I have been frightened by the question “how is your spiritual life going?” because I know that I have ceased moving forward toward the best version that God intended. My upbringing was a works based faith of strict rules and regulations. Jesus did not say, “Follow all the laws that my Father gave you.” He said in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”. I have often use my behavior and devotional practices to measure my spiritual health. I thought that the measure of my spiritual life was by how early I could get up to read the Bible, or how long my quiet times are, or how often I attended church services. But that is not what spiritual growth is about. The truth is, joy is available to me by remaining connected to God. When my main focus is being connected with him, everything seems to fall into place. When my primary focus becomes anything else, my inner strength suffers, and I become a lesser version of myself. It is no longer the Spirit in control, but myself.
Transformation Plan
God’s plan is for me to become the best version of me, but right now there are two versions of me. There is the version God made me to be, and there is the version that currently exists. What do I need to do in order change? I have often felt that if I could just change I would become more useful. I say things like; “If I would read the Bible more or read another self -help book or listening to other sermons, serve more or learn some new disciplines. If I just work harder I’ll grow.” And I constantly compare myself to others spiritual walk. I hear about someone who gets up early in the morning to pray, and I feel guilty because I think you don’t pray enough. So I decide to do that too, but I think, I know this is exhausting, but I must be disciplined in order to be “more” spiritually connected to God. I keep it up for a few days or maybe a week or month, but eventually I stop. Then I feel guilty. After enough guilt, I try to start do something else. Sometimes I’m just pretending to be spiritual. I have learned to fake it. I speak as if I had had deeper spiritual experiences than I have really had, as though my sin bothers me more than it really does. I have moved from one spiritual experience to another. I have rededicated my life to God a few times and then fall away, hoping to recapture the emotions I felt when I first met God.
Work in process
I have learned through this class that my life is not my project. My life is God’s project. My life is a process of growth and set-backs through which God is working to bring glory to himself. God brought me into existence, and he knows what I am intended to be. God has many good works for me to do, but they are not the kind of “to do” lists we given by my wife or bosses. My Spiritual life is not limited to certain devotional activities that I engage in. The only way to become the person God made me to be is to live with the Spirit of God flowing through me. The only way to grow is connecting to the power of Spirit of God to transform into the person God had in mind when he created me.
My uniqueness is God-designed
Some people think that if they seek to grow spiritually they will have to become someone else. God made us to grow and flourish. Growth is God’s gift and plan, and when you grow in your faith, you are in harmony with God, with other believing people. Growth is not measured by outward signs such as job title, income, possessions, or beauty. It means becoming the person that God had in mind when he created you. Even you can’t tell yourself how to change, because you didn’t create you. As God helps me grow, I have changed, but I will always be me. He has given each of us unique gifts intended to help serve him and others. Just like Jesus’s disciples, I may not be the best of the best, but the spiritual gifts he has given me are given to work together in the body of believers. He designed my personality, and he determined my natural gifts and talents. He has given me certain passions and desires. I was chosen by God therefore he did not create me to be anybody else.
How you grow also depends on the season of your spiritual life. God has a plan for who he wants me to be in the season that I’m in. It will not look exactly like anyone else’s, which means it will take freedom from doubt and a search for understanding in order to learn how and when God wants to grow me. God does not do “one-size-fits-all” growth pattern. I sometimes get frustrated when I think that my spiritual life should look like the pastor or the church leaders or the conference teacher who is training us about spiritual growth. We all study differently, struggle with different sins, and communicate to God in different ways.
Disciplines
A spiritual discipline is simply an activity you engage in to grow closer to God through the Spirit. Real spiritual growth happens when I actually want to do what I should to do. It is a testing of my faith with the help of God’s grace that pulls me through the trials. This means I have to change how I think about what “counts” as spiritual. What makes an activity spiritual is not the activity itself, it is whether or not I do it with and through the Spirit. It is the quality of the presence and communication with the Spirit while I am doing the activity.
Solitude
I have to quiet my physical movement and my mind in order to connect to the Spirit. Because I am an introvert, the idea of going off to be alone sounds good to me. However, solitude rarely happens on its own. Situations in my life never work together to produce a day with no activities or events. I will have to choose solitude, and the simplest way is to take my calendar, find a day when I have no commitments, and block it off to go someplace I would love to be out in nature or at a lake or quite rolling stream. Eventually I know that a day of solitude will free me of other people’s expectations and demands. When I am alone with God, I remember that this world is temporary and that people’s opinions of me don’t really matter much.
Study Gods Word
By opening my mind to different approaches to God’s word, it has allowed the stories to come to life. A comparison of the integrity of the written word of God and a movie adaptation has given me a new curiosity of how the characters felt and thought of what they experienced. There is a new level of exposure to the disciple’s thoughts and feelings that I can relate to today. I’m learning to interact with God’s word and then do something with it, to build a relationship with him.
Prayer
I pray briefly to accommodate my limited attention span. I have started out slowly, and organized through a prayer list. Before when I would pray I end up praying about things that I thought I should be worried about like: ministries, missionaries, the lost, you know Church business! But I have learned to pray what is in me, not what I wish were in me. Sometimes I replay a conversation from the day or something that comes to me out of the blue. I usually thought that these thoughts were obstacles to deep prayer, but instead of suppressing these I have begun to take them to God.
Conclusion
God uses people to form people. The Spirit is at work with every interaction. We are designed to live in connectedness with God and with each other. This does not mean that I have to become more extroverted. It means growing spiritually means responding to God’s calling. My hope is the belief that God has a plan for my future and it has an upward projection of growth in him. I genuinely desire to be connected to God through the Spirit, to become the person God made me to be, and to be used by him.