This article is written by Ryan Christensen, a former practitioner at Valeo, who is currently serving as the Men’s Ministry Associate at Grace Church in Eden Prairie, MN.
How is your health? On face value, people generally say “good” or “bad.” BUT that is a bad question. To assess your health, you need to dive into the various aspects of your life: physical health, emotional health, relational health, financial health. The most important portion of your health is your spiritual health. Your physical health is temporary for the number of years that you are here on earth, but your spiritual health will affect you for an eternity.
James 4:14 says “yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” Life is short. In 1 Peter 1:24, it gives an analogy of how life is like grass and flowers. It will bloom and then fade away quickly. Those verses are not saying that we should neglect our physical bodies, but it is showing how fleeting this life is and how important it is to act now. Don’t wait and don’t neglect to nurture and grow in your spiritual life.
Here are three ways you can do just that.
Knowledge of God
The first step to growing in your faith is learning about God. God created everything seen and unseen; the physical and immaterial; in heaven, on Earth, and under Earth. He has given us life and a spiritual life. If we want to know how to grow in our faith, we need to know more about who created it. Just like learning about art, you have a deeper understanding of the painting when you learn about the artist. It’s the same with learning about God. It will give you an insight into the value He has for you and the direction that He wants you to go in. God loves you and cares for you. But if your view of God is just that He is loving and caring, you have only a small picture of who He is. He is infinite, perfect, patient, kind, all-knowing, all-powerful, faithful, self-sufficient, merciful, gracious, and holy. The difficulty is if we only look at this list, we are still missing how big God is. But remember, Ephesians 2:10 states that “we are His workmanship.”
Even though we do not have the capacity to be all-knowing or all-powerful, He does want us to have His qualities just as loving, merciful, and gracious, but before we can be those things, we need to learn from Him who created them.
Love for God
As we continue to learn about God, it should spark and increase our love for God. In Matthew 22, a Pharisee came to test Jesus, asking Jesus, “Which is the greatest commandment of the law?” And Jesus replied to him “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.” Above anything and every other point, Jesus said that we are to love God.
I believe learning about God is great, but in 1 Corinthians 13:2, it says if you have all knowledge yet do not love, you gain nothing. If we move down a couple of verses to 4-8, it shows us what it looks like to love: kind, patient, does not envy, not arrogant or rude; does not insist on your own way; not resentful; does not rejoice with the wrong, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears, believes, hopes, and endures. This is how God shows His love to us, and He is calling us to show that same love to Him.
Obedience to God
Here is the point where the rubber meets the road. Christians all agree with learning and loving God more, yet shy away from us talking about obeying God especially when times are hard. The reason why… It’s hard.
James 2 talks about how our faith is exhibited through what we do, by what we say, how we treat people. Actions reflect what we believe. We can say that we believe in God and that we love God, but do we trust Him enough to follow with what He says that we should do? This is called submitting. If you want a truly clear picture of what obedience looks like, Jesus obeyed God the Father perfectly. Philipians 2:5-8 speaks to how Jesus who is God came to Earth and humbled Himself; being born and was completely obedient even to the point of a gruesome death. What would it look like to live out what you believe in Jesus? By obeying, it will test your faith and grow it.
Wrapping It All Together
Let’s bring all three together, and by doing that we need to learn about ourselves too.
Isaiah 64:6 says, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” We all have a huge problem, and it is sin. To test this, we can do a simple test with the Ten Commandments. Ask yourself, “Have I lied before?” “Have I disobeyed your parents?” “Have I stolen anything?” “Have I murdered or committed adultery before?” (The last two are unique because Jesus said that if you have “hate” in your heart for someone, you have murdered. Or if you have looked at someone lustfully, you have committed adultery.) Those are just a few, but if you said yes to even just one of those, you have sinned.
Unfortunately, the Bible says that there is a consequence for sin. Romans 6:23 say that “the wages of sin is death.” This talks about a physical death and a spiritual death. Something that will happen unless we have someone else take the consequence for us. In God’s perfect love for us, He sent Jesus who is God in the flesh, and He lived a perfect life apart from sin. Jesus did not deserve the punishment for sin, but He was an innocent man who was put to death for our evil deeds. Because of that, we have an opportunity to be saved from our punishment. The Bible says that you need to ask God for forgiveness and turn away from sin and believe that Jesus is Lord of all. By doing this, you are saved from sin through Jesus that starts a relationship with God. All of the points of spiritually growing are useless unless you have a saving relationship with Jesus. Start with Jesus then learn, love, and obey.
