterns related to spiritual growth. Here is the list:

• Harvest Pattern (in Matthew)
• Growth Pattern (in Ecclesiastes)
• Motherhood Pattern (in Job, 1 Samuel 1-2)
• Law Pattern (in Exodus)
• Journey Pattern (in Matthew 1, Job)

I doubt that I have found all the patterns that the Bible contains related to this topic.

When Jesus called the Church a vine (John 15), or Paul a human body (Romans 12) or an olive tree (Romans 11), they were not just using a poetic analogy. They were telling us that there are principles of growth that apply not only to individuals, but to groups, nations and whole civilizations. Good trees and bad trees, wild vines and cultivated vines, we are all part of social organisms that are larger than us. That is why everything Jesus says can have two meanings (at least). That is why prophecy works.

God has arranged it so that analogies between the growth of people from infants into mature adults serve as well to describe the phases of growth for nations from a few families to a great kingdom - and then to the grave. To understand the course of history you need to understand the life of a single soul.

When Nicodemus argued with Jesus over the idea of being "born again" or "born from above", Jesus said this:

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe,

how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

- John 3:12

How is the spiritual idea of being "born again" related to earthly things? Why was it so hard for Nicodemus to understand? I submit to you, most Christians have no more idea about these things than Nicodemus did. If we believe, then we have experienced it. We can point to the change in our spirit. Yet, can we explain it? Can we translate the earthly things into the heavenly things, matching them one to one? Can we relate the medical details of human birth to the spiritual process of salvation?

I found out how. The answer was in Ecclesiastes. Solomon speaks of twenty-eight times of life. Who knew that they were ordered to tell a story? Who knew that those twenty-eight times set forth the earthly process of materialistic and emotional development that carries a person from birth to full maturity? If you read what commentators say about the structure of Ecclesiastes, you will find opinions like this, from the New Century Bible Commentary:

"in general no progression of thought

from one section to another is discernible."

– R. N. Whybray (1989)

That scholar could not see an overall structure to Ecclesiastes. He could not see the "earthly things". Unable to see the earthly things, he could not see their spiritual analogies. "A time to be born" maps to being born again. "A time to die" maps to the dying to self that Paul describes in Romans 6. "A time to plant" is being grafted into the vine, the church, through baptism. "A time to pluck up" is being severed from your former connection to the world. Those are the first four steps on the road to a mature faith, ending with "a time for peace".

Growing Pains

Why should you trust me? For a nuanced theoretical view of spiritual growth, consult someone with a doctorate in theology. For a comprehensive clinical view that weighs and balances all factors and can apply them appropriately to people with different personalities and cultural backgrounds, consult a professor of Christian counseling. What I have to offer is based on the problems I have faced personally, how I overcame them, and how I related my victories to the actions of the Holy Spirit and the wisdom found in the Bible. My experience is limited so my wisdom is limited. Ah! Despite my limitations, my area of understanding may include the issues that you confront, because among the problems I have overcome are:

• depression
• fear of death
• loneliness
• nightmares
• anxiety
• purposelessness
• peer pressure
• social ostracism due to a neurological problem
• frequent unemployment exacerbated by being on the autism spectrum

That list is not exhaustive. I am able to empathize, not because I am gifted with empathy, but because I have suffered and overcome a cross-section of problems common to hundreds of millions, plus several less common trials. I am able to offer hope, because God swiftly delivered me from some of these problems after but a few weeks or months of prayer. I am able to model patience, because for some of these problems (especially anxiety) I endured decades of suffering while God's patient ministrations brought slow relief (and frequent lapses!). I have waited in faith, trusting a promise given to me by a friend's prophecy that help would come soon. I have also waited in confusion and doubt, with no prophecy and no promise beyond the words of Scripture to rely on.

I will explain how healing and deliverance follow a pattern. That does not mean that they follow a timetable to which we are privy. We each have many areas needing improvement. Who establishes our treatment regimen? Who defines the order in which to tackle each area? Not us! However, by understanding what God does tell us in His Word about how He orders the different phases of human growth, we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit or at least get out of the way. That is something I have learned and will share with you. Even though we may not know God's time, we can know God's times.

Stuck in Time

Lack of understanding of Solomon's times can cause you to become stuck. The times must be embraced, not avoided. When I had been a Christian only a few years, an appeal by my pastor to the church fell on deaf ears. He asked people in the congregation to visit a sick member who lived in a nursing facility. I had at that point suffered for about a decade with depression. Being saved weakened its hold on me but did not end it. The thought of visiting a sick person was anathema to me. Her suffering would add to mine. I couldn't handle that. I was determined not to go. Weeks of these appeals wore me down. The final straw was discovering that the woman lived one block from my apartment. We lived two towns away from the church. Of everyone in the congregation, I was Janet's only neighbor.

One morning, as I walked to church (a forty-five minute walk), I stopped by Janet's facility. I brought her a Christian music cassette, read to her from the Bible and prayed. She had rheumatoid arthritis. I have never seen anyone in so much pain. When my visit was over, I walked the rest of the way to church, sobbing. Never before had I ever cried so hard for someone other than myself - and never since.

My instinct to avoid visiting the sick was spot on. It would add to my pain. It would magnify my sadness. It would usher me into "a time to weep". I had been holding in so much pain for so long. Why would God put me through this?

It is because "a time to weep" was designed by God. We need it. We must not try to skip over it. We must enter into it fully if we are to advance.

The tears stopped a few minutes before I reached the church that morning. First, a gentle peace settled in. Then my soul was flooded with joy. That joy remained with me for a week. I had entered "a time to laugh". My years of depression were over. It is now over thirty years later and they have not returned.

That is how important it is to know and embrace the times God has given us. "A time to weep" is not the only one I have resisted, but now I know that I do not have to walk through them alone.

Prophetic Times

Once you can connect the worldly analogy to a spiritual one that applies to a single person, you can take it a step father. Ecclesiastes 3 is a parable for more than spiritual growth. It is a parable for the history of the Church and the world. Many articles on this website talk about how to interpret the spiritual patterns prophetically. This section won't do that. It is all about how to gain understanding about the patterns and put them to work for you.

You may lack interest (or trust) in the prophetic parts of the Bible, or at least how people interpret them. Prophecies are not there to be flashy or spooky. What are they for? Parables and analogies work two ways. Solomon's poem in Ecclesiastes 3 is about how God has charted the normal and healthy course of a human life. Do you trust God? Can you lean on that pattern? Does it explain things in a way that helps you plan out your life?

Articles in other sections of this website show that those times correspond to eras in history. Each era has a theme that is related to the name for that time. Thus "a time to tear" is a time of turmoil and civil war (the wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation being one example). As you see the prophecies you will see that God governs history, the church, Israel, and the world's civilization according to that pattern.

Have you ever heard advertisements that say things like, "If this deodorant is strong enough to keep a marathon runner smelling fresh all the way to the finish line, isn't it strong enough for you? The times of Solomon are like that deodorant. If the principles behind those times are powerful enough and wise enough for God to use in governing and guiding the whole world through its problems, do you think they might be good enough to guide you through yours?

The Golden Rule

Few sayings of Jesus are more widely known than the Golden Rule. It is so simple that it can be taught to children, yet adults struggle for decades to comprehend its meaning.

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