2007 Larry Huntsperger
12/16/07 Running The Right Way
Last week we started a series on Spiritual Growth -
what it is,
what it’s not,
and what brings about spiritual grow in our lives.
This whole business of growing in our Christian lives is a fascinating thing.
There are many times in the New Testament when the writers
draw clear parallels between the process of physical growth
and the process of growth in our Christian walk.
Peter ways,
1PE 2:2 ...like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation...
The author of Hebrews tells his readers,
HEB 5:12-14 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
And Paul says,
1CO 3:1-2 And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to receive it. Indeed, even now you are not yet able...
And to the Ephesians he says,
EPH 4:14-16 As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
Again and again throughout the New Testament
we come to these references in which the New Testament writers
draw parallels between physical growth and spiritual growth.
And yet...
within all of them
there is one huge implied difference between physical growth and spiritual growth.
Whereas physical growth is an automatic, inescapable result of simply being alive,
spiritual growth is not.
Spiritual growth does not just automatically happen in the Christian’s life.
And the comments made by the New Testament writers
clearly indicate that the growth process
is deeply affected by the choices we make.
In fact that’s what the writers were attempting to do -
to urge their readers to make those choices
that would then bring about growth.
And the first step in that process
is our gaining a clear understanding
of what growth really is.
It took me a number of years
before some of these things finally fell into place in my own thinking,
but I want to begin by sharing with you
what I now believe was my own first conscious step in that discovery process.
It happened as a result of a series of events
that took place in the summer of 1968.
I’d been a Christian a little less than two years.
It was the summer between my Junior and Senior year in college
and I’d volunteered to join a team of students for the summer
who were involved in door-to-door witnessing on the Carribean islands of Trinidad and Tobago.
That particular day we were on the Island of Tobago
and the morning routine began as it had all summer.
We all crawled off of our air mattresses,
ate our bread and jam breakfast,
and then gathered our Bibles and stacks of tracts together
in preparation for the day’s door-to-door witnessing.
But when everyone else headed out to knock on doors
that particular morning I simply couldn’t do it.
As soon as everyone was out of sight
I slipped away down to the beach,
found a chunk of driftwood to sit on,
and just stared out into the Carribean.
The turmoil I felt inside was terrible.
The whole mess had started the night before
with a discussion between myself and my team leader.
Before joining that team for the summer
virtually all of my nurturing during the first two years of my Christian life
had come through an energetic evangelistic organization that had been active on my college campus.
Through that group
I had been exposed to a tremendous amount of teaching
by a number of powerful communicators
who covered everything from Bible basics to prophecy.
At that point in my life
my entire doctrinal belief system
had been shaped by the teaching I’d received from those men.
And my exposure to other groups and other perspectives was so limited
that I just assumed that what I’d been taught
was universally accepted by most believers.
It never entered my mind
that there might be large numbers of believers
who held radically different interpretations of the passages and concepts I’d been taught.
But then, the night before,
my team leader and I got into a discussion about prophecy,
and in that discussion I watched as he skillfully sketched out
an interpretation of several key prophetic passages
that simply blew massive holes in much of what I’d been taught.
From there our discussion broadened out into questions about free will,
and about God’s sovereignty,
and about God’s control over the evil that touches our lives.
He had lots and lots of verses to support what he was saying,
but the things he was saying
didn’t sound anything like the things I’d been hearing for the past two years.
By the time I went to bed I felt just sick.
Huge chunks of the doctrinal system I’d accepted without question
now lay in broken pieces at my feet.
I had no idea what to believe any more.
I certainly didn’t have sufficient personal Bible knowledge to put things back together myself.
I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t sleep very well and I was still a mess when I got up in the morning,
and when everyone else went off to do their witnessing thing
I just found an isolated place where no one would bother me
and tried to sift through the doctrinal rubble of my life.
I no longer knew what to believe.
It seemed like all I had left were questions and confusion
and soft, gooshy places that gave way as soon as I tried to put any mental weight on them.
I remember sitting there, praying,
trying to talk things over with my God.
“Lord, what am I going to do?
I no longer know what to believe about any of this stuff.
Why is there so much confusion?
Why does it all seem so unclear?
Oh Lord, I need You so much.
I need You to take all of these broken pieces
and put them back together again.
Thank you for loving me even when I don’t know anything,
and thank you for leading me one step at a time.”
It wasn’t a real high point in my life.
But then, as I sat there,
trying to figure everything out,
all of a sudden I saw something I’d never seen before.
Here I was with what felt like my entire doctrinal kingdom
laying in rubble at my feet,
surrounded by little chunks of ideas that didn’t fit together.
And yet, all of my doctrinal confusion
had not destroyed my awareness of my Lord,
or my dependance upon Him,
or the obvious reality of His presence with me in the least!
He was still right there with me,
loving me,
sharing my life with me.
In fact, at that point in my life,
the turmoil I was experiencing was actually drawing me closer to Him.
It was almost as if the questions,
and confusion,
and frustration I was experiencing
were far more effective tools for bringing about growth in my walk with Him
than any amount of answers could have been.
I wanted a nice tight fool-proof doctrinal system,
a system that answered all the questions
and made me feel intellectually secure.
He wanted to create within me a situation that drew me to Himself personally,
forcing me to find my security not in what I knew,
but rather in Christ Himself.
From my perspective
at that point in my life
my program of spiritual growth was in shambles,
but from God’s perspective I was right on track and making tremendous progress.
That was a long time ago,
nearly 40 years ago now.
I’ve long since reassembled my doctrinal rubble and now,
of course, I know ‟the truth” about all of those matters
that caused me such mental chaos that day.
But the truth that ended up being infinitely more important
than everything else put together
is the one I began to discover sitting there on the beach talking with my Lord.
True spiritual growth is not the result of what I know
or what I do
or what I produce.
That day I knew less,
and did less,
and produced less than any other day all summer.
And yet that day I grew more
than I did during the whole rest of the trip.
True spiritual growth, the real thing,
centers squarely on discovering how to live
in a growing friendship with Christ Himself.
Knowing how to do that
is something we haven’t even begun to talk about yet in this series.
But until we clearly understand the goal
there’s no way we can begin to make progress in moving toward it.
OK, now I’ve let you see what I’m trying to say here
through an event that took place in my own life.
But I want us to see it somewhere else, too.
I want us to see it in the life of Christ Himself.
When I first saw what I’m about to share with you
about the approach Christ took with His people when He was here
it amazed me,
and it made me realize how much I sometimes read into the Bible accounts,
things that simply aren’t there.
Now, to appreciate what’s going on here
we need to begin with a clear understanding
of what Christ wanted to do
and the way He went about doing it
in the extremely limited time-frame He’d chosen.
He began with a group of mostly uneducated,
selfish, stubborn, self-centered, strong-willed men
who had no idea who He was
or what He wanted to accomplish for the human race.
Before His departure He had to make certain
that He had equipped His followers with all the knowledge
and all the tools they would need
to spearhead the movement that would ultimately transform the world.
He knew how limited His time with His men would be.
He knew, too, the massive areas of ignorance and confusion
that clouded their thinking.
Now look at this!
Here He is,
the only man who has ever had absolute, perfect understanding
of every statement
in every book of the Bible.
Now, with His perfect and eternal understanding of all the Old Testament writings,
I find it amazing that He seemed to put such a low priority
on communicating specific content to His men.
Why didn’t He sit them down for several hours each morning
and instruct them in the Scriptures?
Why didn’t He design a curriculum
that would systematically lead them through the writings of Moses and the prophets,
and the history and poetry of the Old Testament?
Why didn’t He establish some sort of an intense formal education process
that would allow Him to pass on massive quantities of knowledge?
And yet, with so little time and so much to be done,
all He asked of His disciples was their willingness to build a friendship with Him.
He simply invited them to stay by His side,
to eat with Him,
to walk with Him,
to camp out with Him,
to build a comradeship with God in human form.
Christ didn’t attempt to bring His men
to a point of competency in knowledge, or techniques, or programs.
He simply tried to draw them into a depth of friendship with Himself,
a friendship that would ultimately become the driving motivation in every area of their lives.
In the Gospel of John chapter 21
we’ve got a conversation between Christ and Peter that shows this beautifully.
At this point in the gospel record
Christ’s earthly program is nearly over.
He’s done what He came to do.
The crucifixion is behind Him,
the resurrection is a living, amazing, thrilling reality.
The Lord is making His final farewells to His chosen few.
Now, when He gets to Peter,
this man that He has selected to head up the whole first phase of the birth of the Church,
the Lord asks Peter a single question.
He doesn’t ask him if he now has a really good grasp on His program.
He doesn’t ask him if he has any questions about the teaching he’s heard for the past 4 years.
He doesn’t even ask Peter
if he knows what has to be done next.
He asks Peter just one question,
and He doesn’t ask him once,
he asks him three times:
‟Simon, son of John, do you love Me...?
Simon, son of John, do you love Me...?
Simon, son of John, do you love Me...?”(John 21:15-17)
Now, why was Peter’s love for Christ the only thing that really mattered?
Quite simply because Peter’s love for Christ was the only thing that really mattered.
Christ didn’t come to offer His followers in the first century a better system.
He came to offer them Himself.
He didn’t ask them for competence in the content of the Sermon on the Mount,
or mastery of all the rules that govern Christianity,
or a systematic doctrinal statement.
He simply asked them
for their willingness to grow in a deep personal friendship with Himself.
That is Christianity.
That’s what it’s all about - the restoration of the Creator God’s friendship with us, His creation.
The Apostle Paul stated this beautifully in Philippians 3:8.
In this single verse he summarizes perfectly
the heart and soul of true Christianity
and the object of all real spiritual growth.
He says simply,
‟...I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ...”.
Our calling as Christians is not to become more competent in doctrine,
more disciplined in devotions,
or more fervent in our “ministry”, whatever that is.
Our calling is to know Christ Jesus our Lord more and more deeply.
Anything else misses the mark.
Anything else runs the very real risk
of becoming an ugly religious counterfeit of true life in the Spirit.
OK, I’ve let you see the goal through my own life,
and then we’ve seen it illustrated in the life of Christ.
I’ve given you the intellectual truth we need
for discovering the goal we’re moving toward.
But before we close
I’d like to offer you an illustration that may help give some life to the truth we been talking about.
It’s a story about a little boy, and a father, and a very large wall that separates them.
The boy stood next to the wall, looking up.
It was solid concrete,
towering more than twenty feet above his head
and stretching as far as he could see in both directions.
Massive, impassable, it was the great enemy of his young life.
He had been told that his father lived just on the other side of this wall.
He had never met his daddy.
He had never seen his face, or felt his hug.
He had never wrestled with him in the grass,
or thrown a football back and forth,
never seen the excitement in his daddy’s eyes
as he watched his son pull a wiggling trout into the boat.
All he had ever known was this cold, grey, terrifying barrier
that separated him from the father he had never known.
It was a scary place for the little fellow, there along the wall.
There were noises and sounds he didn’t understand.
And it was lonely, too, out there all by himself.
He spent most of his free time walking along the edge of that wall,
walking and walking, sometimes one direction, sometimes the other,
always hoping to find the end of it,
or maybe to find a door,
or possibly a tree growing close to the wall that might help him to climb over.
Many people had told him to forget about the wall,
and about the man on the other side.
He had tried.
But there was an emptiness deep inside his young heart
that nothing but a father’s love could fill.
And he knew it was true - his dad really was on the other side.
He knew because sometimes he heard his voice,
his deep, strong voice way in the distance, calling to him.
‟Son, son, can you hear me? This is your dad - can you hear me, son?”
The little boy would call back as loud as he was able,
‟Daddy, daddy is that you? I can’t hear you very well.
I can’t get over this wall, dad.
Where are you?
Please wait, daddy, I’m coming.
I just need a little more time.
I know I can do it.
I can find a way around this wall.”
Then it would get quiet again.
Occasionally people would come by and talk to the little boy.
He was well known at the wall by those who lived in the area
and everyone seemed to have suggestions and advice for him.
‟Hey, kid! Are you the one hanging around this wall looking for your dad?
Let me explain something to you, kid.
You’ve got to understand that there are lots of dads in the world.
There are lots of guys on this side of the wall that would make a great dad for you.
Forget about that voice over there.
Come on, let me introduce you to some fine men over here
who would be more than happy to be your dad.”
And someone else said, ‟Hello, son. I hear you’re looking for your dad.
Well now here’s a piece of luck!
I just happen to have a map I can sell you that shows you a secret way around that wall.
It won’t cost you much and it’s guaranteed to get the two of you together.
Now let’s see, how much money do you have there?...”
Still another approached the boy and said,
‟Hey boy, I hear you want to know about your dad.
Well, I can tell you all about him.
Oh yes, he and I go way back.
We were in the war together, you know.
Why, I could tell you stories about your old man that you just wouldn’t believe.
Why don’t you come on over to my place and I’ll tell you all about him?”
But in the end the boy always came back to the wall,
straining his ears,
listening for that voice on the other side.
There must be some way, there just must!
In the weeks and months that followed
he tried everything he could think of to get to the other side.
He tried climbing the wall again and again,
but each time he got a few feet above the ground his fingers would slip and his little body came crashing down.
Then he tried to tunnel underneath.
At first he clawed at the hard packed dirt with his hands
until his little fingers were cut and bleeding.
Then he found a shovel and began to dig with all his might.
But, after days of digging, his hands blistered and swollen,
he was forced to realize that the wall must go down as far as it went up.
There was no way to tunnel under, no way to climb over, no end in either direction.
Gradually, painfully the great fear of his life became an inescapable reality -
there was no way for him to get to other side.
As this terrible truth flooded in on him tears filled his eyes,
then streamed down his cheeks.
He sank into the dirt next to the wall and sobbed quietly,
‟Daddy, daddy please help me. There’s nothing I can do to get to you.”
Suddenly the boy heard a noise and looked up at the wall.
The outline of a door appeared in the concrete.
Then the door began to swing open.
Through the opening, for the first time in his life,
the little boy could see his father and heard him saying,
‟I know, son, I know - I just needed you to know it too.
I formed this door in the wall long before you were born
and have waited and longed for the day when you would ask me for help.
Come on in, son. You’re going to like it over here with me.”
The little boy ran through the gap and into his daddy’s arms,
and from that day on they walked together.
Sometimes the little guy would trip or slip and fall,
and sometimes he would pull away to play in a mud puddle or chase after a rabbit.
But now his father was always there to pick him up,
or to clean him off,
or to call him back when he began to get too far away.
And sometimes they would not always agree on which way was the best way to go.
The little boy had lived without his daddy for so long
that he often forgot to listen or to trust what his daddy had to say.
But now the ache and loneliness were gone forever.
That horrible wall was no more
and nothing could ever again separate the little boy and his father.
We, like that little boy, enter this world with a huge, horrible wall separating us from our Heavenly Father.
It is the wall of our own sin
a wall we are powerless to conquer on our own.
Through His death for our sins
Christ has offered us a passage through that wall and into His arms.
When correctly understood, spiritual growth is no more complicated
than that little boy running through the fields with his daddy.
It is simply building a living friendship with a living God one day at a time.