GROW IN GRACE

SINCLAIR B. FERGUSON
THE BANNER OF TRUTH TRUST
 THE BANNER OF TRUTH TRUST

3 Murray field Road, Edinburgh, EH

12 6EL PO Box 621, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013, USA

© Sinclair B. Ferguson 1989 First published 1989 ISBN 0 85151 557 6

Set in to 1/2ll2pl Linotron Plantin Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington,
Hants and printed and bound in Great Britain by BPCC Hazell Books Ltd Member of BPCC
Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks, England

Scripture quotations taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERS I ON,
copyright© 1973,1978, 1984 by International Bible Society are used by permission of
Zondervan Bible Publishers.
Contents

Introduction

Section I: Christ our Life

1 Jesus-The Pioneer

2 How Jesus Grew

Section 2: Basic Principles

3 In the Beginning

4 A Spiritual Appetite

5 A Matter of Life and Death

Section 3: Life Together

6 Growing Together

7 Restricted Growth

Section 4: Case Histories

8 Daniel - Growing Faithfully

9 Peter - Fits and Starts

10 Timothy-Coping with Yourself

11 Over to You
TO ERIC J. WRIGHT

WHO HAS HELPED MANY TO GROW IN GRACE

Introduction

Grow in Grace is a book about the way we develop and mature as

Christians.

When a baby is born there is great rejoicing. Parents are relieved to

discover that the little one is well, and they are delighted by the
miracle of new life. But every parent knows that birth is only the
beginning. Every baby must grow. Food, warmth, affection and
exercise will all be necessary in the years which lie ahead. The baby
will begin to crawl, then walk and run. Its knowledge will increase,
its personality develop as it responds to the circumstances and
experiences of life. The marriage of natural characteristics with life-
experiences will produce a unique person. There will be
opportunities to take, obstacles to overcome before maturity is
reached.

It is the same in the Christian life. If we are to grow in grace we need

spiritual nourishment, protection, exercise and knowledge. Only
through these means will we become the kind of Christian men and
women God intends us to be. Grow in Grace describes how
God’s intentions are to be fulfilled in our experience.

Some books on Christian living and growing might best be described

as ‘how-to’ books. They present a kind of ‘do-it-yourself manual for
Christian living, providing helpful advice on the mechanics of Bible-
reading, prayer, Christian service and so on. Grow in Grace is not
that kind of book. The difference is not accidental. It is intended
to reflect the principle which Paul explained to the Corinthians: Paul
may plant, Apollos may water, but God makes things grow (1 Cor.
3:6-7). While there is much we can do to encourage growth in
ourselves and each other, true spiritual development is something
which God himself gives.

This, then, is the emphasis of these chapters. At many points they

provide or suggest instruction about what we must do in order to
grow. But their main thrust is this: our greatest need is to recognise,
and to put our lives under, the influences which God uses to produce
growth in Christian character. If we can learn some of the
principles he employs - that is, if we become familiar with those
ways and thoughts of God which are always higher than our own (Is.
55:8-9) - we will be more likely to advance steadily in the Christian
life. That is why I have combined exposition of biblical principles
with their illustrated application in the lives of some of the great
biblical characters. This is what Scripture itself does - or so it seems
to me — and we are always on safe ground when we follow its
example and try to capture its spirit.

SINCLAIR B. FERGUSON
 SECTION ONE: CHRIST OUR
LIFE
The whole of the Christian life is centred on Jesus Christ. Like Paul
the contemporary Christian can say: ‘To me to live is Christ.'

But often, in Christian experience, we are tempted to look elsewhere

for direction, example, counsel and guidance. We lose sight of the
fact that everything we need to live the Christian life is to be found
exclusively in Christ.

For this reason when we begin thinking about spiritual growth we

must think first of all about Christ.
1. Jesus - The Pioneer
We were born in order to grow. When someone becomes a
Christian the transformation which takes place in them is called ‘the
new birth’. They have been ‘born again’ (Jn. 3:3,7). Like new born
babies they see the kingdom of God, they cry ‘Abba, Father’, and
they need milk in order to grow. (So we are taught by Jesus, Jn. 3:3;
Paul, Rom. 8:15; and Peter, 1 Pet. 2:2.)

What happens when we grow? Often in natural life we become more

like our parents! At first, when we are babies, people will ask ‘Who is
he like?’ ‘Is she like her mum?’ Later, when they have not seen us for
a period of time, they may exclaim (to our embarrassment!),
‘My, how like your mother you are!’ Later still, when we feel that we
have left behind the influence of our parents, we discover - perhaps
in a crisis - that the family characteristics remain with us for the rest
of our lives.

The writers of the New Testament were often struck by the fact that
this is equally true of the Christian life. One of the things which
should begin to happen to the child of God is that he or she should
grow up to resemble the character and to reproduce the actions of
the heavenly Father. That is why Jesus’ commandment was that we
should be perfect, just as our Father in heaven is perfect (Mt. 5:48).

But, there is another common characteristic of family life. Children

in the same family resemble each other. We are often asked about
our children: ‘Is he like David?’, ‘Is she like Peter?’ and from time to
time we notice striking similarities. People expect that
younger brothers and sisters will have the same features as an elder
brother.
As Christians we too have an elder brother. Jesus Christ is described
as ‘the firstborn among many brothers’ (Rom. 8:29). The New
Testament tells us that God’s plan is to make all his children like his
Son.

For all practical purposes the message of the New Testament could
be summarised in these words: God wants us to be his own children,
he wants us to share the family-likeness. He is working in our lives in
order to make us like Christ. He wants us too to shape our lives
so that they will be like his.

There is nothing more important to learn about Christian growth

than this: Growing in grace means becoming like Christ.

The significance of this is so fundamental that it is worth spelling out

in greater detail what it means:

Jesus, who grew in grace himself, is the source of spiritual

growth.

Jesus, who grew in grace himself, is the example of spiritual

growth.

Jesus was a man himself, that is why he too needed to grow

spiritually.

Why are these statements so important? For two reasons. They are
often either denied or they are exaggerated.

They are exaggerated when people think of Jesus as no more than a

man - as a good and great teacher, perhaps even as a miracle worker
sent by God. But if Jesus were only a man the whole of the Christian
gospel disintegrates and crumbles. For then many of his claims,
much of his teaching, the confessions of the early Christians
all amount to nothing. Indeed, Jesus could not have been a good man
or a great teacher if his claim to a unique relationship with God
proves false.

There is also the danger that Christians may deny that Jesus Christ
was truly and fully man. Many people who have believed in his
divinity, the fact that he is God, have found it difficult to accept that
he really shared our human nature. They have difficulty in believing
(and feeling that he entered fully into our experience.

Why is that such a crucial matter? We have already suggested the

answer.

Being a Christian, growing in grace, means becoming like Christ. But

if we are modelling our lives on a Christ who was not really human,
who did not really get inside our experiences, we will end up living
Christian lives which are lacking in the warmth and compassion of
real humanity. There are Christians just like that. We are all ashamed
of it, but it is true. Some Christians do seem to have rather steely
glints in their eyes. They are not like the Jesus of whom you read in
the Gospels. It is not because they lack earnestness, or prayer, or
zeal. It is because they are living their Christian lives on the basis of a
wrong design.

Have you ever made something from a pattern or design? You may
have built a model, or knitted a sweater. Have you ever been totally
frustrated when everything has gone wrong, only to discover that you
have been following the wrong page in the instructions or the
pattern? How frustrated you were! Exactly the same happens in the
lives of some Christians because they never look carefully at
the pattern which the Bible gives us in Christ. But a Christianity
which does not produce true humanity in our lives is surely a
fraudulent version of the message and life of Christ. That is why it is
so fundamental for us to see that in spiritual growth we begin by
recognising that our Saviour grew. He is our example.

Teach me how to grow in goodness

 Daily as I grow;

Thou hast been a child, and surely

Thou dost know.

W.J. Mathams

THE FACT OF JESUS, GROWTH

Luke, author of the third Gospel, was a medical doctor. He seems to

have been one of the most educated of the early Christians. He was
also interested in things which did not attract the attention of the
other Gospel writers. He tells us at the beginning of his Gospel that
he had done a good deal of study on the life of Jesus. What he offers
to us is an account which has been carefully researched and includes
the testimony of eye witnesses (Lfe. 1:1-3).

One of these eye witnesses was, in all likelihood, Mary the mother of
Jesus. The Gospel opens with two long chapters for which she was
probably the source. Luke even seems to hint at this when he tells us
at the end of chapter two how Mary ‘treasured all these things in
her heart5 (Lk. 2:51).

What did Mary remember? Like every mother she recalled the stages
of Jesus' development.

The Jews divided a child’s growth into eight different stages from
birth through to adulthood. Luke reduces these stages to two, which
read like a chorus running through Mary’s account of the life of this
wonderful child born and brought up in her home:

The child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and
the grace of God was upon him. (Lk 2:40)
Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men.
(Lk. 2:52)

Two things went side by side in Jesus. He grew physically. His body
developed and became stronger. As we read between the lines in the
Gospels we learn why. He was a country boy. He revelled in the
outdoor life. The birds, the animals, the sea, the whole world of
nature coloured his way of explaining the spiritual world. It is
obvious from his teaching that like most other boys he must
have loved being outside, walking, running, playing. He was also
Joseph’s apprentice. He worked with his hands, carried wood for
yokes on his shoulders, and tested them on oxen to see whether they
were ‘easy’ (Matt. 11:28-30). No wonder he grew strong!

Mary noticed something else about Jesus. She could not avoid
recognising it. He grew strong in spirit. He was filled with wisdom.
The grace of God was upon his life. In her own home lived a boy, a
teenager, then a fully grown man about whom she could say: ‘He
grew in favour with God’. Here is clear proof for our earlier
statement that Jesus himself grew in grace.

We need to be very clear what this does not mean. It does not mean
that the Lord Jesus was morally imperfect and therefore needed to
grow to perfection. He was perfect at every stage of his life. He was
without sin as a child, and he maintained his sinlessness until the
end of his life.

But our Lord was a perfect man. He grew through every stage of his
life, in understanding and capacity. As his natural powers grew, he
was constantly faced with the challenge of submitting them to God or
using them for self-seeking ends. The obedience he gave to God as
a seven year old boy was as perfect as the obedience he showed when
he willingly died on the cross and suffered in order to fulfil his
Father’s will. But his obedience on the cross, while no more perfect,
was far, far greater than the kind of obedience which was appropriate
to his life as a boy. This is what Luke means when he says that even
as a young boy Christ’s spiritual growth could be seen, and what Paul
means when he says that this obedience reached its height on the
cross when Christ became obedient even to the point of dying in
great shame (Phil. 2:8).

Because of this growth in grace and obedience, Christ grew in favour

with God. The more he obeyed his Father, the more cause his Father
had to love him. Of course the Father has always loved his only Son.
But perfect love can always respond to new experiences and to new
reasons for expressing itself. The ‘perfect’ love which a newly
engaged couple share together is still capable of reaching new depths
of fulness when they are married. They will find new reasons for love.
Similarly Jesus himself said that the Father loved him because he
was going to lay down his life (Jn. 10:17). Because he obeyed God to
the limit as man, his Father’s love for him knew no bounds. As
Christ grew in obedience it was natural that he should also grow in
the favour of his Father.

But what exactly was involved in this growth?

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS’ GROWTH

Luke says Jesus grew. The word he uses has an interesting

background. Originally it meant ‘making one’s way forward by
pushing aside obstacles’. It was a nautical and military metaphor. A
ship sailing to its destination would make its way through hazards
and difficulties on the high seas. An army, marching through rough
terrain might have to hack its way through a forest, or overcome
the difficulties of a river. Later on the word came to have the much
less picturesque meaning of making progress of any kind. It may
have that mundane meaning here. But it is certainly very helpful and
encouraging to think of Jesus in the context of its original meaning.

When we say that Jesus Christ grew spiritually and therefore is able
to help us to grow spiritually, what do we mean? We mean that, just
as we find there are obstacles in our way, things were no different for
Jesus. He felt the kind of pressures that we experience to
compromise and yield to temptations. He lived in ‘the likeness of
sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8:3); he experienced weakness, hunger, thirst,
fear and opposition, just as we do. Jesus lived his life in our world.

The Gospel writers underline the fact that Christ did not come to the
Garden of Eden, but to a fallen, broken world to be a Saviour and
Example for his disciples. Although he was the Second Man and the
Last Adam (cf. 1 Cor. 15:45,47) he came to be tempted not in a
garden but a desert. He was tested when he was hungry. He was
not surrounded by a tame creation, but by wild beasts (Lk. 4:1-2;
Mk. 1:12-13). Jesus had to hack his way through the jungle which our
sin had created in order to grow in his obedience to his Father in
heaven.

This is one of the reasons why Jesus was given the Greek title
Archegos by the early Christians. The word archegos does not have a
one word equivalent in English. It means someone who leads, and by
his leadership stirs others into activity and brings them with him. It
was used in classical Greek of the heroes who founded great cities. If,
in those far-off days, school had ‘Founder’s Day’ this was the
word which would have been used. The Founder of a school is not
only the person who began it. He is the person whose example is
meant to serve as a model and stimulus to the pupils in years to
come.

Jesus, says Peter, is the Archegos of life (Acts 3:15). He was the first
to be resurrected from the dead, and he is the one whose
resurrection causes our resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20-3). Hebrews tells
us that Jesus is the Author (Archegos) and the Pioneer (.Archegos)
of our faith and salvation (Heb. 2:10; 12:2). He is the great trail-
blazer.

Picture an army captain hacking his way through a jungle during a

battle with guerilla forces. He leads his men from danger to safety by
first facing the dangers, impediments and tests himself. Similarly
Jesus is the Captain of our salvation. He has tasted all of
our experiences of temptation. He has gone further. He experienced
them in their full strength, when they unleashed all their powers
against him. Where we would stumble and fall, he has pressed on. He
overcame temptation, conquered death and drew its sting. Now
he beckons to us: ‘Follow me, the pathway of faith is safe for all of
you to use!’

When the New Testament speaks about the fulness of grace which we
find in Christ, it does not mean only forgiveness, pardon and
justification. Christ has done much more for us. He died for us, but
he also lived for us. Now he has sent his own Spirit to us so that we
might draw on his strength. He grew in grace, and when we draw
on his power we shall likewise grow in grace.

Our faith can only receive what grace provides and can only believe
what Scripture reveals. But faith should receive everything grace
provides and Scripture reveals. We impoverish our spiritual
experience and deny ourselves Christ’s help when we fail to see how
important his spiritual growth was. But when we see that our
Saviour himself grew in grace, new dimensions of his love for us and
new possibilities of our own spiritual development are opened to us.

The Christian life depends on how we think about Jesus. Do you

think of him as the author, the pioneer of spiritual growth?
2. How Jesus Grew
In chapter one we began to think about the fact of Jesus Christ’s
spiritual growth. Now we must look at it in more detail. How did it
work out in practice?

One of the ways in which we can do this is by mapping out from our
Lord’s life some of the key features of his own experience in which he
blazed a trail for us to follow. It is because he has experienced what
we experience that he is able to see us through in our struggles
towards spiritual growth (Heb. 2:18; 4:15-16). What were the ways in
which his Father brought Jesus to spiritual maturity?

THE PATTERN OF JESUS’ GROWTH

When we read the New Testament with this question in mind, there
are at least four different ways in which we can think of our Lord’s
personal growth as a servant of God.

He grew in the fruit of the Spirit. When Paul describes the fruit of
God’s Spirit in the life of the Christian in Galatians 5:22-3 he is also
giving us a picture of Jesus. He was the one who was baptised with
the Spirit and experienced him without limitation (Jn. 3:34).

It is an illuminating Bible study to examine Paul’s list of Spirit-grown

qualities and trace each of them through the life and ministry of our
Lord. See his love in giving his life as a ransom for all. Think of his
joy as the Great Shepherd who carries his lost sheep home to the
Father. Notice his peace and poise. Watch the kindness of his actions
to the poor and needy. Trace the sheer goodness of his life as
he ministers publicly for three years. Meditate on his amazing
faithfulness both to God and men, even when he felt forsaken by the
one and was rejected by the other. Then there is his gentleness, to the
sick, to the broken hearted, to needy and hopeless sinners.
Remember his self-control when wicked men mocked and scourged
him.

All these qualities are summarised by Luke when he says that the
grace of God was on Jesus and he grew in wisdom. In this context
wisdom probably means practical spiritual goodness. No wonder the
Father later announced that Jesus was his dearly-loved Son with
whom he was satisfied (Lk. 3:22)!

Sometimes we substitute other things, important in themselves, for

real spiritual growth. For example, witnessing to others is an
important part of living the Christian life. But zeal in witness can
never substitute for the fruit of the Spirit in our character. Again,
knowledge of God’s word and an understanding of Christian
doctrine plays a vital role in our lives. But if these become
a substitute for faithfulness to our friends, gentleness and patience to
people we find ‘difficult’, or are accompanied by a lack of self-control,
all our learning and understanding is of little permanent profit. God
wants us to grow in grace and in knowledge (2 Pet. 3:18). Even this
knowledge is not merely information but personal fellowship with
the Lord Jesus Christ!

Some Christians, whether through circumstances or upbringing, or

because of the basic tendencies of their personalities stress the
negative aspects of the Christian life, rooting out doctrinal error and
defending the Christian faith against attack.

These are all biblical duties. But they are not to be pursued in
isolation. Someone once humorously remarked to me that it might
be possible for a book to be written by some Christians called You
Name it – We're Against it! Perhaps there was more than a grain of
truth in what he said. If we are to let our light shine before men so
that, impressed by the fruit of the Spirit in us, they will glorify our
Father, we must ask him to make us daily more like Christ.
He grew through the disciplines of life. Spiritual progress should not
be measured only by outward evidence. We must also consider the
obstacles overcome in the process, and the pressures endured in
order to make such progress.

That principle helps us to think and judge rightly about the actions of
others. Some who seem to have made extraordinary headway in the
Christian life may have had easier obstacles in their way than others.
Some possess qualities by nature which others develop only
through arduous spiritual exercise.

Jesus grew in all the positive graces of the Spirit. But the lustre of his
character is all the greater because he did so in the face of severe
obstacles and constant trials. He once spoke about the whole period
of his ministry as a continuous time of trials (Lk. 22:28). As the
Captain of our salvation and the Pioneer of the life of faith
he experienced opposition from the powers of darkness at the height
of their strength. We, by contrast, even though our trials are real,
meet with a foe who has been defeated and stripped of his powers
(see Col. 2:15; Heb. 2:14)·

What were some of the difficulties Christ faced which we also face,
and through which we may grow as he grew in grace?

Jesus was tempted. The New Testament goes further: he was

tempted in every way, just as we are (Heb. 4:15). Do we believe that?
When we are tempted we tend to think (although we would be
hesitant to admit it): ‘Yes, I know he was tempted; but he did not
experience what I am experiencing’. But the truth is the other way
round. You will never experience what he did, because you are
a sinner. In our temptations we give way long before we experience
the level of temptation’s pressure which Jesus experienced. Because
we have given in in the past the powers of darkness never need to
apply the degree of pressure to us that they applied to Jesus. We
provide them with an easy target. Jesus, on the other hand,
exhausted all the devil’s powers and energies. They could find no
‘grip’, no ‘foothold’ in the life of Jesus (Jn. 14:30). According to the
Gospel records the powers of darkness mounted an all-out attack on
Jesus (a legion of demons was stationed in one man at Gadara in
order to oppose him). But even in the hour of the power of darkness
they could not overcome him (Lk. 22:33).

Jesus experienced rejection and misunderstanding. One of the most

painful things some young Christians experience is the response of
their parents to their newfound faith.

There are occasions in which we ourselves, rather than the gospel,

cause offence to our parents. Sometimes we lose sight of the teaching
of God’s word, and do not show them the humility, love and
obedience which Scripture commands. Sometimes we are far more
interested in ‘evangelising’ them than in obeying them. Scripture
tells us that the major part of our evangelising our parents (if they
are not yet Christians) should be by obedience to them! Perhaps we
are too often in a hurry to tell them that we have become Christians.
We are not sufficiently patient to allow them to see with their own
eyes the changes which begin to take place in our lives. Here
again Jesus is a wonderful example. Do you think he had to tell Mary
that the grace of God was on his life?

Yet, while we may sometimes be at fault, there are times when

Christ’s followers suffer misunderstanding and even persecution at
home, and certainly at school, or college, or work. How do we know
that Christ understands? How is he our example then?

Jesus himself grew in grace through the way in which he responded

to misunderstanding. This was one of the things Mary remembered –
how she and Joseph had misunderstood and been insensitive to
Jesus. They had taken him at the age of twelve to the Temple services
at the Feast of the Passover. What an experience! On their journey
home they realised that Jesus was not with their company. They
returned to Jerusalem and eventually found him in the Temple
courts engaged in discussion with the teachers. Mary (how like a
mother!) rebuked him: ‘Did you not know how worried your father
and I would be?’ They had not even thought of him when they began
the journey home! They had probably been engaged with their own
group of friends.

Jesus’ reply is remarkable. It shows his faithfulness to God and his

word, and his desire for Mary and Joseph to discover the real reason
for his presence in their family. But Luke records, ‘they did not
understand what he was saying to them’ (Lk. 2:50). It was not the
last time there was misunderstanding of Jesus by his family (.Mk.
3:21). Nor was it only in this intimate circle that he was to
be misunderstood. How often his own disciples seemed to be more
like hindrances than helps to his ministry! (SeeMatt. 8:25-6; 14:25-
31; 16:8, 22-3; 17:4-5, 14-20; Lk. 24:25.)

The misunderstanding Christ suffered was to lead to his death (1 Cor.

2:8). Yet he did not protest. Rather he kept on showing the fruit of
the Spirit. He did not open his mouth in self-defence; he did not raise
his voice against those who oppressed him.

What grace, O Lord, and beauty shone

Around Thy steps below!

What patient love was seen in all

Thy life and death of woe!

For ever on Thy burdened heart

A weight of sorrow hung,

Yet no ungentle, murmuring word

Escaped Thy silent tongue.

 Thy foes might hate, despise, revile,

Thy friends unfaithful prove;

Unwearied in forgiveness still,

Thy heart could only love.

The example which Jesus sets before us should encourage us to sing:

O give us hearts to live like Thee,

Like Thee, O Lord, to grieve

Far more for others' sins than all

The wrongs that we receive.

Edward Denny

He grew in obedience. Obedience lay at the heart of Jesus’ life. The

apostles saw his obedience as the key to understanding his work. The
reason he is able to be the Saviour is because he obeyed God in our
place throughout his life and suffered the punishment of our
disobedience by his obedient death.

Jesus’ obedience was, of course, unique. It was God’s special plan

that he should alone lay down his life for others. In this respect also
he did the will of his Father (Jn. 4:34; 5:30; 6:38). But Jesus also
placed himself under the law of God by which our lives are governed.
He was ‘born under law’ (Gal. 4:4).

There is an important example of this in the teaching of Luke 2:39-

52. What did Jesus do when he discovered that his mother and
Joseph were liable to sin? After all, he was the Son of God; he was to
die to be their Saviour. Luke tells us (again, presumably on the
authority of Mary’s testimony) that Jesus ‘went down to Nazareth
with them and was obedient to them’ (Lk. 2:51). He honoured
his parents. When he was hanging on the cross, in the last agonies of
his passion, he made arrangements for the apostle John to care for
his mother. Here is obedience to the will of God at its finest (Ex.
20:12). Jesus obeyed all the commandments of God and exhibited
them to perfection in his own life.

He grew through experience. The Gospels frequently record the

response which Jesus made to different situations. They tell us
something of the wide variety of human experience he had, and the
vast numbers of human needs he encountered. The impression
which we gain is that, as Jesus increased in experience, he seemed to
go from strength to strength in coping with it. Near the end of
his life, when we are told that his spirit was deeply troubled and
disturbed, he exercised so much grace and self-control that he was
able to encourage his disciples lest their hearts should also be
troubled (Jn. 14:1ff).

The Letter to the Hebrews deals with this aspect of our Lord’s
experience at some length and draws out its significance. He was
God’s High Priest. He came to offer a sacrifice, and at the same time
to be the victim himself.

But a High Priest had a further ministry. He prayed for and cared for
God’s people. That was why he needed to come from among them, so
that he could feel for them in their weakness and needs (Heb. 5:1ff).
This is the kind of High Priest and Saviour we have in Jesus:

For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in
order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in
service to God . . . Because he himself suffered when he was tempted,
he is able to help those who are being tempted. (Heb. 2:17-18)
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with
our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every
way, just as we are – yet was without sin. (Heb. 4:15)

So, every experience of life was tasted in some form by Jesus. He

blazed a Pioneer’s trail of total, whole-hearted obedience to his
Father. He responded with grace and the fruit of the Spirit in every
trial and test. He grew in stature as a man, and in favour with God
and man. As the Captain of our salvation he did all this for our sake,
and as an example to us. As the Pioneer of our faith, he has made
it possible for us to follow him. As a High Priest who shares our
human nature he is able to help us in our weakness. As our Example,
he is also perfectly equipped to be our Guide.

All this raises a further question. How did Jesus grow in grace like
this? What means did he use? What did he ‘feed’ his spirit on in
order to grow so perfectly? If we can discover the answers to such
questions it will be obvious that we must use the same means in
order to follow his example and grow more and more like him.

THE MEANS OF JESUS’ GROWTH

Jesus did not possess any special means of spiritual growth which
are not available to us. It is essential to realise this if we are to
understand Jesus, if we are to become like him.

Nowhere did Jesus explicitly tell his disciples the God-given means
by which they would develop as his followers. But the Gospel
narratives make it clear that he looked to three particular channels of
help and blessing.

Jesus searched the Scriptures. We do so in order to find the meaning

of his life and ministry. In fact Jesus did the same thing. Through his
understanding of God’s word he grew in appreciation of the will of
God for his life. Even a single reading of the Gospels makes us realise
that Jesus identified himself with the Old Testament figures of
the Suffering Servant (Is. 52:13-53:12) and the Son of Man (Dan.
7:9-14). He saw his own life and ministry prophesied in the pages of
Scripture, and he lived in order that Scripture might be fulfilled
through him.

We too find out God’s will for our lives, and grow in the knowledge of
it, by searching the Scriptures. There we find specific directions,
principles and examples which enable us to grow in obedience to
God and to increase in our knowledge of him.

Jesus grew in moral obedience by his understanding, use of and

obedience to God’s word. The classic example of this is in his
temptations. There our Lord revealed a rare depth of knowledge and
insight into parts of the Book of Deuteronomy. God’s word was the
Spirit’s sword in his hands, and safeguarded him in a time of fierce
temptation.

Such knowledge and understanding of God’s word, linked with

humble obedience, will always lead to growth in the Christian life.

★ ★ ★

Jesus found fellowship with God in prayer. His whole life was one of
prayer.

Throughout the story of the last three years of his life Jesus had
regular periods of prayer. They were times of intercession - there was
so much for which he had to pray. But they were also times of
fellowship and loving communion with his Father. From the ease
with which Judas led the soldiers to the Garden of Gethsemane, it
seems that Jesus made a habit of communing with God
there whenever he was in Jerusalem. The hills around Galilee were
another favourite and much frequented spot.
How did this prayer fellowship help Jesus to grow? First, because it
was at such times that he enjoyed meditation on his Father’s
greatness and love. It may have been in such times that the special
features of his Father’s will were impressed on him. In John 5:20
he says: ‘the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does’. This
intimate knowledge - like Jesus’ familiarity with Joseph as they
worked hour by hour, day by day at the carpenter’s bench at
Nazareth - was something which developed in times of communion
with God. But, secondly, in prayer Jesus drew on the resources of
God his Father. John’s Gospel particularly reveals the depths of
relationship between them. But it also appears elsewhere in the
Gospels. One of the things for which Jesus prayed was that the
Father would glorify his name (Jn. 12:28). It is interesting to notice
that Paul says Abraham grew strong in faith as he gave glory to God
(Rom. 4:20). We can surely assume that, in these hours of prayer,
Jesus did exactly the same. As he kept his heart in tune with God his
love and devotion to him gained in energy and power. That is one of
the qualities of love. It grows in the exercise.

Jesus looked for fellowship with God’s people. Was that not what he
was doing in the Temple at the age of twelve? He was engaged in
discussion with the teachers. He was asking penetrating questions
which amazed these theologians. He was wrestling with the great
issues which God’s word had already begun to impress on his
spirit. Did he know something of what Luke was later to describe as
‘the burning heart’ (.Lk. 24:32) as he discussed the Old Testament’s
teaching with these learned men? Was he inwardly grateful to his
Father that, for all their faults, here were men who could discuss the
ways of God? Did Jesus, as a boy, look on these leaders of his people,
as he was later to look on a young ruler, and love them?

At the age of thirty he chose twelve disciples. He wanted to send

them out. Eventually he planned to send them into the entire known
world to preach the gospel to every creature! But he had also chosen
them ‘to be with him’ (Mk. 3:14). Of course they needed to be with
him for their own sake. But did he not want and need companionship
for his own sake, in order to grow in fellowship with them? Did he
not take three of them with him to share his experience when he was
changed on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mk. 9:2-13), and to
witness his sufferings and encourage him by their presence with him
in Gethsemane (Mk. 14:33-42)? Why did he go to Bethany, to the
home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus? It was undoubtedly because he
found spiritual fellowship with them.

Knowledge of God’s word; communion in God’s presence; fellowship

with God’s people. These are the means by which Jesus grew in
grace.

Have we begun to use these same means? We shall need to return to

them again in the course of the following chapters. But for the
moment we ought to remind ourselves that they merit priority in our
lives. If we are to grow, if we are to become increasingly like Christ,
then we will need to follow the Master’s example.

If you have not already begun to do that, begin today. Indeed, begin
now.
 SECTION TWO: BASIC
PRINCIPLES

What are the essential marks of spiritual growth? How are they
produced in our lives?

In this section, three of these marks are considered. The Christian

grows in the knowledge of God. What does that mean? The
Christian develops a desire to know God, and to live more closely to
him. What produces this desire? Christians come to a deeper
understanding of Christ and what he has done. We must be willing
to make the sacrifices involved in being a Christian. What does that
involve?
3. In The Beginning
In chapter one we saw that Jesus grew, not only physically but also
in spiritual stature and'power. In particular we are told that he grew
in wisdom (Lk. 2:52).

If we now ask: ‘What does Luke mean when he says that Jesus grew
in wisdom?’ we must turn back to the rest of the Bible to discover the
answer. It tells us something which sounds strange and almost
unwelcome to our modern ears: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom’ (Prov. 9:10). To say that Jesus grew in wisdom is simply
another way of saying that he lived in the fear of God.

A Jesus who feared God sounds unfamiliar to us. A Jesus who

trusted God, who loved God - yes! But do we not hesitate to say or
even to think that Jesus feared God? We are tempted to say: ‘Well, I
have never heard this before. No sermon or Bible study I ever heard
described Jesus as a God-fearer. And, quite frankly, I am not
sure that this is the Jesus Christ I know and follow. Is this the Bible’s
Jesus?’

Yet the equation seems undeniable. Jesus grew in wisdom. Wisdom

means learning to fear God. If Jesus grew in wisdom he must have
grown also in the fear of God.

Our problem is that we often have a rather one-sided view of Christ.

We also tend to have a very distorted view of the Bible’s teaching on
the fear of God. A wise old writer wrote that the fear of God ‘is
generally looked upon as a left-handed grace’. He meant that because
it is there in the Bible we have to recognise it. Yet we feel ill-at-
ease about the whole idea that there should be fear of any kind in
spiritual life.
We shall never understand this dimension of growth in grace - either
in Christ’s life or in our own - until we realise that the Bible speaks
about two very different kinds of fear.

TWO KINDS OF FEAR

The Bible recognises both ‘servile fear’ and ‘filial fear’. There is the
fear which a slave would feel towards a harsh and unyielding master,
and the loving fear which a child feels towards his father. Servile fear
is the kind of fear which people often know before they become
Christians. It is a sense of terror of God. Filial fear (from the
Latin filiusy a son) should be the experience of every true child
of God.

The mistake we often make in thinking about fear is to imagine that

all fear is servile fear. If we can avoid that mistake, discover the
meaning of filial fear and grow in the experience of it, new strength
will inevitably come into our Christian living.

What is servile fear? Thomas Man ton, one-time chaplain to Oliver

Cromwell, described it like this:

Servile by which a man feareth God and hateth him, as a slave

feareth a cruel master, whom he could wish dead, and himself rid of
his service, and obeyeth by mere compulsion and constraint. Thus
the wicked fear God because they have drawn an ill picture of him
in their minds: Matt. 25:24-5, T knew thou wast a hard man, and I
was afraid’. They perform only a little unwilling and unpleasing
service, and as little as they can, because of their ill conceit [mistaken
and perverted understanding] of God.

For all the old-fashioned language in Manton’s statement there is

much in what he says. It rings true to modem experience. If we think
of the fear of God only in this way it is not surprising that we find it
difficult to believe that it is the beginning of wisdom, or that
Jesus experienced it.
But often the deepest reason for our distaste and dislike of the idea of
the fear of God is that servile fear lurks within our own hearts even
after we have become Christians. Sometimes it may haunt a true
Christian throughout the whole of his spiritual life. We may
spend years trying to hide from the fact that hidden within our own
lives is a spirit of servile fear which we have never properly faced and
from which we have never been fully delivered. We must learn that
the only means of deliverance lies in our growth in filial fear. It takes
filial fear to destroy servile fear!

What then is filial fear? It is that indefinable mixture of reverence

and pleasure, joy and awe which fills our hearts when we realise who
God is and what he has done for us. It is a love for God which is so
great that we would be ashamed to do anything which would
displease or grieve him, and makes us happiest when we are doing
what pleases him. Perhaps it has never been better expressed, with
its mysterious combination of pleasure and awe, than in F.W. Faber’s
words:

My fear of Thee, O Lord, exults

Like life within my veins,

A fear which rightly claims to be

One of love's sacred pains.

There is no joy the soul can meet

Upon life's various road

Like the sweet fear that sits and shrinks

Under the eye of God.

 Oh, Thou art greatly to be feared,

Thou art so prompt to bless!

The dread to miss such love as Thine

Makes fear but love's excess.

But fear is love, and love is fear,

And in and out they move;

But fear is an intenser joy

Than mere unfrightened love.

They love Thee little, if at all,

Who do not fear Thee much;

If love is Thine attraction, Lord!

Fear is Thy very touch.

How little we know of these biblical paradoxes! Psalm 2 encourages

us to ‘Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling’. Psalm 112
tells us of the blessing experienced by the man who fears the Lord. It
is against this kind of background that we begin to understand that
when Jesus grew in wisdom he experienced joy and awe in
the presence of his heavenly Father.

THE FEAR OF THE LORD

We are commanded to fear God (1 Pet. 2:17; cf. 1:17). We are
expected to fear Christ (Eph. 5:21). Many other New Testament
passages teach us that the fear of the Lord cannot be dismissed as
Old Testament religion’. It is the heart and soul of New Testament
Christianity as well. Ever since God called a people to himself his
desire has been that they should live before him in filial fear.

When the Ten Commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy, Moses

reminds the people of God’s heart-longings for them: Oh, that their
hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands
always, so that it might go well with them and their children
for ever!’ (Deut. 5:29).

Later, prophets like Jeremiah were beginning to look forward to the

new covenant which God would make through Christ. God promised
to accomplish what he himself longed to see in the lives of his people:
T will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they
will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children
after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will
never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so
that they will never turn away from me’ (Jer. 32:39-40).

These words contain God’s answer to the prayer of David: ‘Give me

an undivided heart, that I may fear your name’ (Ps. 86:11). God
looks for filial fear in his children; they pray for it; he provides it by
the ministry of his Holy Spirit!

But David’s prayer also suggests that a failure to fear God in this way
is the result of a divided heart, one that is not entirely devoted to God
and does not submit to him with whole-hearted abandon. Our Lord
Jesus devoted all his powers to God; he had an undivided heart. That
is why his life is the supreme illustration of what it means to fear the
Lord. It is the beginning of wisdom, or practical holiness, because it
is born in an undivided heart, a pure heart. Such a heart, Jesus said,
‘sees God’ (Matt. 5:8). It therefore fears God (because it has
seen him as he is). But it also learns to see life and to live it on the
basis of such intimate knowledge of God. It is this which makes the
life of the God-fearing child of a heavenly Father so different.

THE SOURCE OF FILIAL FEAR

In some passages in Scripture the expression ‘the fear of God’ is

simply another way of speaking about the presence of God, or God
making his presence known (e.g. Gen. 20:11; Ex. 20:20). God himself
is the ultimate source of filial fear. His presence produces that
answering response in our hearts. We glimpse his greatness and
majesty, and a silence comes over us (cf.Job 40:3-5; 42:2-6).

But we have not yet touched the nerve centre of the fear of God. For
the child of God there is a deeper mystery to be unfolded. He can say
with John Newton ‘’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear\ and
with the writer of Psalm 130: ‘There is forgiveness with you, that you
may be feared’.

What does this mean? It means that filial fear, the fear of a son for
his Father, is produced by God’s love for us. More exactly, it is the
result of discovering that the God whom we thought of with slavish,
servile fear, the holy righteous, terrifying God of judgment and
majesty, is also the God who forgives us through Jesus Christ. He is
just, yet he justifies the ungodly (Rom. 3:26; 5:6). He is righteous, yet
he counts sinners as righteous. One reason why we know so little of
such filial fear is that we do not appreciate the gospel! If we would
grow in grace so that we fear God like this, we must first return to the
gospel, and to the meaning of the cross.

The great illustration of this, as we shall later see in greater detail, is

Simon Peter. When he discovered how weak and sinful he had
proved to be in denying his Master, he saw his Master’s eyes gazing
upon him from the other side of the courtyard. What a moment!
‘The Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered what
the Lord had said . . . and Peter went out and wept bitterly’ (.Lk.
22:61-2).
Was Peter ashamed? Of course he was. But he also wept because of
what he had seen in the eyes of Christ. They said to him: ‘Remember
what I said Peter - that you would deny me, but that I would pray for
you (Lk. 22:31-2). I am praying for you, Peter, because I still love
you. I forgive you. I am going out to die on the cross for you’. Do you
not think that Peter’s heart responded in words very like these?

O how I fear Thee, living God,

With deepest, tenderestfears,

And worship Thee with trembling hope

And penitential tears!

Filial fear is always the grateful response of sinners who have become
saints.

Why is it important to grow in the fear of God? Because the effects

which this produces are themselves marks of spiritual growth.

THE EFFECTS OF FILIAL FEAR

(i) The fear of the Lord tends to take away all other fears. Jesus said
it is by learning to fear God that we are delivered from the fear of
what men will do to us (Matt. 10:26). He illustrated the power of
such filial fear in his own life. Because he would die rather than
grieve his Father’s heart he was not bullied by the threats of what
others might do to him. Because we are working through the
implications of our salvation in the fear of God (Phil. 2:12) we do
not need to be frightened in any way by those who oppose us, says
Paul (Phil. 1:28). Even if we suffer, says Peter (who surely knew what
he was talking about), we do not need to fear what those who do us
harm fear (i Pet. 3:13-14).
It was said of John Knox, the boldest of all Scottish Christians, that
he feared the face of no man (or woman, as Mary Queen of Scots was
to discover, although she towered above him by some six inches!).
The reason was that he had learned to fear the face of God. This is
the secret of Christian courage and boldness.

(ii) Fearing God prevents us from continuing in sin. There are

many examples of this in the Bible.

When Moses was given the Ten Commandments the people were
awed by the sense of the majesty of God they experienced at Mount
Sinai. Moses explained why God had touched their hearts in this
way: ‘Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of
God will be with you to keep you from sinning’ (Ex. 20:20). That
was exactly the spirit which had kept Moses himself alive as a child.
When Pharaoh had ordered every new-born boy to be slaughtered,
we are told, ‘The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what
the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live’ (Ex.
1:17). Rather than destroy God-given life, these ladies refused to obey
the king. They feared God; they would do nothing to grieve him, no
matter what it cost them.

(iii) Filial fear of God puts integrity into Christian character. The
child of God who possesses it is straightforward. His word is his
bond. He does not engage in doubledealing, for he ‘makes holiness
complete, in the fear of God, and cleanses himself from every
defilement of body and spirit’ (2 Cor. 7:1).

Nehemiah was such a man. He was brought up in a harsh tradition of

governing the people in his charge. But he did not follow the
precedent which had been set, for one reason, as he explained: ‘The
former governors who were before me laid heavy burdens upon the
people . . .

Even their servants lorded it over the people. But I do not do so,
because of the fear of God’ (Neh. 5:15). Fearing God enables the
Christian to say ‘No’ when that becomes necessary. And saying ‘No’ is
one of the last lessons some of us seem to be able to learn.

(iv) Filial fear promotes obedience in our lives. We not only avoid
doing what is wrong, but we very much want to do what is right and
pleasing in the sight of God.

Noah provides us with an interesting example of this. By faith, he

built an ark ‘in holy fear’ (Heb. 11:7). Because he so highly valued the
smile of God on his life he was unafraid of the undoubted leg-pulling
(and worse) which he experienced. After all, he was building an ark
on dry land, in readiness for the Day of Judgment. But God
had spoken to him; Noah would rather lose all his ‘friends’ than lose
the friendship of God. He knew something of the experience about
which Charles Wesley wrote:

O give me, Lord, the tender heart

That trembles at the approach of sin;

A godly fear of sin impart,

Implant and root it deep within,

That I may dread Thy gracious power

And never dare offend Thee more.

(v) The fear of God produces effectiveness in evangelism. This was

the case in the life-style of the first Christian churches.

Take their services of worship as an example. What did Paul look for
in them? He expected that there would be such a sense of the
presence of God with his people that outsiders (non-Christians)
coming in would be immediately arrested by it. They would sense
that God was present in holiness and power; the secrets of their
own hearts would be revealed. They would fall down and say: ‘Surely
God is here among you all’ (1 Cor. 14:24-5). Why did Paul expect
this? Because he knew that this was often the result of Christians
walking in the fear of the Lord. In the days surrounding his own
conversion ‘the church . . . had peace and was built up; and walking
in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it
was multiplied’ (Acts 9:31). Later on in Acts ‘fear fell upon them all;
and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled’ (Acts 19:17)· It needs to
be emphasised again and again that this was not servile fear, but
filial fear. It was joyful fear, penitential joy, trembling hope. It put
something into the living and worshipping of those early
Christians which we need to recover in our own lives.

The same is true at an individual as well as a corporate level. Paul

could say that it was because he had experienced the ‘fear of the
Lord’ that he wanted to persuade men to trust in Christ (2 Cor. 5:11).
This is one of his most revealing statements about his inner thoughts
on the theme of evangelism. He holds this statement together with
another which may even appear contradictory: ‘the love of Christ
constrains us’ (2 Cor. 5:14). But the two belong very naturally
together. For it was at the judgment seat of Christ that Paul had
learned there was forgiveness with Christ in order that he might be
feared (Ps. 130:4). He had been convinced of his sin, of his lack of
righteousness and of the certainty of judgment to come (Jn. 16:8-11).
But he found mercy and forgiveness. When we see this, we no longer
think that the fear of the Lord and the love of the Lord are mutually
exclusive. We discover that one cannot exist without the presence of
the other. We then begin to understand with Paul that evangelism is
not merely a privilege; it is a debt. We owe the gospel to our
fellow men. We offend God our Father if we do not take it to them
(Rom. 1:14). We who have learned to fear him will not dare to offend
him.

GROWING IN THE FEAR OF GOD

How then are we to grow in this essential Christian grace? Scripture
sets before us many great thoughts about God which will lead us, as
they led Jesus, to a loving filial reverence and fear of our Father in
heaven.

Consider first that God has chosen you. You did choose to serve him;
but only because he first loved and chose you. The mystery of the
relationship between God’s choice of us and our choice of God should
lead us to fear him.

Then there is God’s providence. Every hair of my head is numbered!

He has guided me, protected me, chastised me, provided for my
needs from the day I was born. More, he has over-ruled all the
circumstances of my life. The very genes from which I come were not
outwith his sovereign rule.

Think about his saving grace. The gift of his Son; the sending of his
Spirit to claim me personally as his child; the way in which he
moulds my life in his service. Think too on a larger canvas. For
salvation is of the Jews (Jn. 4:22s). Its coming to the Gentiles (to our
western world) was the result of its rejection by the Jews. We, says
Paul, are really wild branches unnaturally grafted in. Do not
therefore be high-minded, he concludes, ‘but fear’ (Rom. 11:20).

These are all thoughts which are calculated to produce this filial fear
of God in our hearts. Fearing God is the fruit of the gospel; it is the
beginning of real practical wisdom. That is why Ecclesiastes (that
shrewd preacher in the Old Testament whose sharp pen exposes so
many contemporary fallacies) tells us:

Here is the conclusion of the matter Fear God and keep his
commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. (Ecclesiastes
12:13)

If we have never grown beyond servile fear, either in our experience

or our understanding, these will seem dismal and depressing words.
But if we know the filial, loving fear of God as our Father, we will
realise that this is not only our duty, it is also the beginning of true
spiritual progress. So wrote John Flavel, the great Puritan preacher:

The carnal person fears man, not God;

the strong Christian fears God, not man;

the weak Christian fears man too much,

and God too little.

How true!
4. A Spiritual Appetite
The Book of Psalms has been described as ‘an anatomy of all the
parts of the soul’. It is an excellent description. For what we find in
the Psalms is a description and analysis of the spiritual life. Nothing
is hidden from us. ‘Highs’ and ‘lows’ are alike recorded. That is
why, when we read the Psalms, we are often amazed by the way they
present a mirror-image of our own experiences and condition.

In the Psalms we see a description of our own experience. But

sometimes we also recognise a description of new experiences. These
provide insights and guidelines for us, to teach us what to anticipate.
Some psalms are really saying to us: ‘This is how God may work.
Be prepared to recognise his hand in your life in similar experiences’.
Such is the case with Psalms 42 and 43. They are unusually
appropriate at this juncture of our thinking about spiritual growth.

These two psalms belong together. Psalm 43 is one of only two

psalms in the second book of the Psalter (Ps. 42-72) which has no
title. The reason probably is that at one time it was joined with Psalm
42. The theme of both psalms is the same. Indeed you will probably
have noticed that there is a chorus or refrain running through both
of them. (Ps. 42:5,11743:5):

Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God for I will yet praise him,

my Saviour and my God.

No wonder the message of these psalms has often been taken to be
‘counsel’ for the spiritually depressed’. They certainly provide such
counsel. But that is probably not meant to be the main lesson. For it
is characteristic of the Psalms to introduce the chief theme, not in the
chorus, but in the opening words. Psalm 42 begins with
this statement:

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When can I go and meet with God?

Here is someone who is longing to know God! That is an essential

part of all true spiritual growth. Of course growing as a Christian
involves gaining more knowledge of God’s word; it implies a life of
prayer and witness. But these are all the results of something more
basic. Being a Christian means knowing God. Growing as a
Christian means increasing in our desire to know God. This is
the sum of the Christian life. Jesus himself said: ‘This is eternal life:
that they may know you, the only true God’ (Jn. 17:3). The true men
and women of faith are ‘the people who know their God’ (Dan.
11:32). That is why, in the Old Testament, one of the anticipated
blessings of the new age which the Messiah would inaugurate was
that then men and women would ‘know the Lord’ (Jer. 31:34).

This is the heart of the Christian life. It is fundamental to all spiritual

growth. If we are not growing in the knowledge of God, we are not
growing at all.

Does it sound churlish to suggest that our greatest weakness today as

Christians (young and old) lies here? That was the complaint of
Hosea about his church. God’s people were destroyed for lack of
knowledge (Hos. 4:6). Similarly we tend to be a generation of
Christians who major on minor matters but do not seem to possess
the true measure of the gospel in the knowledge of God. We do not
really know God. At best we know about him.

The man who wrote Psalms 42 and 43 may once have been content
with a similar level of spiritual experience. But then God began to
order his circumstances in such a way that a new desire to grow
spiritually filled his horizon. He began to long to know God. He
describes his experience in three stages.

LONGING TO KNOW GOD

What is it like to have a desire to know God? These Psalms indicate

that it can be an exceedingly painful and disturbing thing. This man
felt he was cast down. He realised that he did not know God as he
needed to:

Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Perhaps in his earlier days he had known the presence of God in

powerful ways. But now his spirit felt barren and dry. It was parched,
and he was crying out for the dew of God’s presence to come to revive
and restore him.

It is a great temptation, looking at this man’s condition, to say that

he was simply a defeated and disobedient child of God - a backslider.
Yet he makes no mention of repentance, or of any specific sin which
is barring him from the presence of God. This is not a penitential
psalm. Indeed, in some ways the reverse is true. For here is a
man who can address God as ‘my Rock’ (v.9). He is thinking of God
as his shelter and protection - as a Crag in which he can hide to find
shelter and protection from his enemies. ‘At night’, he confesses, ‘his
song is with me’ (v.8). Hardly the words of a backslider!
God had begun to break up the fallow ground in his spirit (Jer. 4:3;
Hos. 10:12). He plans to bring him on to a new stage of spiritual
experience. As in ordinary life, so in spiritual life, we experience not
only the traumas of birth, but the struggles of growing out of one
stage into another stage of life.

But what were the means God employed in his life to bring about this
new state of affairs? And, correspondingly, what pattern of
experiences may we anticipate he will employ in our lives to bring us
into a growing knowledge of him and his ways with us?

SPIRITUAL DESIRES AWAKENED

There are three things which God began to use:

(i) Memories of the past. As he called to God in his perplexity, he

said: ‘These things I remember as I pour out my soul’. What did he
remember?

In his mind’s eye he was back in Jerusalem. He saw the crowds of

pilgrims at one of the great festival services: T used to go with the
multitude’. He remembered the atmosphere: ‘shouts of joy and
thanksgiving’. He himself was at the head of the procession (v.4). It
all comes flooding back to him - he even uses a rare word in
the original to describe the picture of the short, careful steps it is
always necessary to take in a vast crowd to avoid everyone stepping
on each other. Yes, those were wonderful days!

Sometimes looking back like that can be a symptom of spiritual

decay. If all our hopes, all our finest experiences lie in the past and
all we do is to complain that things are no longer what they once
were, it usually is a sign of personal spiritual decay. But that was not
the case with this man. He was remembering the grace and power
of God’s presence with his people for a specific reason: to stir up his
soul to long for and anticipate it again. That is one of the things a
memory is for!
When Paul was concerned about the spiritual growth of his young
friend Timothy, he encouraged him to use his memory. Remember
the day we laid our hands on you, Paul said. Think of that occasion
when the Holy Spirit set you apart through us. Do you not recall how
God sealed your calling and wonderfully blessed you? Do you
not remember how you gave yourself to the Lord out of a sense of his
goodness to you? Remember that hour, Timothy, and let its memory
stir you up to seek and to serve God now (see 2 Tim. 1:6-7;1 Tim.
4:14).

Many of us have similar memories of times and places of unusual

blessing in our lives. George Whitefield the great 18th century
evangelist used to say that when he returned to Oxford University
(where he had studied) he always wanted to go to the spot where he
had been converted and kiss the ground. The memory of what God
had done for him had proved to be such a great source of
continuing blessing that this was the only way he felt he could
express his gratitude!

I remember meeting a very elderly Christian in the far north of

Scotland. For many years there had been little faithful preaching of
Christ in the area where he had his croft. I wondered how he had
managed to keep his spiritual fervour (Rom. 12:11). He told me of an
event in his teens which had made such an impression on him that
he had found enormous encouragement for many years simply by
remembering it. At that time the Lord’s supper was celebrated only
twice each year. The congregation gathered for several days of special
services. On the Sunday afternoon, he had gone out to the back of his
father’s croft, and was astonished to discover the ground covered
in black. Scarcely a blade of grass was to be seen. Tt was’,
he explained, ‘because the men all wore black suits, and they were
kneeling and bowing together in prayer outside the house, calling on
God for “the divine unction’”. There had been such a sense of the
Lord’s presence that he had never forgotten the occasion. Since then
he had continued to long to know the Lord more and more.
Do you have a memory of meeting with God like this? Is it as clear in
your mind as the memories which the psalmist was recalling? Then
let your memory accomplish what God means it to: let it create in
you a thirst, a longing, a fresh desire to know God and to sense his
presence with you the way you did then.

(ii) Isolation in the present. Why was it that all these things were just
memories? He tells us: T will remember you from the land of Jordan,
the heights of Hermon - from Mount Mizar’. The reason he has only
recollections is that he is now far away from the scenes of his former
blessing. He is miles from Jerusalem, isolated in the highlands. He is
cut off from the thriving fellowship of God’s people he once knew; he
no longer is able to benefit from the various ministries he had
formerly enjoyed. There were few resources here to encourage his
spiritual growth; few friends with whom to share fellowship with
God.

The problem was magnified by another factor. There, in Jerusalem,

he had been more than simply one among many. He had been a
leader, perhaps the leader: ‘These things I remember . . . how I used
to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God.
(.Ps.42:4)

He was not the last to go through such an acute sense of isolation.

How many missionaries experience this! At home they played key
roles in their own Christian fellowships. They were leaders. But,
removed across the face of the earth, far from being leaders they
cannot even speak the language of the people. For many months
they may feel they are less than members, never mind leaders. When
they return home they may experience exactly the same in reverse.
While they have been labouring overseas their contemporaries have
moved on in life another four years or more. Returning missionaries
do not ‘fit in’ quite so easily as before. Even their own church is at a
different stage of development, of which they may no longer feel
an integral part.
But we do not need to go overseas to experience isolation. Any major
readjustment in our life-style can have this effect of making us feel
distanced, disorientated, no longer fulfilling a strategic, purposeful
role in our Christian lives. A change of job, of house, of
neighbourhood can do this. Bereavement, children leaving
home, retirement can all do the same.

What did God want to teach the psalmist? What does he want to
teach us in similar situations? God wants to teach us lessons in
isolation which he does not teach us, or which we cannot learn, in
fellowship. In our loneliness and separation from God’s people we
may learn to look to God, trust in God, desire God’s presence. We
discover that in the past we have relied too much on the
encouragement of others and insufficiently on the Lord himself.
While before we knew God (quite legitimately) through the help of
our fellow Christians, now we must learn to know him in isolation
from them.

This is why the psalm is called a Maskil, that is a song of instruction.

The writer is saying to us: this is what God taught me through my
experience; it is what he may want to teach you too.

(iii) Hostility in the environment. He is like a deer roving over the

crags and rocks in the height of summer looking for water with which
to slake his thirst. But he feels more than thirsty; he feels pursued:

As pants the hart for cooling streams,

When heated in the chase,

So longs my soul, O God, for thee

And thy refreshing grace.

There are several indications of this in what he says. People say to
him: ‘Where is your God?’ (v.3). He goes about mourning, ‘oppressed
by the enemy’ (v.9). He prays to be rescued ‘from deceitful and
wicked men’ (Ps. 43:1). No wonder he felt that God had cast him off
(.Ps. 43:2). He must have felt as though God were digging
his spiritual grave. He could not stand the pressure much longer.
‘Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause’, he cried (Ps. 43:1).

What was happening to him? There are several strands to be

untangled in his experience. God was showing him how much he
needed to depend on him for protection. Perhaps at an earlier stage
in his experience he felt that he could hold his own with anyone who
opposed his faith. Now he was discovering how vulnerable he was.
Perhaps too he had taken an altogether too confident view of his own
ability to stand firm against the forces of darkness. Now he was
beginning to realise that belonging to the kingdom of God meant
being a target for the attacks of the Devil. He goes around like a
roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (i Pet. 5:8). He had sent his
emissaries to attack this man. He needed help!

Yet none of this lay outside the control of God himself. While the
psalmist felt that God was digging his grave he was only partly right.
In a sense he was. God was wanting him to come to an end of himself
and his self confidence. That is always the place where the true
knowledge of God begins. But it was not really a grave God was
digging at all. It was a well! For out of the depths of this
experience would flow a river of spiritual blessing for him,
and through him to others. Through it all he was coming to know
God. No price was too great to pay for that. Sometimes we sing:

I thirst, I sigh, I faint to prove

The greatness of redeeming love,

The love of Christ to me.

What we tend to learn all too slowly is that sometimes we do have to
thirst, sigh and faint if we are to prove it.

This writer did prove it. So he shares with us one final thing:

SATISFACTION

His testimony is this. He prayed for spiritual satisfaction. In

particular he focused his prayers on the twin means by which God
would bring this into his life:

Send forth your light and your truth,

let them guide me;

let them bring me to your holy mountain,

to the place where you dwell.

Then will I go to the altar of God,

to God, my joy and my delight.

I will praise you with the harp,

O God, my God. (Ps. 43:3-4)

What were the means he expected God to use in order to bring him
to a deeper knowledge of him?

(i) The word of God. He prays for God’s light and truth. God’s word
serves as a lamp to our feet and a light for our path (Ps. 119:105). So
a later psalm confesses:
 The entrance of your words gives light;

it gives understanding to the simple.

I open my mouth and pant,

longing for your commands. (Ps. 119:130-1)

What does he mean? Of course he is missing the opportunity to read

God’s word with others. He has no access to the exposition of God’s
word in public. But he is wanting much more than the restoration of
these lost opportunities. He is asking for God to send forth his
light and truth. He is looking for ‘the entrance of your words’.

When we become Christians we are brought out of darkness into

God’s marvellous light (1 Pet. 2:9). God, who at creation said, ‘Let
light shine out of darkness’, has shined in our hearts to bring us to
know him through Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Formerly we were darkness,
but now we are light in the Lord (Eph. 5:8). One of the things which
accompanies this is the penetration of God’s truth into our minds,
consciences and hearts. We see our lives in his light for the first time.
We are brought to see the kingdom of God for the first time (Jn. 3:3),
and we are given a radically new interpretation of our own
lives. Illumination, enlightenment takes place (cf. Heb. 6:4).

It is common for young Christians to experience this effect of God’s

word regularly. There is so much that is new to learn. I have never
forgotten the first occasion on which I heard someone preach on the
idea that every Christian is a ‘saint’ according to the New Testament;
nor the first time that I appreciated that I was ‘in Christ5. These new
truths about our lives as Christians often come to us with
unforgettable force.

Accompanying this illumination of the mind there is a deliverance

and cleansing in our lives. Chains which formerly bound us, habits
which we could not break seem to be overwhelmed and defeated by
God’s power. We are not yet perfect (far from it); but we have begun
to taste the powers of the age to come (Heb. 6:5). We are new
creatures:

At times with sudden glory,

He speaks, and all is done;

Without one stroke of battle

The victory is won,

While we, with joy beholding,

Can scarce believe it true

That even our kingly Jesus

Can form such hearts anew.

Charitie Lees de Chenez

But it is not only in the lives of recent converts that God is able to do
this. He can speak with unusual power whenever he pleases. He can
bring fresh illumination, delivering grace, strong assurance. The
psalmist was praying for this. There are times in our experience
when ordinary means of growth need to be accompanied by special
illumination from God if we are ever to make any significant
progress. It was such a time in this man’s life. It may also be in our
lives too.

(ii) The worship of God. Having prayed for God to come to him, he
vows that in response he will come to God. He will climb God’s ‘holy
mountain’ (v.3); he will go to the altar of God; he will find God as ‘my
joy and my delight’ (v.4).

He has now discovered, as we shall discover, that all the experiences

of life are ordered by the Lord for one great purpose. Trials and
difficulties especially have this purpose in view. It is that we should
be brought into the presence of God, so that we worship him with all
our hearts. That is an authentic sign of spiritual growth.

There is a special significance in the order of these words: he climbs

the hill; he goes to the altar; he discovers God as his great joy. He is
thinking of coming to Jerusalem, where God has promised to reveal
himself in his temple. He is thinking of drawing near to God at
the place where sacrifice is made. He believes that at the
altar, because of the sacrifice, he will meet with God in grace and in
power.

The order of spiritual experience has not changed since the

psalmist’s day. We too need to go to the place where God has
promised to meet with us. That is no longer in Jerusalem. It is in
Christ. No longer in a place, but now in a person (cf. Jn, 4:21ff). We
too need to climb the hill to God - the hill of Calvary, in order to
come to Christ in whom alone God makes his presence known to us.

What do we find there? We too find an altar, a place of sacrifice - the

cross. We find a victim - our Lord Jesus Christ. We are called to
present our bodies on the altar as thank-offerings for his sacrifice for
us. This is our spiritual worship (see Rom. 12:1-2). Only then shall
we discover God as our chief joy.

God has made us to ‘glorify and enjoy him for ever’. Are we afraid of
the cost of glorifying him? Have we never experienced the bliss of
enjoying him here and now? We need a new willingness to sacrifice
our lives to him and for him, in order that we may know him fully.
We came upon the writer of Psalms 42 and 43 picturing himself as a
thirsty seeker. He longed to know God. We leave him as one who has
begun to discover the blessings of a promise which he never heard,
but which is so familiar to us.

Jesus said: If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living
water will flow from within him. (Jn. 7:37)

He said: Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.
Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water
welling up to eternal life. (Jn. 4:14)

Since we have ‘better promises’ (Heb. 5:6), let us follow on to know

the Lord (Heb. 6:1-3).

The first step forward in knowing God better is the awareness that
you do not yet know him fully. It is ‘thirsting’ for God. It is
discovering that he has water which can satisfy our deepest longings.
It is saying to him: ‘Lord, give me this water’ (Jn. 4:15).

Do you know God? Do you realise how little you know him? Do you
want to grow? Are you willing for all that is involved? We shall see in
the next chapter just exactly what is involved in knowing God better.
5. A Matter of Life and Death
The apostle Paul’s relationships with the many congregations in his
care were, on the whole, happy and fruitful. But there were some
exceptions.

The congregations in Galatia became a burden to him. So did the

church at Corinth, and also the fellowship at Colosse. In each case
false teachers and false teaching were among the reasons for Paul’s
concern. When he wrote to these churches he wanted to provide
therapy for their spiritual ailments. In particular he was concerned
about how, in these different congregations, a similar pattern had
begun to emerge. In one way or another they were being tempted to
look for something extra, to find a ‘plus’ in their Christian experience
which would bring them up to a new level of spiritual growth. The
‘plus’ was different in each case. But in every case it involved the
teaching that Christ himself was not enough. If people were really
to know God, it was suggested, then they would need to
have something extra.

The trouble was that instead of growing in grace these Christians

were ‘falling from grace’ (Gal. 5:4). They had begun to lose sight of
what the grace of God really is and does. It was therefore vital that
Paul should recall them to appreciate and enjoy the grace of God
offered to them in Jesus Christ.

Spiritual growth always involves understanding, appreciating,

receiving and enjoying the grace of God. So Paul found it in his own
experience. ‘I am what I am’, he wrote, ‘by the grace of God’ (i Cor.
15:10). Grace is so absolutely vital for spiritual development that we
usually speak about it in terms of the biblical expression
which provides the title for this book: growing in grace. But what is
growing in grace? What is grace? What is involved in receiving it?
How does it come to us, and what are its implications for us?

The Corinthians were searching for their ‘plus’ by over-emphasising

the gifts of the Spirit to the point of ignoring the fruit of the Spirit.
The Galatians were emphasising the necessity of the rite of
circumcision as an ‘extra’ to the point of dis-gracing God’s free grace.
The Colossians were adding rules and regulations to the Christian life
and leading those who had begun their Christian lives through faith
to walk by legalistic principles. What was Paul’s common message in
this situation? What message could lead these difficult congregations
away from their errors, rescue them from their immaturity and help
them to progress in the grace of God?

Paul’s answer was to emphasise the message of the cross.

To the Colossians he wrote:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your
sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our
sins, having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was
against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to
the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made
a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
Therefore . . .

(Col. 2:13-16).

Paul then explains the implications of the perfection of Christ’s work

for the Christian life. When we understand the cross, he says, and
when we live in the light of it, we are planted in the soil in which we
may grow in grace.

To the Corinthians he wrote:

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we
preach Christ crucified . . .

(i. Cor. 1:22)

Everything he says to the Corinthians is, in one way or another, an

outworking and application of this statement. If they are to grow they
must be brought back to the cross.

To the Galatians he wrote:

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

(Gal. 6:14)

Clearly the cross lies at the heart of the gospel; it is the centre of
everything else. Why should this be so? The answer is this: we find
grace through the cross and we grow in grace in proportion to the
welcome we give to its implications.

GRACE IN THE CROSS

In the New Testament ‘the cross’ has two different meanings. It can
mean an instrument of public execution. The cross was a wooden
structure on which a man was hung, bound to it with ropes and nails,
until he died. Medical analyses and descriptions of the cause of death
in the case of crucifixion leave a sickening feeling behind them. It
was a particularly degrading mode of execution, matched only by the
agony of the sufferer. In Jesus’ case, as with so many others, he was
already ruthlessly beaten, bruised and weakened before his
crucifixion took place.

It was only to be expected that ‘When all the people who had
gathered to witness this sight saw what took place, they beat their
breasts and went away’ (Lk. 23:48), and that the women of
Jerusalem who saw him slowly make his way to Calvary ‘mourned
and wailed for him’ (Lk. 23:27). One Latin author insisted that even
the name of the cross was not fit to be mentioned in decent Roman
conversation.

Paul could never have ‘boasted’ in the cross if this were all it meant.

But ‘the cross’ means something else. It not only is an instrument of

execution, in the New Testament it is also the means of our salvation.
When Paul preached ‘the cross’ he preached a message which
explained that this instrument of rejection had been used by God as
his instrument of reconciliation. Man’s means of bringing death to
Jesus was God’s means to bring life to the world. Man’s symbol of
rejecting Christ was God’s symbol of forgiveness for man. This is why
Paul boasted about the cross!

Here we must ask the all-important question: How do we find the

grace of God in the cross? How has it become God’s instrument of
salvation to those who have faith? Paul’s writings disclose no less
than three reasons.

(i) The Cross of Christ demonstrates the love of God. When the
famous text John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son that men might not perish, it means that God gave
his Son over to the death of the cross. The cross is the measure of the
love of God. That is why James Denney, a Scottish theologian of a
former generation, used to say that the only time he ever envied
a Roman priest his crucifix was when he wanted to brandish one
before his hearers and say: ‘God loves you like that!’ Although he
used no such visual aid the apostle Paul saw this as the burden of his
own preaching. We preach Christ-having-been-crucified, he said.
Earlier, when lamenting the falling from grace of the Galatians (Gal.
5:4) he had reminded them of the nerve-centre of his own preaching:
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes
Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. (Gal. 3:1)

He spoke to them about Christ’s work by way of personal testimony:

The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)

Again, in his letter to the Romans, he had underlined that it is on the

cross that we see the love of God demonstrated:

When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. God
demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us. When we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled
to him through the death of his Son. (Rom. 5:6,8,10)

When we think of Christ dying on the cross we are shown the lengths
to which God’s love goes in order to win us back to himself. We
would almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son!
We cannot measure such love by any other standard. He is saying to
us: I love you this much.

(ii) The Cross demonstrates the justice of God. Sometimes when we

explain the message of the gospel to others we say something like
this: ‘God has laid aside his justice. He no longer deals with us as
sinners; he forgets our sin, and accepts us’. But when we say this we
distort the biblical teaching. For the New Testament’s message is not
‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting
their tresspasses’. Rather it is:‘God was in Christ, not counting their
trespasses against them’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Do you see the difference?

God did count our trespasses. It is not on Mount Sinai that we

discover this. There we hear God telling us what our trespasses are,
and that he will in no way pass by sin. But it is only on Mount
Calvary that we witness God counting men’s sins, demonstrating his
perfect justice. Yes, it is wonderfully true that he does not count our
sins against us. But it is not the ultimate wonder. The wonder of all
wonders is that God counted our trespasses against his Son the Lord
Jesus Christ. He did not pass them by; he punished them to the full
in the person who ‘himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’ (1
Pet. 2:24). That was why Jesus cried out on the cross: ‘My God, I am
forsaken -why? why?’ Heaven’s answer was ‘Because you stand in the
place of sinners; you bear their guilt; now you must sustain their
punishment’. And so stroke upon stroke of divine judgment fell upon
Jesus:

He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our

iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and
by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own
way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Is. 53:5-6)

(iii) The Cross demonstrates the wisdom of God. How else could
guilt and forgiveness appear in the presence of God at the same
time? How else could God remain equally faithful to his love for us
and his just judgment of our sins? The glory of the cross, its
unimaginable wisdom lies in the way God has devised to provide
salvation for his people:

O loving wisdom of our God!

When all was sin and shame

A second Adam to the fight

And to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood

 Which did in Adam fail,

Should strive afresh against the foe,

Should strive and should prevail.

It is truly the ‘trysting place where heaven’s love and heaven’s justice
meet’, as Elizabeth Clephane’s great hymn puts it.

The cross is the heart of the gospel. It makes the gospel good news:
Christ has died for us. He has stood in our place before God’s
judgment seat. He has borne our sins. God has done something on
the cross which we could never do for ourselves.

But God does something to us as well as for us through the cross. He

persuades us that he loves us.

The view that the cross shows us the love of God is inadequate if
taken on its own. But when taken alongside what we have already
seen it sheds important light on what we should discover when we
trust in Christ crucified.

God has accepted us for Christ’s sake. But he wants to go further. He

intends to persuade us that he does accept us for Christ’s sake. So he
demonstrates, by adequate proof, his love to us. When I look at the
cross, I learn to say The Son of God loved me, and gave himself for
me’ (Gal. 2:20). I begin to believe with Paul that if God did not spare
his own Son, but gave him up to the cross for me, then he loves me so
much he will always give me only what will bring me blessing (Rom.
8:32).

Such conviction is a key point in Christian growth. If we have deep-

seated fears that God does not really love us (as many Christians
have), we can only go so far in growing nearer to God. There will
come a point at which we will fear to trust him any further because
we cannot be sure of his love. When we look at ourselves, or our own
faith, or our circumstances we will never be free from those
lurking fears. Satan will see to that. But when we lift up our eyes and
look on the cross we find the final persuasion that God is gracious
towards us. How can he be against us when all his wrath against us
fell upon Christ? How can he fail to care for us when he gave the only
Son he had for our sake? How can we doubt him when he has given
us evidence of his love sufficient to banish all doubts?

The reason we lack assurance of his grace is because we fail to focus

on that spot where he has revealed it. But if we fail to focus our
understanding there, we will fail to grow in grace.

★ ★ ★

There is, however, another aspect of the cross which we need to

consider. It too is a critical point of growth for the child of God.
Welcoming God’s grace must be accompanied by a willingness to
welcome all its implications. It was this Paul was thinking about
when he said that he gloried in the cross by which the world had
been crucified to him and he to the world (GaL 6:14).

IMPLICATIONS OF THE CROSS

(i) The world is crucified to the Christian. ‘The world’ is estranged

from God; ‘this age’ is dominated by sin. Here Paul means ‘the world’
with its temptations, in all its insidious power to draw the Christian
away from God.

What is to be done to the world in the Christian life? It is to be

crucified. It is to receive the same treatment at the hands of the
Christian as Jesus received at the hands of worldly men!

This is not a natural response to the world. Crucifixion is not a

natural death. It is a deliberate, brutal execution. Nor can crucifixion
be self-inflicted. The world does not go away on its own! It clings to
us like a limpet, seeking to weaken all our spiritual powers. We must
deal a mortal wound to its influence in our hearts and lives. Just as
the Lord Jesus was an object of revulsion and rejection to the world,
so it must be to us.

Paul is saying the same thing here as Jesus. If our right eye, or hand,
causes us to sin, we should pluck it out or tear it off, he had said
(Matt. 5:29-30). If we are to be his disciples we must deny self, take
up the cross daily and follow him (Lk. 9:23). There is no disharmony
between our Lord and Paul. The message is the same; the picture
is one. Welcoming God’s grace implies rejecting the world. Living for
Christ means nothing less.

It is a remarkable fact that so many practical issues like this one

came under our Lord’s scrutiny in his great parable of the Sower and
the soils. It was the key to understanding all the other parables.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to write about the practicalities of
being a Christian without coming back again and again to
the principles which Jesus there teaches.

In this connection it is his description of the thorny soil which is

relevant. What did Jesus say? He emphasised that it is possible for
growth to take place to a certain point, and then for fruitfulness to
cease because no weeding has been done in the heart. In other
words, no matter how much we build up the positive aspects
of Christian character, unless we also deal radically with
the remnants of indwelling sin in our lives, all will be lost. How
foolish we are, when nature itself teaches us these lessons, and Jesus
impresses them on us, if we ignore the importance of dealing with a
worldly spirit! The tragedy is that when we do nothing in this area of
spiritual life we provide exactly the conditions in which worldliness
will grow. What a solemn warning! Paul expressed it perfectly to his
friend Titus when he wrote:

The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It
teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to
live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while
we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our
great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to
redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that
are his very own, eager to do what is good. (Tit. 2:11-14)

Notice Paul’s perfect balance. The grace of God teaches us to say

‘No’.

(ii) The Christian is crucified to the world. How tempting it is to

draw back here. It is one thing to cope with the necessity of denying
ourselves. Yet, Paul now adds that by yielding to Christ we are likely
to be rejected by others. But the principle is an unavoidable one: ‘in
this world we are like him’ (1 Jn. 4:17). Christ was a man of
sorrows, despised and rejected (Is. 53:3). We are called to share
in his suffering. That, for Paul was the sign of genuine sonship. We
are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ provided we suffer with
him (Rom. 8:17) Paul himself bore on his body the marks of Jesus
(Gal. 6:17).

There are times when this crucifixion in the Christian’s life is

extended beyond inner spiritual experience. Paul spoke of how he
filled up what was lacking (or remaining) in the sufferings of Christ
(Col. 1:24). He could go so far as to say that ‘we always carry around
in our body the death of the Lord Jesus ... we ... are always being
given over to death for Jesus’ sake’ (2 Cor. 4:10-11).

What does this mean? We must never forget - if we are to grow in

grace, and therefore grow like Christ - that the One we trust, love and
serve is a crucified Saviour. To follow him means taking up the cross,
as well as denying ourselves. It means a crucified life.

At the end of chapter three we asked this question: Are you willing
for all that is involved in growing spiritually? Now we see what is
involved. We are to bear the cross. Only then can we say with Paul
that all we care for is to know Christ and the power of his
resurrection, sharing the fellowship of his death, in order that we
might attain to the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:10).

What, then, will you do about the cross, where God’s grace is
revealed, and where your will must bow to his?

We must do something about the cross, and one of two things only
we can do - flee it or die upon it. And if we should be so foolhardy as
to flee we shall by that act put away the faith of our fathers and make
of Christianity something other than it is. Then we shall have
left only the empty language of salvation; the power will depart with
our departure from the true cross.

If we are wise we will do what Jesus did; endure the cross and
despise its shame for the joy that is set before us. To do this is to
submit the whole pattern of our lives to be destroyed and built again
in the power of an endless life. And we shall find that it is more
than poetry, more than sweet hymnody and elevated feeling. The
cross will cut into our lives where it hurts worst, sparing neither us
nor our carefully cultivated reputations. It will defeat us and bring
our selfish lives to an end. Only then can we rise in fullness of life to
establish a pattern of living wholly new and free and full of
good works.1

Let Isaac Watts give you words with which to respond:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,

Save in the death of Christ, my God;

All the vain things that charm me most,

I sacrifice them to his blood.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

 That were an offering far too small;

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

1 A.W.Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, Harrisburg, PA., 1955, pp 64-5.

 SECTION THREE: LIFE
TOGETHER

Christians are not isolationists. They do not exist on their own, but
in groups, fellowships, communities known as (churches'. This is the
pattern which the Lord Jesus Christ laid down. He said: Ί will build
my church.'

What is the church for? One of its functions is to help us to grow in

grace. How does it do this?

Sometimes it is in the context of Christian fellowship that the

obstacles to true spiritual growth begin to appear. How can these
be overcome?
6. Growing Together
Why did Jesus Christ die? Paul emphasises that it was to ‘purify for
himself a people that are his very own’ (Tit. 2:14). When we quoted
this verse before it was to stress the necessity of learning to say ‘no’ if
we are to grow in grace. What we must now notice is that Paul
emphasises here, and in many other places, that Christ wants to
create ‘a people’, not merely isolated individuals who believe in him.

The story of God’s work throughout the Old Testament underlines

the point. Always God is interested in and working through
individuals. He does so because he plans to call together a nation of
men and women to serve him and witness to his glory throughout the
earth. In this chapter and the next we must give more careful
consideration to what this means in terms of our own spiritual
development.

Paul describes the church as a building, as a temple. Christ is the

cornerstone. The ministry of the apostles and prophets serves as the
foundation. In Christ, ‘the whole building is joined together and rises
to become a holy temple in the Lord’ (Eph. 2:21). God is shaping us
to be like Christ; but he is also shaping us in such a way that
we should fit together. In order to reflect Christ more perfectly our
relationships with our fellow Christians must be developed!

This is so obvious, and yet we frequently overlook its importance.

The more firmly we are held in place by the chief cornerstone, the
more securely we will be bound together with the other stones in the
building. We learn the same lesson from the picture of the church as
the flock over which Christ is set as the Chief Shepherd. When
he calls his sheep and they respond, they are brought closer to him.
But as he welcomes them to himself they inevitably are drawn closer
to each other!
Our lives are intended by God to exercise ministries to the lives of
our fellow Christians. We ought to be able to say to our fellow
Christians: T will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in
the faith’ (Phil. 1:25). If this is to be so, there are several features of
the New Testament’s teaching we will need to appreciate.

YOUR MINISTRY TO OTHERS

Every Christian has a gift. The Spirit gives one to each person, just as
he determines (1 Cor. 12:11). What is this gift for? To each one the
manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good’ (1 Cor.
12:7). These are illuminating words. Paul says a gift is a
‘manifestation of the Spirit’. It is a means by which the Spirit shows
us more of Christ. He does so by using some ability he has given us in
the service of others.

Martin Luther used to speak about the Christian being ‘a little Christ’
to his neighbour. That is what Paul means here. Unlike many of us,
Paul did not think of a gift of the Spirit as making the recipient seem
special or important. A gift of the Spirit is meant to show that Christ
is special. The only person the Spirit wants to manifest is Jesus!
(See Jn. 16:12-14 and Jn. 14:21,23.) When we exercise the gifts which
Christ has given us we are really saying to our fellow Christians and
others: See how much the Lord Jesus Christ loves you and cares for
you; he has sent me to serve you in this way; he is using my hands
and feet, my lips and ears, to show his love. It is a tragic mistake if
we think that the message is: See what a superb Christian I am; see
the wonderful gifts I have.

In the Upper Room, Jesus’ disciples were arguing with one another
about which one of them was the greatest and had the best gifts (how
like the Corinthians!). By contrast, Jesus was thinking: How can I
show these disciples that gifts are not for ourselves but for others?
The outcome, of course, was the washing of the disciples’ feet. Gifts
are for service, not self-advancement. We belong to each
other (Rom. 12:3); we need each other to reflect the fulness of
the love of Christ (1 Cor. 12:21). We must therefore learn to see our
gifts as instruments by which we can love and serve others.

These general considerations help us to make sense of Paul’s

statement in Ephesians 4:1 iff: ‘Christ gave some (gifts to the
church)... so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all. . .
become mature’. Maturity, spiritual stature is the raison d'etre of our
spiritual gifts. This was the driving force in Paul’s ministry: ‘so that
we may present everyone perfect (literally, mature) in Christ. To this
end I labour, struggling with all his energy, which so
powerfully works in me’ (Col. 1:28-9). But Paul is not unique in
this respect. He may have possessed more gifts, and different gifts
from the ones we do; but his aim and ours must be one. We live in
Christian fellowship so that we may serve each other with our gifts
and thus promote true spiritual growth in the body of Christ.

★ ★ ★

If we are to put this teaching into practice we must have a proper

appreciation of what Christ’s gifts are, and how they are related to
each other in the fellowship of the church.

THE NATURE OF OUR GIFTS

What we call ‘spiritual gifts’ (pneumatika) are also known in the New
Testament as ‘grace gifts’ (charismata). They are manifestations of
the Spirit, but they also express the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the graciousness he produces in our lives. We should never
confuse the gifts of the Spirit with the grace or fruit of the Spirit.
However the gifts of the Spirit are meant to produce the fruit of the
Spirit in our and others’ lives. They are given to the church by the
risen, ascended and reigning Lord Jesus Christ for this purpose.

When a king celebrates his coronation, gifts are given to his people.
In the same way the gifts which Christ has given to his church are
symbols of his coronation. Like a Roman general returning home in
triumph ‘he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men’ (Eph.
4:8). When we receive these gifts; when we employ them for others’
blessing; when we receive help through others’ gifts, we should
recognise that it is because Jesus is Lord. Because he reigns and has
been crowned, we have become the recipients of his royal bounty.

In the different lists in the New Testament describing the gifts of

Christ to the church it is noticeable that the ‘greater’ gifts (1 Cor.
12:31) are those which are related to the ministry of the word of God
in some form or another. Apostles were the channels of it to the
church of God in every age; prophets were mouthpieces of it and
applied it particularly to contemporary situations; pastors
and teachers used it in order to build up local congregations in their
faith. Words of wisdom and knowledge obviously fed upon its truth
and it served as the background to their usefulness; tongues and
their interpretation grew richer through familiarity with it, and were
tested by it; miracles, healings, helps, and all other gifts witnessed
to its truth and power to save. Because the character of our service
and its quality, whatever our gift, depends on the kind of men and
women we are, so those gifts depended on the divine instrument
which moulds and shapes Christian character - the word of God.

In the climate of our modern church, it is essential for us to realise

that God’s word is the central gift Christ gives to the church. The
major gifts of the New Testament era were given either to write that
word (apostles), apply it (prophets) or teach it (pastors and
teachers). Whenever we dislocate our own spiritual gift from this
anchor we begin to flounder in a sea of instability. We must see to it
that our gifts are fed on the teaching of Holy Scripture, so that
they grow strong and are channelled in the right direction, and so
bring glory to Christ.

★ ★ ★

But how, precisely, is this to be achieved?

PRODUCING GROWTH

Paul tells us that these fundamental ministries of the church were

given by Christ ‘to prepare God’s people for works of service’ (Eph.
4:12). It is in this way that the body of Christ is built up to maturity.
These central ministries are meant to help us to exercise our
ministry. The purpose of each gift is to promote the use of all the
other gifts.

This is why Paul was so attracted by the picture of the church as a

body (of Christ) and individual Christians as its members. The whole
body needs the eye, if it is to function properly. But it also needs the
parts which Paul describes as ‘less honourable’ (1 Cor. 12:23). Failure
to function properly in any area means that the whole body does not
function properly (Eph. 4:16). Failure to grow in one member
distorts the usefulness of the whole.

The word Paul uses in Ephesians 4:12 is a most interesting one.

Although it is translated ‘prepare’ in the NIV, it is the same word
which is used in the Gospels of the disciples ‘mending’ their nets or
‘preparing’ them for the next night’s fishing. They restored broken
and frayed parts of the nets, and folded them in readiness for
service later on. In 2 Timothy 3:16-17, when he is discussing
the effect of God’s word in the life of the believer, Paul uses similar
language: God’s word prepares us for every good work. This is a
marvellous illustration of what the basic ministry of God’s word is
meant to accomplish in our lives. God means to use it to get us in
readiness to employ the gifts he has given to us. In turn our gifts will
help others to use their gifts. In this way, as we serve one another in
Christian fellowship, the momentum of our usefulness increases. We
grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This always has a twofold effect, both negative and positive.

Negative effects. ‘Then we will no longer be infants’ (Eph. 4:14). Paul

appealed to the Corinthians to let the word of God produce this kind
of effect in their lives: Do not be children, but adults, in the way you
think (1 Cor. 14:20).

Infants are unsteady on their feet. They are usually attracted by

appearances. The items which are available for sale in a baby shop
illustrate the point. You will need to buy a large fireguard; a special
door gate; covers for electric points; a play pen - to name but a few of
the items which will keep an infant safe! Infants need to be protected
from the harm they are likely to do to themselves. They lack
experience and understanding. They are not to be criticised for that!
But they do need to be protected because of it. The time comes,
however, when they should have gained sufficient experience and
understanding to be able to find their way in fife, step by step. They
come to see that while fire is attractive it burns; that while electricity
is a wonderful servant it is a lethal master; that house stairs are for
walking up, not for tumbling down!

The same is true for the young Christian. He is unsteady. He does not
naturally possess the discernment necessary to steer his path
through the false teaching, the subtle temptations, the many snares
which he meets. Any wind of doctrine may blow him over and carry
him along in its wake (Eph. 4:14). The first essential is to be able
to stand. The only way this can be achieved is by gaining
the understanding of God’s word and ways which will safeguard us.
This is always the first benefit we receive as young Christians from
the ministry of others. There is a protecting and stabilising influence
in the teaching we receive from the word of God.

Positive effects. The ministry of others also produces growth in love:

‘Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into
him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body,
joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and
builds itself up in love, as each part does its work’ (Eph. 4:15-16).

The promotion and practice of love is fundamental to all spiritual

growth. The church is built up by love, and is a community which has
learned to ‘speak the truth in love’. Paul literally says that we ‘truth-
in-love’. We have no equivalent verb ‘to truth’. He means much more
than ‘speaking the truth’. Illustrate, express, demonstrate the truth
in love, is what he means. There is a reality and a transparency which
should develop in a Christian fellowship where the gifts of the Spirit
are exercised in the proper way. The aim of Paul’s own ministry was
precisely this: ‘the goal ... is love’, he wrote to Timothy ( Tim. 1:5).

John Owen explained the importance of love in a Christian

fellowship in this way: The church, he said, is like a bundle of sticks -
some long, some short; some straight, some bent; some fat, some
thin. We have different interests, personalities, backgrounds, spheres
of life. What do you do if you want to carry a bundle of sticks of
different shapes and sizes? You bind them together in a bundle. One
piece of rope makes the task straightforward. So too in the church of
Christ. There is only one thing which will hold together such diverse
groupings of people - and so Paul says: ‘put on love, which binds ...
all together in perfect unity’ (Col. 3:14).

But how is this love produced by the use of the gifts God has given to
his people? We have already seen the answer: gifts are given to us so
that we can serve others, so that we can show Christ’s love and our
own love for them. But the answer also lies in the influence these
gifts have on our lives. They teach us why we should love one
another, because God has loved us. They teach us why we
should welcome and forgive one another, because Christ
has welcomed and forgiven us (Rom. 15:7; Eph. 4:32). The ministry
of God’s word, in particular, should open up to us the wonders of the
gospel, and lead us to yield ourselves at an ever deepening level to
the service of the Lord Jesus Christ and of all who belong to him.

What then should we look for in our Christian fellowships? What

should we pray for if they are to be communities in which the body of
Christ upbuilds itself in love?
We should look first of all for a true ministry of God’s word. It is clear
from what we have seen in Paul’s teaching that while this is not the
only gift which Christ has given to the church (nor for that matter
does it seem to have been the exclusive province of only one person
in each New Testament congregation), it remains the central gift. All
other gifts depend and feed on it.

The ministry of the word builds us up. It does so through the

instruction it gives to our minds and the way in which it shapes our
thinking. Through its influence we learn the truths and principles
which help us to love God more, to appreciate our fellow Christians
and to understand the will of God for our fives. The ministry of
the word also protects us against harmful teaching and influences.
Through its effect we learn to distinguish between what is true and
what is false, what is real and what is counterfeit. According to Peter,
growing in grace and the knowledge of Christ is contrasted with
being ‘carried away by the error of lawless men’ and so falling from
our secure position in Christ (2 Pet. 3:17-18). It remains the central
necessity in all Christian fellowship.

The ministry of the word is intended to produce a fellowship of love,

as we have also seen, a mutual serving of one another. There will be a
reflection of Christ who came among us as ‘one who serves’ (
Lk. 22:27). This love will express itself in a willingness to suffer with
each other and for one another. Paul, who said that if one member
suffers the whole body will suffer, who stressed that we should weep
with those who weep, also spoke about being willing to suffer in the
place of his fellow Christians (1 Cor. 12:26; Rom. 12:13; Col. 1:24).
That is always the fruit of love, and it must be so in our fellowships
too.

Love also means caring for the needy, for love is nothing if it is not
practical. Love is always simple rather than complicated, caring
rather than merely demonstrative. Consequently the teaching of the
Bible about spiritual growth includes exhortations to use our
time, talents and financial resources in the interests of
others. Indeed, true spiritual growth, modelled on Christ’s
life, means looking out for the interests and needs of others rather
than our own (Phil. 2:21-2).

We grow through Christian fellowship too because it is the context in

which we witness for Christ. We cannot reflect all of Christ in our
own life. We need all of our fellow-Christians to be able to show his
grace and power. People will see only a fragment of all that Christ is
able to do when they look at us. But when they are drawn into
the fellowship to which we belong, then they may find how fully
Christ is able to save and keep those who trust in him. They will
recognise that our witness to Christ is much more than merely a
different standard of living. It is rather the direct result of the
presence of Christ in our lives and among his people.

Centuries ago, Christians used to say that ‘there is no salvation

outside of the church’. Their words are open to misunderstanding,
but when we properly understand them they are full of biblical truth.
You cannot be a Christian in isolation; you cannot grow by
shutting yourself off from contact with fellow disciples; you
cannot adequately receive the help God intends to give you,
or properly share the love of Christ. ‘In Christ we who are many form
one body, and each member belongs to all the others’ (Rom. 12.*5).
Christ has given us gifts so that we may serve each other and witness
to his glory, ‘until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge
of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole
measure of the fulness of Christ’ (Eph. 4:13).
7. Restricted Growth
God’s purpose is that we should grow as Christians in the context
of Christian fellowship. We need one another in order to show all the
facets of what Peter calls the ‘multi-coloured’ grace of God (i Pet.
4:10). We need one another in order to receive the rich variety of
blessing which Christ intends to give to us through our fellow
Christians.

But when we look realistically at our Christian fellowships, we are

forced to acknowledge that being together sometimes causes as many
problems as it seems to solve! We come to recognise that the church
is a community in which we receive spiritual help, but also one in
which deep-seated problems will come to the surface and will require
treatment. When we enter hospital for a check-up we may have very
minor symptoms; but after we have been there a little time the
physician may say to us: ‘It is just as well you came here when you
did, because we have diagnosed a more serious illness, and we shall
now be able to treat it’. Similarly, in Christian fellowship, through
the ministry of the word of God, through the care of our fellow-
believers, we often discover things about our own hearts which we
never anticipated.

So, there is a positive way to look at the problems which inevitably

arise in every fellowship. But that does not diminish the seriousness
of these problems.

In chapter four we mentioned that one of the churches which proved

to be a burden on Paul’s spirit was the one at Corinth. They had
received many blessings, and had been ‘enriched in every way’ in
Christ (1 Cor. 1:5). Paul’s testimony to the ascended Christ had been
confirmed in Corinth through the presence of many spiritual gifts
(2 Cor. 12:12). They eagerly waited for the return of Christ (1 Cor.
1:7). Yet they simultaneously had many signs of spiritual immaturity.
Paul’s first letter to them reveals that there were many practical and
doctrinal questions still being discussed by the Corinthians, the
answers to which should have been settled in their minds
long beforehand. Paul wanted to speak to them as spiritual men, but
he was discovering that they were ‘mere infants’. He could give them
only milk, because they were still not ready for solid food (1 Cor. 3:1-
2). There was jealousy and quarrelling among them. They
were acting like ordinary men and women rather than as the children
of God. Paul could well believe that there were divisions among them
(1 Cor. 11:18). Maturity had been given a back seat. All the signs of
childishness were returning. The situation was critical.

In the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul continued to wrestle

with this problem. He put his finger on one of the issues which was
stunting their spiritual advance. He appealed to them by name
(something he did very rarely):

We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our

hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but
you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange —I speak as to
my children - open wide your hearts also. (2 Cor. 6:11-13)

The Corinthians were suffering from a narrowing of their spiritual

heart-arteries. In natural life, health is threatened by such a
condition. So in spiritual things growth is stunted and the quality of
our Christian experience impoverished. The symptom of their
sickness, in this case, was the nature of their relationship with a
fellow Christian – with the apostle Paul. The life blood of affection
and love was no longer flowing through the body of Christ at Corinth
with its former freedom and fulness.

A closed heart is a major cause of lack of spiritual growth. Only an

open heart towards our fellow Christians makes for authentic and
natural spiritual development.
A CLOSED HEART

There were many signs of the needy spiritual condition of the

Christians at Corinth, and particularly of how closed their hearts had
grown towards Paul. Before, they had welcomed him and rejoiced in
the ministry which he was able to offer to them. Now things had
dramatically changed. One of the most obvious of these symptoms
of decay is the number of times Paul speaks about recommendation
or commendation. This idea appears more frequently in 2
Corinthians than in the rest of the New Testament put together!

What did this mean? Paul had earlier asked the church:

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like

some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? (2 Cor.
3:1)

Paul had become what we sometimes call persona non grata. He was
no longer welcome among the Corinthians the way he had formerly
been. Apparently some of them were beginning to ask: ‘Who is he,
anyway? What right does he have to a special place in our hearts?
What authority does he have?’

This situation caused Paul great heartache. He felt like a father

whose children have turned their backs on him, refusing to confide
their secrets, and worse, refusing to share their lives to any degree. It
is interesting to notice that Paul speaks about his relationship with
the Corinthians precisely in these terms (1 Cor. 4:15; 2 Cor. 6:13;
12:14-15). The hearts that were once most open to us are often those
which become most tightly closed when their affection is withdrawn.
In this case the principles of growth within the body of Christ which
Paul describes in Ephesians 4 had ceased to operate. The condition
gave all the signs of being terminal. The situation was highly critical.

Yet, the church at Corinth tells a story which is repeated in miniature

in many fellowships, and in the hearts of many individual Christians.
Fellowship is blocked, growth ceases, the light of grace and love no
longer shines as it once did. What are the causes of this? Two stand
out in the case of the Corinthians.

(i) Because of their lack of spiritual discernment the Corinthians

had been estranged from Paul's affection by the influence of others.
If you sit down and read through the letters to Corinth, particularly
the second one, you will feel that Paul seems to be looking beyond
the Corinthians in what he writes. Of course his comments are
directed towards them, but they also show an acute awareness of the
influence of others on them. For example, Paul contrasts his
own ministry with that of ‘others’:

Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit.

Do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you

or from you? (2 Cor. 2:17;3:1)

Who were these ‘so many’? Who were these ‘some people’ about
whom Paul was writing? Eventually Paul brings them out into the
open:

We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who

commend themselves.

But I do not think I am in the least inferior to those ‘super-

apostles’.

For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen,

masquerading as apostles of Christ . . . Their end will be what
their actions deserve. (2 Cor. 10: 12; 11:5,13)

Here were men who had followed Paul in the church at Corinth and
had wormed their way into the confidence of the people by boasting
of their gifts and message. But they abused God’s word, sought their
own personal gain and were a harmful influence. In order to
establish their own authority they found it necessary to play down
the authority of the apostle Paul, to oppose his teaching, and most of
all, to turn sour the former affection which these young Christians
had felt towards him. Now, they were told, their ‘apostle’ had feet of
clay. He was able to use words well when he wrote, but he was
lacking in eloquence in person (2 Cor. 10:10); he had many faults . . .
and where did he get his authority from in any case? The Corinthians
were too immature, too lacking in discernment to understand what
was happening to them. But Paul was in no doubt. Satan
masquerades sometimes as a messenger of light, he said, and we
should not be surprised if his servants do likewise (2 Cor. 11:13-15).

These Corinthians were the same people who, previously, had caused
Paul so much trouble with their party-spirit. They had grouped
themselves around a favourite preacher – Paul, or Apollos, or Peter.
They had been far more interested in the individual’s presentation of
the gospel message than with the message itself. They had
not distinguished between what was merely the outward
and secondary matter of the messenger, and the inner, central matter
of the truth of God.

Are we surprised to discover that these same people who lacked

spiritual discernment in that context (where the same truth was
being preached by these three faithful stewards of the gospel) also
lacked discernment when they were the recipients of false teaching
and under the influence of false teachers? Whenever they saw
great talents, outward pomp and show, they followed. It did
not much matter to them what tune was being played, so long as
some pied piper was playing it!

Over and over again this happens in the church. Christians begin to
grow in grace. But then they are swept off their feet by some new
movement, some novel teaching, or organisation - something bigger,
better, more exciting, seemingly more spiritual. One of the symptoms
is that our hearts begin to close to Christians who previously meant
so much to us, from whom we received help over long periods of
time. Their care was humble, constant, faithful. But now it is seen to
have been totally lacking in what we really needed! It is the
radical nature of this change of heart that is so disturbing. It
is reminiscent of the Israelites during the wilderness wanderings
murmuring against Moses (e.g. Numb. 11:4ff). We need to learn as
early as we can in Christian experience to have a healthy suspicion of
any influence in our lives which begins to close our hearts to those
who have been a spiritual help to us. That is not the kind of work of
which the Spirit of God is the author.

This reaction to Paul and his ministry was accompanied by other

alarming trends in the church at Corinth. It usually is.

(ii) The Corinthians were also, apparently, refusing to rid their

fellowship of known sin. In many translations there is a marked gap
between the end of 2 Corinthians 6:13 and 14. Paul is now taking up
a new theme. But notice that the issue to which he turns is integrally
related to what he has just been discussing. His appeal to the
Corinthians to open their hearts to him is followed by a summons to
live a life of holiness:

What do righteousness and wickedness have in common?

What fellowship can light have with darkness?

What harmony is there between Christ and Belial?

What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?

What agreement is there between the temple of God and

idols? (2 Cor. 6:14-16)

All this leads up to an exhortation to self-purification, ‘perfecting

holiness out of reverence for God’ (2 Cor. 7:1).
Why this sudden attack on sin? Did Paul suspect, or even know that
the Corinthians were living lives of double standards, professing
Christ (according to the new ‘light’ they had received from the false
teachers), yet living in fellowship with known sin? Was this why they
had begun to turn away from Paul and the ministry he exercised,
why they began to propagate criticism about him? Was this the only
way they could disguise, or justify, the double standard in their lives?
Were they accusing Paul of an inconsistency (‘his letters are weighty,
but in person he amounts to nothing’ (2 Cor. 10:10) to hide the
depths of their own inconsistency?

A good deal of evidence in the Corinthian correspondence suggests

that this was the case. It should not come as a shock to us that it was.
We find the same characteristics present in the Pharisees. Why did
they attack Jesus? What possible motive lay behind their accusations
of inconsistency in his life? It was surely the fact that his ministry
was uncovering the truth about many of them, and was exposing the
sin in their hearts. Jesus’ life and ministry demonstrated that while
they had separated themselves from outward immorality, many of
them were self-seeking, grace-abandoning enemies of God (see
Matt. 23:13ff). Their only way of self-defence was to attack Christ. So
in Corinth. There could be no ‘peace’ in the conscience until the
teaching and gracious influence of Paul had been silenced.

There is a great difference between a necessary spiritual and biblical

discernment of error and a spirit of criticism towards a fellow
Christian. We are encouraged to exercise the first. But the second is a
poison which will eventually destroy us. It is a sign that growth has
ceased.

Sometimes we think that sin in our lives is entirely a private matter,

between the individual and God. In a sense that is true. But sin can
never be kept within these bounds. Sooner or later it breaks out. It
shows its true colours - for it always takes the shape of
antagonism against grace, either in Christ himself or in his
disciples. In the case of the Corinthians the tell-tale sign
was antagonism against Paul. What concerned Paul was the fact that
antagonism against Christ himself was the next logical step. That is a
warning which we need to heed.

What is to be done when spiritual growth is thus hindered? In a

nutshell what this passage is teaching us is: Do not be like the
Corinthians; be like the apostle Paul. What, therefore, can we learn
from him?

AN OPEN HEART OF FELLOWSHIP

The natural thing for Paul to have done in this situation was to have
closed his heart against the Corinthians. Tit-for-tat! This is the way
of the world, and it is often our way, despite our fellowship in
Christ’s church.

I remember as a child listening to school radio programmes of music

and action. We would stand in our seats, and when the announcer
told us, ‘You are a flower’ and the music played, we pretended to be
just that – flowers! We opened up as the sun rose in the sky, and
then closed down as sunset came and it was time for flowers to go
back to bed. We were flowers! There is a spiritual lesson in
that mime. For we do respond to warmth and appreciation –
it brings us out of ourselves. We are drawn to those who take an
interest in us. We tend to close up in our spirits when we feel others
do not accept us, or when we find their reactions cold toward us.

The extraordinary feature of Paul was that the more the hearts of the
Corinthians were closed to him, the more he opened his heart to
them. Whereas they had spoken behind his back, he said ‘We have
spoken freely to you’. Whereas they had narrowed their hearts
towards him, he had ‘opened wide’ his heart to them. Whereas they
had withheld their affection from him, he had not withheld his from
them (2 Cor. 6:11-12). This is true growth in grace. It is seen in two
ways in this strained relationship between Paul and the Christians.
(i) Paul's confession of personal weakness. We noticed in the
previous chapter that one of the fruits of spiritual growth in the
context of fellowship is reality in love.

Paul had been accused of weakness. So he confessed his many

weaknesses, and the occasions on which he had been most conscious
of them. He said: God has put the treasure of the gospel in jars of
clay which are easily broken; such are we (2 Cor. 4:7). He illustrated
the point: ‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the
hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under
great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired
even of life’ (2 Cor. 1:8). Again, speaking of his previous
correspondence, Ί wrote you out of great distress and anguish of
heart and with many tears, not to grieve you but to let you know the
depth of my love for you' (2 Cor. 2:4). Hardly the words of a man
who gave himself out to be an impregnable leader!

But perhaps even more remarkable is his confession in 2 Corinthians

2:12-13. The Lord had opened a door for him to preach the gospel in
Troas. But he did not find his friend Titus there. He became anxious
and left. In short, he had an outstanding evangelistic opportunity
given to him, but he failed to rise to the occasion because he
was overcome with worry about a friend. We do not here need to
assess the seriousness of Paul’s failure. All we need to see is that he
confessed that he had failed his Lord. Furthermore, if 2 Corinthians
4:1 and 16 give an accurate reflection of Paul’s own experience it
seems that there were times in his ministry when he was in danger of
losing heart, and needed to resist the temptation by
anchoring himself to the great truths of the gospel.

Why all this personal confession? After all there was another
dimension altogether to the character and ministry of Paul - his
driving ambition to serve Christ; his long list of successful service;
his great strength of mind and the special revelation he had received
- why then did he not beat the Corinthians with an apostolic stick (as
he himself had suggested was a possibility open to him, i Cor. 4:21).
Why come to them in such evident weakness?

The answer is straightforward. Which would be the more Christ-like?

Which would show the affection he continued to feel for the
Corinthians? Which would most clearly prove that he was concerned
for them and not merely for his own position? Which was the more
likely to win them back to the ‘meekness and gentleness of Christ’ (2
Cor. 10:1)?

Alexander Whyte, the famous minister of Free St George’s Church in

Edinburgh said that there is such a thing as sanctification by vinegar.
What did he mean? When we were children we used to play a game
called ‘Conkers’. We bored a hole through a chestnut, and suspended
it from a piece of string with a knot in the end. The idea of the game
was to take alternate swipes at one another’s chestnut. Proud was the
boy who won in successive games, destroying his opponent’s conker
on each occasion. Having a ‘tenner’ (a conker undefeated in ten
successive matches) was an achievement in itself. But sometimes we
would become suspicious of a friend’s success. ‘You’ve used vinegar!’
the accusation would be made. That was cheating – soaking the
chestnut in vinegar to make it specially hard.

Some Christians live their Christian lives in that way. They become
unloving, unyielding, ‘holy’ in a formal, critical, unattractive way.
They have a holiness (it would be better to say ‘rectitude’) without
love. They have ‘been sanctified by vinegar’, not by grace. But this is
not genuine holiness. Nobody is drawn closer to the Saviour
or restored from rebellion and sin, by such a Christian. Only grace
can restore. That was why Paul shared with the Corinthians his own
need of grace, and the welcome which Christ’s grace in his own life
would give to them.

Do you know anything of that kind of costly spiritual growth?

(ii) Paul’s application of God’s grace. In the previous section of this
letter Paul had been explaining the nature of God’s saving grace. God
was reconciling the world to himself in the death of his Son. Now
Paul appealed to men: Be reconciled to God. His work was to invite
people to receive God’s grace. His message was evangelistic (2 Cor.
5:14ff). But when he turns to this new theme in chapter 6, he is
simply making a pastoral application of the same basic message. He
urges the Corinthians ‘not to receive God’s reconciling grace in vain’
(2 Cor. 6:1).

What does Paul mean? He saw the contradiction inherent in a group

of people who claimed to be reconciled to God but refused to be
reconciled to Paul. He is urging those who have received
reconciliation in Christ to display that reconciliation in their
relationships with others.

Whenever we close up our hearts against a fellow Christian we are

also closing them up against God. We are refusing to allow his grace
to produce its fruit in our hearts. For grace has been offered to us to
make us gracious to others.

The testimony of the apostle John echoes that of Paul:

If anyone says, 'I love God’, yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For
anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot
love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this
commandment: Whoever loves God must love his brother.

(1 John 4:20-1)

If we fail to open our hearts to our brothers and sisters in Christ, we

are failing to open them to Christ. If we fail here then we cease to
grow in true grace.
But how do we open our hearts to our brothers? How do we grow in
grace in the context of our fellowship with one another? The answer
lies in what Paul had already said about not receiving the grace of
God in vain. The way to open our hearts to others is by receiving
afresh the grace of God and appreciating what it means: seeing our
own need of Christ; coming to receive his mercy; sensing
how undeserved his love for us is; remembering how he has also
opened his heart to those whose hearts are closed against us. Then
we will see that the heart which is too narrow to receive a fellow
Christian is too narrow to enthrone the Lord Jesus Christ. But the
heart that is opened to receive the grace of Christ will learn to
welcome all those whom Christ himself has welcomed.
 SECTION FOUR: CASE
HISTORIES

Most of us find it an encouragement in our own Christian growth

to learn what God has done in the lives of others. We learn not only
by direct instruction, but by example and illustration.

This is why the Bible is more than a handbook to the Christian life.
It is also full of biographical accounts of men and women who grew
in grace.

Growth comes through our faithfulness. Growth sometimes comes

through a crisis. Growth also comes through the pastoral counsel
and encouragement of others.

Each of these paths to spiritual maturity is reflected in the lives of

one or other of God's servants in Scripture. In this section three of
them are singled out as ‘case-studies' in Christian growth.
8. Daniel - Growing Faithfully
I still remember curling up in bed as a child on a cold winter
morning, with my grandmother’s old, thick page, small print Bible.
There were two stories to which I most frequently turned in the Old
Testament, although I had some difficulty finding both of them! I
loved the story of Joseph - but sometimes as a very young boy forgot
that there was no Book of Joseph! Even more taxing on my patience
was leafing through from Genesis to find the Book of Daniel. It was a
special favourite.

It was much later that I first heard the words of the well known
chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel!

Dare to stand alone;

Dare to have a purpose firm;

Dare to make it known.

Those are certainly some of the outstanding features of Daniel’s life.

Even among biblical characters he stands out as an example of true
loyalty and devotion to God. Unlike so many other men and women
whose biographies are recorded in Scripture, he was a man of
consistent integrity. He was without obvious blemish. He is set
before us as a model of spiritual life and growth.

In particular Daniel is singled out in the Bible for two characteristics:

righteousness and faith. His name became synonymous with
righteousness, like Noah and Job (Ezek. 14:20). His faith as one who
‘shut the mouths of lions’ is impressed upon us as an example to
follow (Heb. 11:33).

Yet, perhaps the most impressive thing about Daniel is his

consistency. Like so many other saints he doubtless had his inward
trials and struggles. He certainly experienced opposition to the stand
he took for God. But through it all he faithfully and patiently
continued to grow in grace and in the knowledge of God. He can
teach us a great deal about the basic lessons of growing up to full
maturity as a child of God.

Of course we do not all grow like Daniel. God’s ways with us may be
quite different. We shall see in the lives of others in the following
chapters that God did not deal with every saint in biblical times
according to a stereotyped pattern. But, for all the different
applications of God’s purposes, the basic principles of true spiritual
growth remain the same. From each person whose biography God
has recorded in his word we should try to learn something for our
own lives. Daniel is a particularly helpful model.

There are four aspects of his growth which we should seek to imitate.
For young Christians the first of them is one of the most vital lessons
we can ever learn.

SOLID FOUNDATIONS

‘Dare to be a Daniel!’ But what was so daring about him? If there are
two things you know about him they are probably that he spent the
night in the lions’ den, and that ‘Daniel resolved not to defile himself
with the royal food and wine’ (Dan. 1:8).

The important point is not what it was he regarded as defiling. It is

the general principle which he had adopted: nothing which defiles,
that is, nothing which will incur the displeasure of the Lord will ever
have any place in my life. That is the principle which we earlier saw is
essential to ‘the fear of God’. God’s assessment and pleasure were
the most important things in Daniel’s life and the guiding principles
of all his behaviour. He therefore resolved that he would always do
what was pleasing to his heavenly Father. That is the only solid
foundation, the only watertight principle on which we can ever build
a useful Christian life. Unless we are single minded here we will
be unstable in all our ways (cf. Jas. 1:8).

What did this mean in practical terms for Daniel? How did he bring
this theory down into actual nitty-gritty practice? Take the case of
the food and drink he was offered. How did he apply the principle of
wholehearted commitment to the Lord in that situation?

Daniel recognised that spiritual growth depends on two things: first a

willingness to live according to the word of God; second, a
willingness to take whatever consequences emerge as a result. There
was nothing wrong with the king’s food. The very reverse would have
been true - it was the best that money could buy. But Daniel
was convinced that, by the standard of God’s revealed word, it would
have defiled his spirit to accept it. He realised that he could not say
that he loved God with all his heart and soul and strength, yet at the
same time engage in pursuits which dishonoured him. In the case of
the food and drink he was offered, it had in all probability been
dedicated to an idol - the ‘grace’ said before it was eaten would
have been in the form of a prayer of thanksgiving to a false god. To
take the food, Daniel believed, was tantamount to denying his Lord.

From one point of view, as doubtless many of his companions told

him, Daniel’s attitude must have appeared prejudiced and narrow!
Could he not just enjoy the food and continue to believe in God
inwardly? Why make so much fuss about a meal?

That is often the difference in perspective between the man who lives
by sight and the man who lives by faith. One man sees only food; the
other sees beyond the food to the face and presence and will of his
Father in heaven. He sees that in every action he is either
proclaiming or denying his Lord. Daniel was relatively indifferent to
the food itself; but he could never be indifferent to God’s honour.
Because he believed that the ultimate issue was the honour of God,
he declined to eat and drink. He was faithful to his resolution. He
recognised that, to borrow an apt phrase from A.W. Tozer, ‘Some
things are not negotiable’.1 He would therefore be faithful to God
and take the consequences.

1 A.W. Tozer, Man: the Dwelling Place of God, Harrisburg, 1966, pp. 165— 168.

Three features of this decision on Daniel’s part should be carefully

noted by everyone who wishes to make spiritual progress.

(i) Daniel followed the Lord wholeheartedly like Caleb before him
(Deut. 1:36). Scripture makes definite promises to wholeheartedness
(Jer. 24:7; 29:13). Without it we shall never grow in any marked way
in the knowledge of God. Only when we yield ourselves unreservedly
to him can we say that he is truly our Lord.

(ii) Daniel made his stand at the beginning of his life as an exile in
Babylon. This was one of the things which distinguished him from
many of his contemporaries who had enjoyed similar privileges in
earlier life. We discover in Psalm 137 that it was not long before a
rather sad note entered into their lives. By the waters of Babylon
they were taunted by their captors: ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion’.
Their response was: ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange
land?’ Why was this? They had refused to pay the price of standing
up before men as the Lord’s servants. Now they found that any desire
they had once had to please God and honour him had been eaten
away.

How different Daniel was! He could sing the Lord’s song in a strange
land, and he did so without shame. From the beginning he resolved
to shine for his God.

Had Daniel failed here, it is likely that he would have failed again.
One battle is not the whole war. But when we have to fight
succeeding battles using resources which were previously defeated,
we stand less chance of success. That is why the initial moral victory
was so important.

If you would grow in grace you must fly the flag of Christ. You must
do so at the first opportunity. Otherwise there will be lost ground to
be recovered - in some cases too much. Whenever you find yourself
in a new and strange situation, whether it be a new class at school
or college, a new sports team or club, a new neighbourhood or job,
Dare to be a Daniel! You will not need to go out of the way to seek
opportunities to take your stand for Christ and his word. They will
come; do not force them, or artificially provoke others. Begin as you
mean to continue, and you will continue.

(iii) Daniel's victory in his first test was the preparation for a senes
of later tests. Had he failed here it is unlikely that he would have
proved such a magnificent witness in later years of his life. This is
why Paul tells us to make the most of every opportunity, because the
days are evil (Eph. 5:16). In Daniel 4, 5 and 6 we read of the
tremendous tests through which he came under the reigns of
Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar and Darius. Because the foundations of
his life had been properly dug in wholehearted consecration, it was
able to take the many strains he later faced. Sure foundations mean
lasting stability. Weak foundations mean a suspect testimony, and
perhaps a life which will never really show the fruits of perseverance.

What, then, was Daniel’s secret? It lay in the decision of his heart. He
engaged his mind and will in a decisive commitment to his Lord. He
‘resolved’, or, more literally, ‘he laid it on his heart’ that he would live
in a certain way. He took the principle of wholehearted allegiance to
God and to his word as though it were a weight. He placed
that weight solemnly and deliberately on his conscience. He bound
himself by a personal covenant with God to live for his glory.

We do that too infrequently today. We fail to devote ourselves

deliberately to the Lord. But if we are ever to make progress in
Christian living to any marked degree, few things are more
important.

When did you last make such a resolution? Does that explain the
present standard of your Christian living?

WITHSTANDING OPPOSITION

Daniel’s resolution to serve God wholeheartedly was soon put to the

test. The opening chapter of his story records a series of incidents
which were deliberately planned in order to destroy spiritual growth
in both his and his companions. Reading between the lines we can
see that the powers of darkness were determined to spoil the quality
of this young believer’s life before it in turn made inroads into their
monopoly in the kingdom of Babylon.

The devil has nq new tricks. That is one of the most obvious lessons
we learn from his attacks on Daniel. We need not be ‘unaware of his
schemes’ (2 Cor. 2:11). If we pay careful attention to the pattern of
his working in the lives recorded in Scripture, we may be able to
anticipate his activity in our lives and recognise his presence in
our own temptations.

(i) The first onslaught on Daniel and his faithful friends

was intended to bring confusion into their thinking. They were given
new names. These four young men had been given specifically
Jewish names by their parents. Nor were these names of merely
national significance. They provided (and were intended to convey)
religious and spiritual encouragement.

Daniel means God has judged. He was to be called Belteshazzar,

meaning May Bel protect. Hananiah means God has been gracious,
but he became known as Shadrach, meaning Command of Aku.
Mishael’s name, which signified Who is what God is? was subtly
altered to Meshach which means Who is what Aku is? Azariah
means God has helped, but the name he was given in
Babylon, Abednego, means Servant of Nebo. Bel, Aku and Nebo were
Babylonian deities.

The point of this name change should not be ignored. It was not
simply a triviality. Nor was it a harmless case of ‘When in Rome do as
the Romans do’. Its intention and its potential consequences were
far-reaching. Had this strategy fulfilled its function in the lives of
these youngsters the book of Daniel would never have been
written. There would be no tales of heroic faith to pass on
to successive generations. There would be no example to hold up
before ourselves at all.

The menace of these new names was their intention to erode the
distinctive testimony of God’s servants; to provide subtle ways of
saying to them: ‘Now that you are in Babylon, settle into a new life-
style. Forget that you belong to Jehovah God. Forget that he is judge
(Daniel), that he has been gracious (Hananiah), that he is
incomparable (Mishael) and that he has been your helper (Azariah).
One god is as good as another. Distinctive, costly love for the living
and true God is of no consequence. Indeed it is a positive
disadvantage here. Forget about being different.’ This was the
temptation.

Does the devil speak any differently today? How easily he seems to
be able to get us to run from one extreme to the other. For a time our
immaturity will take us into an over restrictive life-style which finds
no place in the teaching of Scripture. But then (as is surely the case
today) we err j ust as seriously by seeming to give the impression that
there is really nothing very different after all about being a Christian.
In either case we have been overtaken by one of the devil’s oldest
tricks. He erodes the difference between faith and unbelief, the life of
God and the ways of this world. ‘People will think you are strange,
unattractive, peculiar, if you show how different a Christian really is.
So, show them that you are no different. Show them that “you can be
a Christian and enjoy yourself just the same way everybody else
does’”. How we reduce the power of the gospel in our lives when we
begin to think like that! For, in essence, we have already capitulated.
We are already thinking that it is far more important how the world
thinks of us (or how we think of ourselves) than that we live for
God and his glory and allow him to look after our reputation.

This was exactly the kind of false thinking into which the
Babylonians were attempting to lead Daniel and his companions.
They recognised the temptation, fought against its tendencies, and
proved that being different for the sake of the Lord is the most
attractive way we can possibly live. It is also the only way really to
grow.

(ii) The second onslaught was intended to indoctrinate their minds,

so that their grasp of God's truth was weakened. They were
educated for a period of three years in the ‘language and literature of
the Babylonians’ (Dan. 1:4).

What was the point of this exercise? It was intended gradually to

wear away the basic thought patterns, the appreciation of God’s truth
and the practical application of his word which were the chief
elements in the education they had already received. Imperceptible
destruction often proves to be the most successful. The sluggard who
lies in bed for a ‘little more sleep’ discovers that he
eventually becomes incapable of activity and is overtaken by
disaster (Prov. 6:9-11; 24:33-4). So the process of
ungodly indoctrination (which surrounds us daily in the
western world) erodes our sense of commitment to Christ, our ability
to detect the difference between what is good, indifferent and bad.
We learn to accept standards in our own hearts, practices in our
lives, attitudes and dispositions, simply because they are part of the
world in which we live.

It is not difficult to test where we stand here. All we need to do is to

place our actual practice of the Christian life beside some of the
demanding moral exhortations of Scripture. Can we read through the
moral application of the gospel (which we find so often in the second
part of Paul’s letters, or in the application of the Sermon on the
Mount) without a sense of concern that the sharp edge of
our testimony to Christ has been blunted? Do we allow our eyes to
look at things we would have shunned in less permissive days in
society in general? Are we numbed by what we see in the media, so
that we no longer turn away eye and heart and mind from what will
eventually destroy our moral fibre?

Satan was out to destroy these potential leaders of the cause of God.
Indoctrination was his second weapon.

(iii) The third onslaught was intended to dull their appetite

for spiritual reality. Food and wine were provided for them ‘from the
king’s table’ (Dan. 1:5). This proved to be the crunch issue for Daniel.
He knew, besides the question of this food being dedicated to false
idols, that the king’s aim was to give these Hebrew teenagers a taste
for pleasure in order to spoil their usefulness.

Few young men have more earned the right to speak about this than
Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, whose out-standing work as an evangelist
and preacher was cut short at the age of twenty-nine. Speaking
during the course of a friend’s ordination, he addressed him
personally in words all Christians do well to take to heart:

Study universal holiness of life! Your whole usefulness depends on

this. Your sermon . . . lasts but an hour or two, - your life preaches all
the week. Remember, ministers are standard-bearers. Satan aims his
fiery darts at them. If he can only make you a covetous minister, or a
lover of pleasure, or a lover of praise, or a lover of good eating, then
he has ruined your ministry for ever. Ah! let him preach on fifty
years, he will never do me any harm. Dear brother, cast yourself at
the feet of Christ, implore his Spirit to make you a holy man.1

1
Memoirs and Remains of R.M. M’Cheyne, ed. A.A. Bonar, Edinburgh 1892, pp. 406-7.
Nor is there one standard of purity and consecration in the Christian
life for ministers and another for everyone else!

Resolve to let nothing dull your palate. Let nothing spoil your
appetite for the service of God and his kingdom.

From subtle love of softening things,

From easy choices, weakenings

–Not thus are spirits fortified,

Not this way went the Crucified

–From all that dims Thy Calvary,

O Lamb of God, deliver me.

Amy Carmichael

DISCIPLINED SPIRITUALITY

One of the impressive things about Daniel’s life is that he kept on

being faithful. He not only began well, but he continued to grow
spiritually throughout his life.

An amazing illustration of this appears in chapters 9 and 10. Daniel

had been a young teenager when the exile began. These chapters
record some of his experiences when it was almost at an end. For
seventy years he had been singing ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’.
Now, presumably in his eighties, he was studying God’s
word, devoting many hours to the work of prayer and intercession,
and even continuing to fast. When all his contemporaries from his
days as a leading civil servant in Babylon had retired, Daniel was still
the spiritual warrior he had been all his life. He was a living proof of
the words of the psalmist:

The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a
cedar of Lebanon; planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish
in the courts of our God.

They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and
green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; he is my Rock, and there is
no wickedness in him’. (Ps. 92:12-15)

What were the evidences in his life that he grew steadily through the
years? What were the major compass points which gave his life such
clear direction? Again we can select only the most outstanding ones
for special mention.

(1) Daniel was a man of prayer. His whole life was prayer; he had
learned that knowing God means learning to live always in his
presence. What Jesus was later to teach as a basic aspect of the
Christian life - living before the face of our Father (Matt. 6:1ff) -
Daniel already knew. Prayer was his instinctive reaction to every
situation.

But there is a reason why he grew into this intimate communion with
God. He made prayer a discipline, a habit, a regular exercise in his
life.

He prayed with his three closest friends in a time of crisis recorded in

Daniel 2. Nebuchadnezzar’s megalomania had affected him to the
extent that he was demanding the impossible of his court
intellectuals. He had experienced a disturbing dream. He wanted his
advisers to tell him both what the dream had been and what its
meaning was! He threatened them with death. Daniel and his
companions’ lives were in danger. They prayed that their testimony
to God’s name would not be destroyed. God heard their prayer and
gave Daniel supernatural insight. Daniel was a man who believed in
corporate prayer. He saw that he himself needed corporate prayer,
and he urged his friends to pray with him (Dan. 2:18).

He was also a man who prayed privately. We read about him in later
life praying on his own (Dan. 9) as well as with others (Dan. 10:7).
The outstanding example of this is the insight we are given in Daniel
6 into his regular habit of prayer. Despite the ruling of the king,
Daniel ‘went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened
toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and
prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before’ (Dan.
6:10).

Regular, disciplined times of prayer were spiritual exercises which

used to be urged upon all Christians as part and parcel of the
Christian life. In many Christian groups today that is no longer true.
Regular praying is regarded as something of an irksome duty, a
bondage. It smacks of ‘legalism’.

No doubt it is possible to be legalistic about prayer. The Pharisees, or

many of them, were obviously legalistic. But could we say Daniel
was? Very often the truth of the matter, when people speak about
regular prayer as bondage, is that they feel it would be bondage.
Indeed, any serious spiritual discipline would feel like bondage for
them. But is that not an indication of how far our hearts are
from enjoying the love of God?

We make the great mistake of putting the cart before the horse. Our
thinking is: I will pray if I feel like praying. Then, when I feel more
like praying perhaps I will pray with greater regularity. But that is
not the pattern of biblical experience. Daniel prayed
regularly, individually and with others. It was out of that discipline
that his life of prayer developed. You do not become a master
musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning
the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any
area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true
of the life of prayer.

★ ★ ★

(ii) Daniel was a student of God's word. God’s word had first led him
to the conviction that to share in the king’s food would be to mar his
fellowship with God. Again, whenever Daniel prays or speaks we are
left with the impression of a man whose mind is saturated in the
thinking of the rest of the Old Testament. His worship of God in
Daniel 2 is reminiscent of the praise of that other figure of
unusual spiritual appreciation beyond her years, Mary the mother of
Jesus (Lk. i:46ff). His whole soul seems to be enlarged with a spirit
of worship:

He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes

them.

He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.

He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in

darkness, and light dwells with him.

I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers . . . (Dan. 2:21-23)

But once more the most fascinating scene is towards the end of his
life. He is now at least eighty years of age. We find him digging into
God’s word still, and discovering fresh light breaking out from it! In
the first year of Darius he was reading the book of Jeremiah (Dan.
9:2). We know exactly which passages he must have been studying -
Jeremiah 25:11-12 and 29:10. It dawned on him what these
words meant: soon the exile would be over and the people of
God would be able to return home! Yet there was no sign
Daniel could see of the promise of God being fulfilled. That is
why Daniel 9 records his pleading with God to be faithful to his word,
as he had always been in Daniel’s own experience.

When we cease to feed on God’s word like this, to have our eyes
opened to discover wonderful things in it (Ps. 119:18), we have
stopped growing as Christians. Naturally there will be days (and
passages of Scripture) which do not yield as much as others. But not
to continue to be learning-this is a serious condition.

‘Like newborn babes’, says Peter, ‘crave pure spiritual milk, so that
by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted
that the Lord is good’ (1 Pet. 2:2). Those last words form an
interesting foundation for his exhortation to go on growing. They
exactly express one further element which was essential to Daniel’s
continued progress in the faith.

TRUST IN GOD’S GOODNESS

We frequently use the expression ‘growing in grace’. We do not

always appreciate that it means growing in grace, that is, the free
and full love of God even for sinners. For there is little doubt that
often the ultimate stumbling block to growth in Christians’ lives is
their inability to grasp the wealth of love and care which God lavishes
upon them. It does not penetrate to us that God loves us,or, on the
other hand, we do not appreciate that grace is given to us to produce
gratitude to him.

This feature of spiritual experience is illustrated unexpectedly in one

of the last parables of our Lord’s ministry. He pictured the time
between his work on earth and his return in power in terms of a Lord
leaving his servants in charge of his affairs while he himself went on
a long journey. The servants were given different responsibilities.
But each one was expected to take what he was given and use it. One
man failed to do this. The reason he gave to his Lord when he
returned was: ‘Master, I knew that you are a hard man . . . Sol was
afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is
what belongs to you’ (Matt. 25:25).

The point should not be missed. A wrong view of God leads

inevitably to a failure to enjoy and grow in his grace. Failure to
appreciate his love, his kindness and generous heart leads eventually
to a life which bears no fruit and makes no progress. The lesson is
clear: if you would grow in grace, learn what grace is. Taste and see
that the Lord is good.

Daniel saw this. His prayers demonstrate his appreciation of God’s

care for him. But nowhere is his understanding so clear as in the
opening words of his great prayer in Daniel 9:

O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of
love with all who love him and obey his commands . . . (Dan.
9:4)

God’s love is the most awesome thing about him. It is not his justice,
nor his majesty, nor even his blazing holiness, but the fact that he
has made and keeps a covenant of personal commitment and love to
his people.

Daniel had only glimpses of what this implied. He knew about the
rock cut without human hands which would destroy the kingdoms of
this world and grow to become a huge mountain which would fill the
whole earth (Dan. 2:31-5). He knew of ‘one like a Son of Man’ who
would come with the clouds of heaven to receive authority, glory and
sovereign power (Dan. 7:13). What he could not fully appreciate was
that God would prove his love to us in that while we were still sinners
Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). He saw only a faint outline what we
have come to know in reality - the full measure of grace. Yet what he
did know filled him with wonder. He was a man who spent the whole
of his life amazed by grace. Such a spirit is the perfect seed bed for
true spiritual growth.
Are there any of these signs of growth in your life?
9. Simon Peter - Fits and Starts
It is difficult to imagine many biblical characters less like Daniel
than Simon Peter was.

The whole shape of Peter’s personality, the cast of his mind, the spirit
which drove him on through life were all at the opposite end of the
spectrum from what we imagine Daniel must have been. While
Daniel stood firm under pressure, Peter always seemed to crack.
While we see in Daniel’s life a vivid illustration of the fact that

Each vict’ry will help you

Some other to win

in the case of Peter the reverse is demonstrated. His failure at one

stage in his life seems to have virtually guaranteed his lack of success
at later stages.

Peter failed often as a member of the small band of disciples who

faithfully followed Jesus during his ministry. He failed most
obviously at the end of that period, when he denied his Master. But
events took place which changed his life. He became a new and
different man in Christ. He became a ‘rock’ according to his
Lord’s promise. Yet, even after the great events of Christ’s
death, resurrection and ascension, indeed even after the Day of
Pentecost when Peter received an unusual filling with the Holy
Spirit, he failed.

Paul narrates the sad story:

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he
was in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to
eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back
and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of
those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined
him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was
led astray.

When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the
gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, yet you live
like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force
Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?’ (Gal. 2:11-14)

What had happened was this. God had clearly shown Peter that the
gospel message was to be brought to the Gentiles (see Acts -11).
Peter had learned that in Christ the old distinctions between Jew and
Gentile had been abolished (cf. Eph. 2:11-21). The rites which
formerly separated them had been fulfilled in the work of
Christ. They had been but symbols and shadows of what he
would do. Now that Christ had appeared those symbols were
no longer necessary.

When Peter had grasped this it brought not only a new conviction
about doctrine to him, but also revolutionised his way of life. Now he
need feel no qualms about eating with Gentiles! He was free to enjoy
table fellowship with them. His conscience, which had once been
bound to such a restrictive practice (contrary to God’s original
intention for his people) had now been set free by God’s word.
Like Martin Luther after him, Peter’s conscience was led captive to
the word of God. But that captivity is perfect freedom.

Then something snapped. Some of the ‘old guard’ arrived on the

scene. Instead of fixing his conscience on what God had shown him,
Peter allowed it to become captive to the opinions of men. He
conformed to the kind of conduct which would keep him in good
standing with those Paul describes as ‘the circumcision party’
(those who insisted that Jewish observances had to be added to what
Christ had done in order to experience full salvation).

Paul had the courage to confront Peter about this. He did not accuse
him of failing to understand the gospel. Peter’s failure was not really
intellectual, for he had understood perfectly what the implications of
the gospel were. The trouble was that Peter and the others ‘were
not acting in line with the truth of the gospel’ (Gal. 2:14).
Paul accused Peter of moral failure. Fear (v.12) and hypocrisy (v.13)
were the charges of which he was guilty. He was proving to be a
double minded man with two standards fighting for supremacy in his
heart - what God said and what men said.

Peter was guilty of hypocrisy, because knowing that what God had
said was true, he was living by the standards of men. He was also
guilty of fear. That is significant because fear was his old enemy.
Jesus had spoken to Peter about it before, from the very beginning of
his disciple-ship (Lk. 5:10; 12:5ff). It was fear that had led to
Peter’s denial of his Master on the eve of the crucifixion. Now Paul’s
diagnosis was that the old sickness had returned. Peter’s Achilles’
heel was exposed and wounded once again.

This sad occasion in Simon Peter’s life is very instructive. As

Christians we are always liable to claim either too much or too little
for the Christian life - never more so than today. Peter’s experience
should safeguard us from both of those mistakes. For he was growing
in grace despite this failure. Moreover, although he was growing
in grace - and had been mightily baptised with the Spirit on the Day
of Pentecost - no crisis in his life provided a guarantee against future
failure. God sends crises into the life of his children to remove
blockages and to make true growth possible. That was what was
happening in Peter’s life. But no crisis rendered him immune to
future failure.

What are the general lessons we can learn about spiritual growth
from these considerations? We have already indicated that no special
blessing we receive guarantees automatic progress. But there are
several other significant insights which we should notice:

(i) Spiritual growth is not the same in every Christian. It is

not possible neady to package the ways in which God brings us on to
maturity and then suggest that everyone must fit in to this pattern.
That would be foolish, and it would also be very unbiblical.

Peter’s life was punctuated by a series of crises which God used to

restore him and to help him cross hurdles in his life which otherwise
would have been insurmountable. The ‘Daniel Treatment’ (if we can
call it that) would have been inappropriate in Peter’s case. Just so,
the ‘Peter Treatment’ may not be God’s pattern of operating in
your life. We ought to submit to whatever pattern God uses; to learn
from the variety of illustration in the Bible that he has many
patterns. Peter himself liked to speak about ‘the multi-coloured grace
of God’ (1 Pet. 4:10), and in his own spiritual growth we see one of
the patterns which that grace creates in a Christian’s life.

(ii) Growth can take place despite failure. Indeed, in Peter’s case
growth continued despite repeated failure.

We often make the mistake of confusing growth with perfection. But

no spiritual development in this life is without its weaknesses. Peter’s
failures were contained within the purposes of God for his life; they
were not outside of God’s control. They could not destroy what God
intended to do. None the less, his failures were real and provided a
barrier to his development. So long as he continued in them he
would never develop that stability and assurance which he needed.
Perhaps it was this which led him to reflect on the fact that the
Christian is ‘kept by the power of God’. But he also recognised this
was ‘through faith’ (i Pet. 1:5).

(iii) Peter’s life was haunted by one particular failure. There was a
specific weakness in his character which Satan seemed to be able to
break down with alarming regularity.
Peter is not alone among biblical characters in this . regard. David
showed similar symptoms in a different area, as did Samson and
Solomon before and after him. They had to learn through bitter
experience that we must guard our weaknesses. Growth in grace
sometimes depends on the relatively mundane expedient of
knowing ourselves well enough to recognise what are the points
of lowest resistance in our lives.

Peter’s great weakness was his fear - fear of suffering and fear of
men. We have already suggested that the only remedy for such fear is
the true fear of God. Several times in his letters Peter himself makes
reference to the fear of God. Clearly by the end of his life he had
experienced the truth of what Jesus had said. Very often it is only the
fear of God which is able to bring such deliverance as this, and to
lead us on past our failures to a new stability and strength in our
walk with God.

(iv) We must never measure spiritual growth merely by outward

appearances and standards. To do so is to forget that God looks on
the heart. But it is also to forget something else. For spiritual growth
can be measured only against the unique factors which exist in every
single Christian’s life. It frequently involves not only outward and
real expressions of the fruit of the Spirit, but also the amount of
opposition which has been overcome in order to produce such fruit.

Some Christians appear to go on in their spiritual pilgrimage by leaps

and bounds, others by fits and starts, and yet others almost
imperceptibly. But spiritual growth is like an iceberg - only part of it
can ever be seen above the surface. Someone whose life manifests
only small degrees of love, joy, peace, longsuffering and the other
fruits of the Spirit may have grown tremendously in grace even
to reach that apparently small measure of maturity. So it was with
Simon Peter. His glaring failures tend to divert attention from the
fact that, despite much natural opposition, despite the concentrated
opposition of Satan towards him, he did grow spiritually.
It is a possible (perhaps a probable) interpretation of Jesus’ words:
‘Satan has demanded to have you, Peter, to sift you like wheat’ (Lk.
22:31) that Peter knew more opposition from Satan than any of the
other disciples. He had been singled out for an all-out attack because
of his strategic position in the disciple band and thereafter in
the early church. Do not be discouraged by slow progress against
great opposition. Remember that progress includes obstacles
overcome as well as outward evidences of grace.

So much for these general lessons which arise out of Peter’s life. We
must now give more direct attention to some of the stages in his
experience which were strategic points, indeed crisis points in his
pilgrimage. His life was full of such moments, but there are some
which seem to have become important landmarks in his life.

THE PROMISE OF GROWTH

When Jesus was first introduced to Simon he said to him: ‘You are
Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas (which, when
translated, is Peter)’ (Jfn. 1:42). The giving of a name (what we
would call a ‘nickname’) in this way was an extremely significant
thing - just as it still is today. Often we learn much more about
people by their nicknames than we do from their proper names!
Peter was to be called ‘Rocky’! He was to be the heavyweight
champion of the disciples. We always imagine him as such -
big, blustering, impatient, determined, swinging alternate uppercuts
and left hooks at his opponents, only to be knocked down and almost
counted out by a skilled blow from his adversary the devil.

Jesus did not give Simon his new name without appreciating that
there was a touch of irony in it. But he also intended it to express
what, ultimately, would be the truth about his disciple. He would be
a rock. He would become steady, reliable, a landmark to friends and
foes of the gospel. ‘You are. . . you will be’. The contrast
summarised all that Jesus intended to do to bring him to maturity.
What lesson are we meant to learn from this? This: Peter’s life can
only be properly understood as the transformation of a man from
what he was into what Christ intended him to be. It cannot properly
be interpreted if we take into consideration only what he was; nor
if we concentrate only on what he was to become. For many of the
incidents in his life make plain that he was being moulded out of one
life-style into another. The man he was during that process is often
disappointing. The experiences through which he passed, when
isolated and interpreted without reference to Christ’s ultimate
goal, give us a very depressing view of his advance in the Christian
life. Only when we see the finished product, the aim in view, are we
able to understand the pattern by which Peter was being moulded.
Only when we remember that Christ was making a rock out of him
can we appreciate why all the hammer blows he experienced were so
very necessary. In Peter’s own words, his faith was impure. In order
to become purified like gold it had to be refined in the fire (i Pet. 1:7).

It was Paul who most eloquently enunciated this principle, but it

might well have been Peter:

We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also
rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces
perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Rom.
5:2-4)

God had used the same process centuries before in the life of the
impetuous Moses. As a young man he seems to have assumed that he
could become the deliverer of the Israelites in a day (Acts 7:25). But
God took forty years of his life to prepare and equip him for the work
of the exodus. He taught him patience through exile, just as
he taught Paul grace through sufferings (2 Cor. 12:9).

In each test Peter experienced, through which he came often feeling a

total failure, Christ was strengthening him, building solid and lasting
foundations into his character. Like his Lord, Peter became mature
through his suffering. Maturity was the necessary qualification for
his ministry. It is not without significance that it was only after he
had denied Christ and was restored that he was ordained to the work
of pastoring the flock as well as evangelising the lost (Jn. 21:15-17).

DISCOVERING PERSONAL SINFULNESS

In the narrative of Luke’s Gospel the call of Simon to dis-cipleship is

given in greater detail than elsewhere. Luke tells of a miraculous
catch of fish after a fruitless night of fishing. Peter, in the process of
being called to follow Christ as a ‘fisher of men’ came to a sudden and
profound consciousness of his personal sinfulness. He fell
down before Jesus and said: ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful
man!’ (Lk. 5:8).

What happened to Peter? He had become conscious of the power and

majesty of Jesus. The effect was dramatic. For Peter this was an hour
of self-understanding. Any illusions he entertained about himself
were demolished in the presence of Christ. All he could say when
confronted by him was, 'I have sinned’.

We have no means of knowing what Peter’s ‘self image’ (as we now

call it) might have been. At one time it seems he was a disciple or
adherent of John the Baptist. Undoubtedly John’s preaching had a
solemnising influence on his life. Perhaps it had made him
endeavour to bring forth genuine fruits of repentance (Lk. 3:8).
But somehow this encounter was different. Peter did not yet fully
understand who Christ was; but he understood more fully who he
himself was. He felt himself exposed, his personality and sinfulness
dismantled before the presence of this Jesus. Whatever self-image he
had - and presumably we find him returning to it from time to time
in the rest of his life - his illusions received a mortal blow. Now, in a
sense, he did not know what to make of himself. All he knew was that
he was a sinner.

Under such circumstances the Lord Jesus called Simon to be his

disciple. He promised to make something quite new out of the life
which was offered to him. He was Simon, he would become Peter; he
was a fisherman, and now he would become a fisher of men. The
most radical reconstruction of his life was underway. But it had
to begin by demolishing the manner in which Peter had previously
thought of himself.

None of the other disciples experienced their call in the same way, as
far as we know. Peter’s experience on its own is not enough for us to
make a general principle out of his conviction of sin. Not all people
need the same sight of their own sinfulness to bring them to Christ.
But often a deep sense of sin and guilt, such as Peter was given, has
a very definite purpose. God does not humble us without a special
reason. In Peter’s case his self-image was a definite hindrance to
God’s plan to lead him to a life of Christ-likeness. While this is not an
invariable rule of God’s dealings with us, bringing a deep
consciousness of personal sin is a pattern which he often weaves into
the fives of those whom he intends to use in a special way.

Isaiah the prophet is the clearest illustration of this in the Old

Testament. He may already have served God officially in the
prophetic ministry. But then God broke into his fife. He had already
preached that the people had unclean lips, but now his self image
was shattered by the discovery of something to which he had
doubtless paid lip service before: T am a man of unclean lips’ (Is.
6:5). He saw the King, the Lord Almighty; he saw the Son of God, the
Christ (according to Jn. 12:41). He experienced what Peter
experienced.

What is God doing to us through experiences which have this effect

on us? They may come when God speaks to us through his word, or
through some event which breaks our hearts. On such occasions of
spiritual crisis God is digging further down into the secret and
sometimes confused and weak foundations of our faith, in order
to form something new and lasting at the very heart of our fives. To
change the metaphor, he is root-pruning, so that everything that
impairs our spiritual growth (but might otherwise remain
undetected) can be properly dealt with.

Jeremiah expressed this same thought about his own ministry. It is

significant that God built it into the original call he gave him to be a
prophet: ‘See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to
uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to
plant’ (Jer. 1:10). It is not surprising that when Martin Luther wrote
his commentary on the Letter to the Romans (which had meant so
much to him in his own spiritual experience) he used these words of
Jeremiah to describe what its teaching does in men’s lives. It plucks
up and roots out - and then plants the strong grace of God in our
hearts.

There can be few more alarming sights than the sight of what we
would be were we left to ourselves, of what we are by nature in and of
ourselves. It is a sight which few of us are able to bear for any length
of time. That is why such experiences are usually brief, pointed but
not prolonged. God shows us enough to make us see our need, to
break down any illusions we may have had about ourselves. Like a
skilled surgeon his knife work is fast, accurate and clean. Like a
skilled surgeon also, the Lord knew that Simon Peter would need
similar treatment again. At a later stage of his life he would need the
most serious treatment consistent with the maintenance of his
spiritual life. But when he fell on his knees before Jesus the
treatment had begun. He could never really be the same again.

THE CRISIS OF THE CROSS

What was the real issue involved in the spiritual development of

Peter? Throughout his life he had a tendency to draw back from the
cross and its implications. Even in the circumstances which Paul
describes in Galatians, when Peter feared the men who emphasised
the need for circumcision and the continuation of the old
religious rites, this was the issue which underlay his fears. Paul
said that he was not living in a way that was consistent with
the gospel. But that had always been a weakness in Peter’s Christian
life, and a hurdle at which he had frequently stumbled and fallen.

After Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God (Mk.
8:27ff) Jesus ‘began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer
many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers
of the law, and that he must be killed . . (Mk. 8:31). Peter
immediately ‘took him aside and began to rebuke him’ (Mk.
8:32). What a remarkable scene! Peter’s response to our Lord’s first
plain declaration of his purpose to die on the cross was one of
hostility. What he did not realise was that he had already played his
life into Satan’s hands (hence Jesus’ words of counter-rebuke: ‘Get
out of my sight, Satan’). Peter was merely echoing the voice Jesus
had already heard in the wilderness temptations, enticing him to
take some other, less sacrificial way to win the world.

Yet Peter’s experience is but a dramatic illustration of a crisis which

faces all of us. He wanted the salvation which the Messiah would
bring; but he was little prepared for its implications - either for Jesus
or for himself. He did not yet understand the necessity of the cross;
but he did seem to grasp (as so many people instinctively do) what its
implications would be for himself. Jesus’ crucifixion entailed a
parallel sacrifice in the lives of his disciples. It meant taking up the
cross daily to follow him (Lk. 9:23). Being a Christian would
therefore imply following a crucified, humiliated, rejected
Messiah, whose triumph and victory could be seen only by faith.

Peter’s distaste for this central feature of his Master’s life followed
thereafter at regular intervals: in his instinctive recoil from the
thought that Jesus should humiliate himself by washing his disciples’
feet (Jn. 13:1ff); in his unwillingness to confess openly that he was
his follower; in the later compromise for which Paul rebuked him.

There was always a tendency to return to the old pattern of a life

which avoided sharing in the crucifixion of Christ.
This is not to suggest that no advance was made. The reverse is the
truth. Peter experienced profound repentance on the eve of the
crucifixion when he went out and wept bitterly. He experienced
Christ’s incisive pastoral dealings when he was later restored during
that painful interview by the Sea of Galilee (Jn. 21:15ff). The
new foundations which Jesus was laying in his life then were
the prelude to what would take place in Peter’s life on the Day of
Pentecost, when he was so mightily filled with the Spirit.

THE PATTERN

Peter grew in grace. It is tempting to think that what made the

difference was either or both of the events to which his new life is
generally attributed. A common interpretation of his experience
suggests that he was changed by the fact that Christ had risen. A
second view suggests that he was changed by the events of the Day of
Pentecost.

Clearly it was not just the resurrection which changed Peter. There
were still fears, still some of the old impetuous tendencies apparent
even after the resurrection (Jn. 20:19; 21:7). Nor would it be
accurate to separate off what happened at Pentecost and suggest that
there lies the key to his spiritual development. The fact of the matter
is that both of these events, and their powerful influence on Peter’s
life were dependent on the crucifixion and death of Jesus. It alone
gives them significance, just as we need them in order to see the real
purpose of our Lord’s death. That is reflected in Peter’s life. Only by
at last yielding his fife to a crucified Saviour was he able to receive
the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Indeed, the real
preparation of Peter for Pentecost had begun the day that Jesus
first explained the necessity of the cross.

There is a good deal of evidence that this is how Peter himself viewed
these events. We do not find him speaking about Pentecost as the
event which gives shape and power to the life of the Christian. No, it
is the death and resurrection of Jesus which form for him the key
points. It is Peter who takes up Jesus’ emphasis on his life
as embodying the ministry of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (Is.
52:73-53:12). He preaches about Jesus as the servant of God ( Acts
3:13, 26; cf. 4:27, 30). In his first letter he expounds the same
teaching (1 Pet. 2:21-3). The heart of the Christian life is the crucified
and risen Christ; the heart of all Christian experience is fellowship
with him; the key to Christian growth is by sharing in all the
implications of his death and resurrection.

He began life as Simon. Jesus promised he would become Peter, a

rock. As they talked together by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus explained
what that would mean. Peter, who had so signally failed his Master,
would, at the end of his life face the ultimate challenge:

Ί tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and
went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out
your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you
do not want to go.’ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by
which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’ (Jn.
21:18-19)

The day would come when Peter - yes, Peter! - would be willing to
accept the ultimate implication of following a crucified Christ. There
is possibly a reference in these words (‘stretch out your hands’) to the
way in which Peter would die - like his Master, by crucifixion. Not
only so, but Peter’s death would glorify God. He did learn to
follow Christ. He took up the cross daily. He also took up the cross
finally. He had grown to the measure of the stature of the fulness of
the crucified Christ. So must we. The pathway remains the same:

Take up thy cross, the Saviour said,

If thou wouldst My disciple be;

Deny thyself, the world forsake,

 And humbly follow after Me.

Take up thy cross; let not its weight

Fill thy weak soul with vain alarm;

His strength shall bear thy spirit up,

And brace thy heart, and nerve thine arm.

Take up thy cross, nor heed the shame,

Nor let thy foolish pride rebel;

The Lord for thee the cross endured

To save thy soul from death and hell.

Take up thy cross, then, in His strength,

And calmly every danger brave;

’ Twill guide thee to a better home,

And lead to victory o'er the grave.

Take up thy cross, and follow Christ,

Nor think till death to lay it down;

For only he who bears the cross

May hope to wear the glorious crown.

Charles William Everest
10. Timothy - Coping with
Yourself
The newspaper report of the Wimbledon tennis championships
describes one of the most famous players as ‘his own worst enemy’.
Despite the large number of famous players taking part in the
championships, few people would guess wrongly about his identity.
It is a curious factor in every sphere of life that there always seems to
be someone of whom this can be said. But in a sense it is true of all of
us.

When the correspondence columns in The Times many years ago

featured letters on the theme ‘What is wrong with the world?’ the
famous writer and apologist for Roman Catholicism, G.K.
Chesterton, contributed the shortest letter of all. It read: ‘Dear Sir, I
am, Yours sincerely, G.K. Chesterton’. Many of us often feel that way.
But there are some Christians for whom it is true to an aggravated
degree. From the point of view of their own personality development
they seem to be in a spirit of bondage, they lack assurance and
experience an insecurity which does not plague others to nearly the
same extent.

Of course even a Daniel must have known an element of this. No

doubt Simon Peter experienced it to a greater degree, because it
feeds on failure. But another young man appears in the pages of
Scripture who is identified in this way as ‘his own worst enemy’.
Paradoxically, Paul once said that he had no friend like him (Phil.
2:20). Yet Timothy (for that was the young man’s name) seems
to have suffered from fears, doubts and misgivings about the value of
his Christian life and service. What he needed to learn was that the
grace of God which enables us to grow as Christians works partly by
giving us the help we need in order to cope with ourselves. We can
discover how he did so by considering the way in which Paul offered
his final pastoral counsel and encouragements to his young
companion in the gospel.

YOUNG SERVANT OF CHRIST

The New Testament provides us with a number of the pieces which

made the jig-saw puzzle of Timothy’s life. His home was in Lystra
(Acts 16:1). Although we do not know definitely when or how he
became a Christian, it is probable that it was during the ministry of
Paul in Lystra on his first missionary journey. On that occasion he
had seen the sufferings which the apostle had experienced, and it
may have been the obvious help which Christ gave him in such
adversity which clinched Timothy’s conversion (2 Tim. 3:10-11).
There seems little doubt that Paul was God’s instrument in all this,
because he refers affectionately to Timothy as his ‘son in the faith’ (1
Tim. 1:2; cf. 1:18; 2 Tim. 1:2; 2:1).

We also know that Timothy was the child of a mixed marriage. His
mother Eunice was a Jewess, but his father was a Greek. Although
his mother had taught him the Scriptures from his childhood - he
had drunk in godliness with his mother’s milk, as John Calvin puts it
- he had never been circumcised as a Jewish child (see Acts 16:3).

Perhaps that is an indication of tensions and difficulties in his family.

Paul chose Timothy as one of his assistants and travelling

companions. We know that his choice was sealed by a special work of
the Spirit in Timothy’s life (1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6). His first task
appears to have been to bring encouragement to the church at
Thessalon-ica ( 1 Thess. 3:2). Later on he was entrusted with a
mission to Corinth (1 Cor. 4:17). Paul’s words to that church teach us
something about it and about Timothy: ‘If Timothy comes, see to it
that he has nothing to fear while he is with you, for he is carrying on
the work of the Lord, just as I am. No one, then, should refuse to
accept him. Send him on his way in peace so that he may return to
me’ (1 Cor. 16:10-11). Paul may have feared that the
Corinthians might do the very reverse. He also knew how
much Timothy needed to feel accepted before he could give his very
best in the service of Christ.

From what we have already seen in Paul’s Second Letter to the

Corinthians, Timothy’s mission probably accomplished little or
nothing. He continued to share in Paul’s ministry (Rom. 16:21; Acts
20:4,5; Phil. 2:20). By the time Paul wrote his letters to him,
Timothy was his apostolic delegate and had been serving for some
time as the pastor of the congregation in Ephesus. Paul was
a prisoner awaiting almost certain execution. He saw that, humanly
speaking, the future of the church in Ephesus lay in the hands of
Timothy and his companions. He knew too that much more than the
stability of one congregation might depend on Timothy’s usefulness
and maturity as a servant of God. So, in Second Timothy
in particular, Paul gives his final personal counsel to his dear young
friend.

We know very little more about Timothy’s life, except that Paul’s
encouragement, as we shall see, bore rich fruit.

TRIALS

Timothy was faced with three basic obstacles to overcome if his

spiritual growth and usefulness were not to be hindered.

(i) Youthfulness. Timothy was a young man. He may also have

sometimes seemed younger than he actually was because of the
nature of his looks and personality. In biblical language ‘young5 is an
adjective which stretches a little further on in life than it does in the
modern western world. Timothy may have been in his late twenties
or even in his thirties when Paul wrote to him. But simply because he
was a young man he faced certain problems.
Paul exhorted him to ‘Flee the evil desires of youth5 (2 Tim. 2:22).
Timothy faced a young man’s temptations. As a leader in the
congregation at Ephesus he knew that he should be a model in ruling
the flock of God. In order to do that he ought to be able to rule
himself (1 Tim. 3:2). But there lay the challenge. How could he rule
God’s people, how could he ‘encourage the young men to be self-
controlled5 (Tit. 2:6) if he found self-mastery a great problem in his
own life?

We are all tempted. But it is noticeable that there are some young
people who seem to be more conscious of the power of temptation
than others are, who feel their weakness more and are more given to
despair than their fellow Christians. There is a minor key running
through their experience, a strain of melancholy which clouds
even their very best moments. Such Christians often expect to be
defeated by the power of indwelling sin. Perhaps Timothy was such a
Christian. It is possible, alternatively, that Timothy lacked sufficient
self-knowledge to avoid occasions or opportunities of temptation. In
that case ‘flee youthful lusts’ was a much-needed exhortation.

Self-mastery is a mark of maturity in any sphere. The mastery of the

sinful self is a chief mark of spiritual maturity, and it is a key to the
growth of a well-rounded Christian character. What Paul was saying
to Timothy to encourage him in such growth was essentially this.
When we are young (in age or in grace) we tend to think that self-
mastery is a relatively straightforward matter. When we are being
driven along by new experiences and ambitions that is almost
inevitable. Further, God seems to protect us in a special way when we
are young Christians; he shields us from temptation and from many
of the problems of the Christian life. We are able to see his grace and
love so clearly that we give little attention to our own failure and sin.
We see the great task in our lives as the work of evangelising those
who do not yet know Christ. But soon we begin to discover that there
are dimensions of experience we never knew existed; there are
spiritual battles to be fought; there are sins from which we must flee.
Little did Joseph think as a youngster that the day would come when
the only safe thing for him to do if he was to keep on growing in grace
was to run (see Genesis ch. 39).

The situation was made more complex because Timothy was a

leader. Paul had urged him not to allow his youthfulness to be
abused by his fellow Christians (1 Tim. 4:12). There were so many
situations for which he felt inadequate. He had so little experience.
There were situations in Ephesus which Paul seemed to have
coped with which perhaps kept Timothy awake at night in bed. There
was opposition to the gospel which he would feel in an intensely
personal way. He was also the ‘curate’ in the congregation of which
the apostle Paul had been the ‘rector’: Paul had ministered there for a
period of some three years, and had expounded the Scriptures for
several hours each day during that period, besides his personal

counselling and house-to-house visitation (Acts 20:17ff., cf. 19:9-10).

Did Timothy feel like a spiritual pygmy each time he tried to expound
God’s word to this congregation? How could he ever hope to match
the teaching of the apostle?

How easy it must have been for him to become turned in on himself.
And, apparently, that is what often happened. But he faced an added
burden.

(ii) Constitution. Timothy was far from robust, physically. Paul

reminded him: ‘Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine
because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses’ (1 Tim. 5:23).
Was this a prescription Paul had received from Dr Luke? For what
ailment of the stomach? We do not know. But what we do learn from
it is that Timothy was not well. Perhaps he was never really ill, but he
was probably never strong. He would have found the weakening
effect of his sickness a great burden; it may also have been a source
of depression.

Yet Timothy had been refusing to take wine. Like many Christians,
he may have had an attitude of total abstinence. Perhaps he felt that
too many people in Ephesus were drunkards, or felt that this was a
real temptation to many people in the church (cf. Eph. 5:18). So he
abstained. He would not become enslaved to his liberties. But had he
become enslaved to his denial of his liberties? Christians can tie
themselves (and their personalities) in the tightest of knots because
they do this with all manner of things. It is a great barrier to the
liberty which ought to accompany development in the Christian
life. When we impose man-made regulations upon ourselves (or
others) and lose sight of our liberty to do or not do those things
which Scripture neither commands nor forbids, we destroy the fruit
of the Spirit and we cease to grow (or to allow others to grow).

Accompanying all this, and partly as a consequence of it, Timothy

seems to have been a shy and timid person. We have already noticed
that when Paul wrote to the difficult members of the church at
Corinth, he had to beg them to put Timothy at his ease. He had a
‘spirit of fear’ (2 Tim. 1:7).

Imagine the situation today. A famous evangelist is sending a

colleague to a church which bristles with problems. He writes in his
letter of commendation: ‘You will find that my young colleague has
certain difficulties in getting to know people; he is shy and diffident.
If you are going to see his work among you prove worthwhile you will
need to give him great consideration. Make sure you go out of your
way to welcome him and put him at his ease’. It would be interesting
to be a fly on the wall of a modern congregation when this letter was
read out at one of the committee meetings! How unlike our ideal
Christian Timothy was! It is not surprising that he had a sense
of inadequacy! We may well wonder if he was the product of a home
dominated by his mother and grandmother (rather than his Greek
father) in which he was rarely if ever given the opportunity to mould
his life on a strong manly model. Be that as it may, Timothy had
personal problems which were obstacles to his progress in the faith.

Does this strike a chord in our own life story and in our inner
thoughts about ourselves? What was Paul’s counsel? What would he
say to us if we confessed that we find ourselves mirrored to some
extent in the life of Timothy?

ENCOURAGEMENTS

Paul’s approach was to suggest to Timothy that his interpretation of

his spiritual condition was only part of the truth. It was true that he
faced all these difficulties. It was also true that on their own these
would inevitably lead him to a sense of despair about his spiritual
growth. But that was only half the truth, and sometimes that can
be just as dangerous, spiritually, as total misunderstanding. Timothy
needed to have another perspective on his life, one that was more
discerning and objective than his own. Paul gave his young friend
several pieces of encouragement.

Timothy was like Mary, weeping at the tomb of Jesus, feeling that he
was no longer present with her. She was so taken up with her own
sense of loss that she could not recognise Jesus even when he was
just beside her! Similarly, Paul could see the evident signs of the
Lord’s presence and influence in Timothy’s life which Timothy failed
to appreciate because he was looking only at his sense of failure.

(i) Spiritual sensitivity. When Paul began to write his second letter
to Timothy he allowed his mind to wander to recollect their times
together in the past. How much he had appreciated Timothy’s
company! How easy he was to work alongside - so different from
many others. Then, into Paul’s mind’s eye came the scene of their last
meeting. Timothy had wept - openly and unashamedly as he
had parted with his aged friend and father in the faith. So, wrote
Paul, T remember your tears’ (2 Tim. 1:4). Timothy’s heart had been
broken open, and he could not restrain his expression of the love and
affection he felt for the apostle Paul.

What was so memorable or important about that? A very simple

thing: in that moment Timothy had expressed himself fully and
freely, in a manner which he had perhaps done very rarely in his life.
He was taking his bottled-up emotions and pouring them out.
Timothy, who seems to have found it difficult to give himself away to
others, who was timid and shy in self-expression, had shown in a
most moving way the true spirit of brotherly love which was in his
heart. It had hurt. It cost him a great deal. Perhaps afterwards he was
tempted to feel ashamed of what might be misinterpreted by others
as weakness. But in fact it was a gracious mark of spiritual maturity.
He had crossed a growth barrier in his life.

The fruit of the Spirit is love. But love is the most costly of fruits.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love

anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be
broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give
your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round
with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up
safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -
safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it
will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy,
is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be
perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.1

1 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Fontana edition, London, 1963, pp. 111-2.

Timothy had broken open the casket. He was free. Now he would
grow.

(ii) Genuine Faith. The second feature Paul remembered when he

thought about Timothy was his faith. At first sight that may seem an
unremarkable thing to say. But closer inspection teaches us
otherwise. For how many people do you know of whom this could be
said?

Paul described Timothy’s faith as ‘sincere’ or ‘genuine’ or ‘unfeigned’

( 2Tim. 1:5). The word he uses is a picturesque one - anupokntos. It
is simply the word ‘hypocrite’ with the prefix ‘an’ meaning ‘not’.

The hypocrite was originally an actor. Theatrical make-up in those

days took the form of a mask which the actor wore. On it would be
painted the character and the mood which the actor portrayed. It
might be a smiling face which hid the sad heart of the actor behind it.
It might be a face of virtue which hid behind it a life of vice. In
acting there can be a great discrepancy between the part which
is played and the reality of the life which lies behind it. Paul suggests
that the same can be true of faith. We can profess much and possess
little. Indeed there is always the temptation in Christian fellowships
to pretend to be something other than what we are. We noticed
earlier that ‘truthing it in love’ was one of the hallmarks of
spiritual growth. So is reality in faith.

Timothy might not yet have had great faith or the full assurance of
faith about which the New Testament elsewhere spdaks. But he did
have genuine faith. There was no double-dealing as far as he was
concerned. What he seemed to be he really and truly was - a man of
sincere, genuine faith.

Again Paul was reminding him of this for his encouragement. He had
grown. Of course he was not all he might be. But God had room to
work in his life because he was hiding nothing. Sincerity on its own is
always inadequate before God. But faith without it is impossible.
Timothy had both. He had begun to take solid and reliable
steps towards spiritual maturity.

(iii) Spiritual powers. Paul’s third line of encouragement was to say

this: ‘Look, Timothy, God has equipped you to serve him in his
kingdom. Do not forget the powers he has given you.’

Timothy had been given a special gift. Paul exhorted him to fan it
into flame (2 Tim. But Timothy was also the recipient of the gift
which every Christian receives:
‘God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a Spirit of power, of love
and of self-discipline’ (2 Tim. 1:7).

What is the significance of this? Paul’s thinking was as follows: All

our needs can be met out of the fulness of the grace, love and power
of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who brings the fulness of Christ to us.
If we possess the Holy Spirit, then all that we need in order to grow
in grace and serve Christ well is available to us.

We have already seen the hindrances to Timothy’s spiritual growth: a

sense of his own weakness; a nature given to self-doubting; the
struggle with sin and temptation.

But, Paul urges: God has given you his Spirit! He is a Spirit of power,
to help you in your weakness. He is a Spirit of love, to turn your life
from an inward-looking to an outward-looking direction, from being
concerned with your own failures to being concerned for other
people’s needs. God has given you the Spirit who brings self-mastery
into your life! He has provided for all your needs.

Did Timothy grow in grace? Do we know whether Paul’s words of

counsel ever bore fruit? Yes, they did! Later, in the closing greetings
of the Letter to the Hebrews, the writer says: Ί want you to know that
our brother Timothy has been released’ (Heb. 13:2s). Released from
what? Although the word is used in the New Testament in the sense
of setting someone free for service (Acts 13:3), in this context the
meaning is undoubtedly that Timothy had been released from
prison.

What is so noteworthy about these words? This is the same Timothy

who had to be urged by Paul not to be ashamed of the gospel and to
take his share of suffering. This was the Timothy who was perhaps in
danger of being ashamed even of the apostle Paul’s imprisonment (2
Tim. 1:8). He, Timothy, had grown so firm and strong in his witness
that he had been willing to suffer even imprisonment for the sake of
Christ. If, as we suggested earlier, spiritual growth is measured not
only by external indications but by the amount of opposition which
has to be overcome in order to express them - then Timothy had
grown greatly in grace. Paul’s encouragements and instruction had
fulfilled their task.

The same word, the same grace, the same Spirit are available to us
still today. Many of us and our contemporaries are like Timothy. We
face great obstacles to our growth. Let us learn from his experience
that they are never insurmountable.
11. Over to You
Our aim in these studies has been to try to come to grips with some
of the Bible’s teaching on Christian growth. We have tried to do this
from a number of different angles. Now we have come to the
conclusion of the matter. We are like a person who has been
preparing for a journey - the time comes when we must take our
first steps, close the door behind us, get into the car, or boat, or train,
or plane, and begin the journey in earnest. Are we ready for that?

What preparations have we made?

We began our studies by thinking about Jesus himself. If we are to

grow in grace then we must aim to become more like him. In fact
growing in grace always means growing in fellowship with Christ.
But perhaps we have already discovered in our Christian lives that
there is opposition to this from many quarters. We are so
readily taken up with ourselves and our own preoccupations
with secondary matters. Or, we are caught up in the world, and we
lose sight of Christ.

It is for this reason that the New Testament exhorts Christians to

focus attention on Christ. Many of the problems which arose in the
early church could only be solved by bringing the Christians of that
time back to think about Jesus. That is why almost every letter in
the New Testament has as its central theme the person and work of
Jesus. Being a Christian is knowing him; growing as a Christian
means knowing him better.

Have you really taken this seriously? Are you making an effort to
know Christ? He shows himself to us in many different ways, and we
have thought about some of them in the preceding pages. Have you
committed yourself to growing in the knowledge of Christ which
inevitably accompanies growing in grace? You cannot expect to
grow as long as he is a matter of relative indifference!

We then went on to think about what we saw to be a key principle in

spiritual growth. A proper attitude to God, and a desire to get to
know him better go hand-in-hand in the Christian life. We
discovered that fearing the Lord and longing for his presence are
among the most important elements in the development of a biblical
Christian life-style. Furthermore, when we turn away from these
we soon discover that what we are ultimately turning from is the
cross and the crucified Lord himself. If there is one thing from which
the world, the flesh and the devil will together seek to draw us, it is
following a crucified Saviour and being willing to accept whatever the
consequences may be. We are faced therefore with a choice, as
A.W. Tozer has said: We must either flee from the cross, or we must
be willing to die on it. It is a challenge from which many people hide:

Perhaps this is at the bottom of the backsliding and worldliness

among gospel believers today. We want to be saved but we insist that
Christ do all the dying. No cross for us, no dethronement, no dying.
We remain king within the little kingdom of Mansoul and wear our
tinsel crown with all the pride of a Caesar; but we doom ourselves to
shadows and weakness and spiritual sterility.
1

1
A.W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, p.66.

Ever since the temptations of Christ, the devil has attempted to draw
God’s servants away from this central principle of Christian living
and growing. But if we are to conquer him, grow in grace and become
mature Christians we must accept the cross. It is as inescapable as it
is radical. It is, literally, the crucial issue. Have we faced it, and
decided that we shall put our hand to this plough and keep looking
forward?
Then we have seen that we cannot grow in isolation. Spiritual growth
means growing in love, and love can never function in a vacuum. It is
with other Christians that our love and spiritual growth are both
exercised and put to the test. The gifts God has given you - these
have been placed in your hands so that you can reach out to minister
to others and their needs. You have a duty, an obligation to give what
God has given you.

Are you tempted to share your gifts only with a carefully selected
group of Christians? Paul has shown us that real growth in grace
means that we open our hearts to all the Lord’s people. Growing as a
Christian means seeking to be ‘perfect’ as our Father in heaven is
perfect. He sends his rain on the just and the unjust alike. To whom
would you send the rain, if that were your prerogative? Only to the
just? Only to those who loved you?

Some of these issues we have seen illustrated in the lives of Daniel,

Peter and Timothy. They were all relatively young and immature
believers with whom God dealt over extended periods of time. None
of us is exactly like them. But most of us share some of their
features. Their lives teach us that growth is not impossible, even for
us! God’s resources are sufficient for each of us.

Now it is up to us to work out these principles in our own lives, to put

these exhortations into practice, to discern what God is doing as he
leads us on in the Christian life. Are you willing to ask God to help
you to grow in grace?