How Do You Measure Spiritual Growth?
I meet many people frustrated with their spiritual life. Often I find they are measuring the wrong things. They tend to measure their day-to-day activities, rather than their progress over time. My intent with this post is to encourage you to measure outputs, not inputs when evaluating your spiritual life.
If you measure only inputs of your spiritual growth…such as…
- How many times you read your Bible
- How many minutes a day you pray
- How many people you invite to church
You’ll often feel like a failure in your spiritual life.
If you measure the outputs of your spiritual growth…such as…
- Are you becoming more patient?
- Are you learning to love people that are hard to love?
- Do you desire to be more like Christ today than you once desired?
You can discern if you are really growing spiritually.
It is much harder to put numbers on intangibles, but deep down you will usually know the answer. When I try to measure the inputs of my faith, I grow disappointed, because it seems I can never do enough. When I measure the outputs, the results of my faith, I can truly determine if I am growing to be more like Christ. (Thankfully, I can see huge progress over the course of my life.)
Discipline helps develop spiritual fruit, and I believe in practicing private disciplines that help grow your faith (inputs), but the discipline is not the goal, the fruit is the goal (outputs). Jesus didn’t say His followers would be known by the number of disciplines they can keep. Jesus said we would be known by our fruit.
What would you add to the list…what input do you tend to measure to judge if you are growing spiritually? More importantly, how are you doing over the course of time?
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