The Path of a Christian’s Growth - Dan Phillips
Dan Phillips over at Pyromaniacs devoted a couple of blog posts to thoughts concerning the latest Florida ‘Revival’. In the second blog post I found this morning, concerning the path of a Christian’s growth to maturity:
We start out wrong about everything important. We have an innate sense of God, but we suppress and pervert it (Romans 1:1-32). We’re dead and blind (Ephesians 2:1-3; 4:17-19). In this condition, even if we hear the Word of God, nothing savingly significant happens (Matthew 13:4-7, 18-22).
- God sovereignly gives us life (Ephesians 2:5), causes His word to be life to us (1 Peter 1:23-25), enables us to see what we had been unable to see (2 Corinthians 4:3-6), and saves us by grace through faith as a gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).
- Thus awakened and made alive, we respond to God’s word in faith (Romans 10:17), yoke ourselves to Christ in repentant faith (Matthew 11:28-30; Acts 11:18; 17:31), in witness to which we are baptized and committed to a lifelong process of learning His word (Matthew 28:18-20; John 8:31-32).
- Our goal then becomes to grow to maturity in and unto Christ (Ephesians 4:15-16; 2 Peter 3:18).
- Specifically, what this maturity looks like involves (among other things) a grounded stability in God’s revealed truth that is resistant to the gusty winds of fad and fashion (Ephesians 4:13-14), and a well-practiced adeptness in the Word of God that enables us to assess, discern, and judge right from wrong, good from evil, and truth from falsehood (Hebrews 4:12; 5:14).
On conversion, the new believer lays down as a basic premise the Lordship of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 12:3b). This is the controlling consideration for all that follows (Colossians 2:6-7). Insofar as he is true to his birthright and call as a Christian, he begins building a framework of truth, and continues building all his life (Proverbs 1:2-6). His goal is to be able to test all things, internal and external, in the light of God’s Word (Psalm 119:9, 11; Hebrews 4:12).
His hero isn’t Indiana Jones, so his motto isn’t “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” His hero is Jesus Christ, whose life was a symphony of pursuit of His Father’s will (John 4:34).
And so he doesn’t drop his Bible and dance the Headless Chicken Jig every time —
- someone tells a hair-raising barn-burner of a story; or
- some World-Class Scholar (or mega-church pastor) writes a Newest, Greatest, Everything-Must-Change book; or
- popular opinion turns against a truth he’s convinced of from Scripture; or
- everyone who’s anyone is embracing a teaching he’s not convinced of from Scripture; or
- the secular media’s fitful fascination lights briefly on some new religious entertainment.
The disciple’s goal is not conformity to the fickle fads of the world, secular or religious. Rather, it is (to coin a word) transformity, into the likeness of the mind, will, and character of God (Romans 12:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:18).
NOTE: Dan Phillips initial blog about the Florida revival is here.
