Nate asked me an important question this weekend.  He asked, “When and how did you become disciplined in spiritual growth?”  That’s a great question.  I wish I could say I was most excellently disciplined, but I’m not…just disciplined.  I wonder though if some of you may be equal curious as to the answers to this question.

I first got serious about becoming a student of God’s Word and having daily time with Christ in my mid-twenties.  I wish it had happened earlier. I grew up in church, but it wasn’t until then that I really took my walk more serious than a Sunday routine.

As to how I disciplined myself, which may be the more important answer, that really has a two-part answer.

• I developed a passion for spiritual growth. The bottom line for most of us is that we are only going to do those things we want to do.  For me, thanks to the encouragement of a pastor at the time, I gained a sincere desire to know Christ more; serious enough that I was willing to discipline myself to do it.
• I found a system that worked for me. At first, I didn’t remember to tell Nate about this one, but it was an equally important part I believe in me becoming a self-learner.  Many people have a desire, but they never come up with the system that will accomplish the desire.  I found a system that fueled my passion, but also kept me disciplined enough to follow through each day.  I haven’t kept the same system I had then continually, but I know even today that without one I’m less likely to be disciplined in spiritual growth.  (I once wrote about that system HERE.)

There’s my answer to when and how I became disciplined in spiritual growth.  What’s your answer…or is this a question for which you still need to work on finding an answer?

I encourage you to start today!

We love our community group that meets in our home (or someone’s home) each week. We had a great discussion recently in one of our meetings.

These are the questions our small group considered. We had a great time talking about them…a few tears were shed…we had some great laughs…and I think we thought through our relationship with God a little more. Perhaps the questions will make you think.

1. What person has most encouraged you in your spiritual growth?
2. What event/activity/season of life caused your spiritual life to grow the most?
3. At what period of your life would you describe as the time when you were closest to God?
4. What changes would you have to make in your life now in order to grow more spiritually?

How would you answer these questions?

Our discussion centered with the fact that we need to see our closeness to God as more of a relationship than a religion. In religion, we have a list to check and complete, but in a relationship, we wrestle through the highs and lows of various degrees of intimacy. When we treat the relationship as something of value, we are more likely to intentionally work to protect and develop the relationship.

Are you more likely to see your closeness with God in terms of a religion or a relationship?

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?

In our recent series “Hunger” at Grace Community Church, I shared a system I have used for spiritual growth that has helped me mature. I had numerous people ask me the following week to describe the details of my “system”. It really isn’t anything scientific or deeply thought out, but has helped me greatly.

Using a simple school folder with dividers and notebook paper in each section, and a calendar that fits in a 3 ring binder I have the following sections:

1. Things that I’m reading in the Bible and what I am learning from it.
2. Books that I’m reading and things I’m learning from them.
3. Prayer requests for people I know well. Since I know many things to pray for them, so they all get their own page. I often spend a month on one page for one person before moving to the next page.
4. Prayer requests from various people as they share them or I observe them.
5. A calendar of prayer requests, mostly the ones in number 3 and 4, but it helps me to write them on the calendar each day as I pray for them.
6. Verses that I’m trying to memorize.
7. My personal journal of thoughts I have; written out to God.

To clarify, I do not use this system every day. In fact, I do not use it but every few years for a few months at a time, but when I really want to discipline myself for spiritual growth, this is the system I use.

More than anything, I encourage you to have a discipline for your spiritual growth. Your system doesn’t have to be this intense, but, from my experience, without discipline, you are less likely to mature.  For more thoughts on that, listen to my message on the subject HERE or watch the message HERE.

What is your system?

For more thoughts on devotions, click HERE.

It was a tough day. A couple weeks ago my office seemed to have a revolving door. We have so much activity and excitement in the church right now, but the normal demands of ministry have not slowed to allow margin for the extra work required of me. In the midst of administrative and managerial responsibilities I also encountered a number of hurting people. I was confronted several times with issues where another person had wronged one person and they wanted me to help them change the other person they sense was mistreating them. It has always fascinated me when people expect the pastor to enforce morals on people in order to change them.

One of the principles I have learned in life and ministry is that RULES NEVER CHANGE PEOPLE. It doesn’t matter how many you have, how strictly you enforce them, or even how loyal people are to obey them. Rules alone never change a person. Rules are often necessary to protect people and bring order to chaos, but for people to change a heart has to change. Truth impacting a person’s heart changes people, not rules. I fully realize God uses people in this process, but I believe our role is more about directing people’s attention towards Christ, than it is enforcing their behavior.

The greatest role I have as a pastor, in my opinion, is to introduce people to the life-changing message of Jesus Christ, help them learn the truths of His Word, help them become growing followers of Christ (disciples), but then allow God’s Spirit to change their heart, which will ultimately change their life.

I am praying today for more opportunities to spur hearts towards the life-changing message of Christ.

Discipleship is the process of becoming more like Jesus Christ. It is the goal of every believer and producing disciples is the command Jesus gave the church. It is also the vision of Grace Community Church.

Sometimes knowing the next step to take is the hardest. At Grace we have tried to simplify the process for you. We have three-part strategy designed to encourage spiritual growth and maturity.

Gather – The goal is to become a regular attendee of the weekly Sunday gathering. It is difficult to take greater steps until a person begins a committed attendance pattern. In addition to providing a worship experience and teaching opportunity, the gathering is designed to be encouraging, engaging, and to produce interest in pursuing the next steps.

Commit – Entering the commit stage of the strategy means a person takes a next step of joining a community group and commits to weekly Bible study and fellowship with other people on the same journey of discovering more about God and faith. Individuals of all levels of spiritual maturity are welcome into group life, but it is essential if a person wants to continue to grow in their understanding and beliefs. Additionally, because of the emphasis placed on community through groups, people who attend Grace will miss out on giving and receiving ministry opportunity if they are not a part of a group.

Serve – The final stage of the strategy, and perhaps the most important, is when a person moves from soaking in grace and truth and begins to invest love into other people. This can be through volunteering at Grace or in the community, but there is something life changing about giving to others that helps a person to mature spiritually.

Ultimately the goal of the believer should be to become a disciple, a follower of Christ. When one truly sets his or her focus on being like Christ he or she will become a “self-feeder” and seek after the deeper truths of the faith, more intimacy with Christ, greater fellowship with other believers and a more intense love for others. This really occurs when a person’s heart’s desire is to follow Christ completely and that is when the best spiritual growth can occur.  We believe following this strategy of Gather/Commit/Serve is the best we can offer to help a person become a disciple.

What next step do you need to take?

As a part of my Master’s in Organizational Leadership from Eastern University I am to conduct a qualitative research project.  I wrote about the master’s program in yesterday’s post.  Read it HERE.  I decided to survey the spiritual health of our church by asking a cross-section of people questions about their own spiritual maturity and growth.

Specifically this research will attempt to measure:

• What contributes to a person’s spiritual growth most?
• What has caused or will cause them to want to take next steps in their spiritual growth?

I am asking people to answer the following questions:

1. What do you believe is spiritual growth?
2. Do you feel you are growing spiritually now?  Why?
3. What has caused your life to improve spiritually in the past?  Were there key events/people/times?  Can you explain?
4. How has Grace Community Church influenced your spiritual growth since you began attending?
5. What would help you grow more spiritually mature?
6. What changes do you need to make to grow more spiritually?
7. Are there any comments or thoughts you have about the church and what we are doing to spur people to “become growing followers of Jesus Christ”?

I am getting great responses so far.  I will share some of my results in future posts.

Feel free to play along.   How would you answer these questions?

Spiritual growth of believers should be the goal of any church. We are to do attract unbelievers and introduce them to Christ, but the end goal according to the commands of Jesus is making disciples.   Yet spiritual growth is often hard to measure, messy and similar to raising children, a church can offer the same ministries and attention to a group of people and get extremely different results.

Right now there are people in my church at 3 stages of spiritual growth:

• Those that need to mature and are not maturing.
• Those that need to mature and have stalled.
• Those that need to mature and are maturing.

I suggest the same is true of your church. We rejoice in the last one, but if we are not careful we can allow the first two to discourage us and make us believe we are not doing what God has called us to do as a church.

It is helpful to me to put things in a strategic format, so here are 5 principles of spiritual growth or discipleship that apply to each of these three groups.

1. People are responsible for their spiritual growth. I am responsible to shepherd them, care for them, encourage them, instruct and teach them, but ultimately the believer holds the responsibility of their own growth.
2. Change is possible. Every believer has an opportunity and potential to experience spiritual growth. God wants to mature all believers. No one is left out of that plan.
3. Growth occurs best in community. The best spiritual growth in my life and in the life of others I have observed occurs when people are in committed, healthy and intentional relationships with other believers wanting to mature. Iron does sharpen iron. (At the same time, I have been in groups where some are growing and some are not, but that goes back to principle number one.)
4. Developing a person’s desire for spiritual growth is key. When a person gets excited about his or her personal walk with Christ and getting to know Christ better they are more likely to assume ownership of their growth.
5. The goal of the teacher/leader of spiritual growth should be to enable people to achieve spiritual growth. We should introduce them to Christ and God’s Spirit, teach them the basics of their faith, and then release them to serve, mature and grow in their spiritual life.

Please understand this is not a formula. Principles are not foolproof, but I believe these principles can help us see the process of discipleship in a more orderly fashion.

Do you agree with these principles? What would you add?

Yesterday I posted a simple way to implement change in an organization when the changes needed seem overwhelming.  You can read that post HERE.

Today I want to put a contextual spin on the issue for the area of spiritual growth.  I know lots of believers, especially early in their Christian walk, who think they should instantly have spiritual maturity shortly after being saved.  Spiritual growth is a process that takes years of discipleship.

If you want to mature in your faith, start with one spiritual discipline.  Master that discipline (or get better at it at least) and then move to another discipline.  For example, try to form a habit of regular church attendance. Then start reading your Bible everyday.  When that becomes a regular part of your day, begin to form a prayer list.  After a period of time you can start journaling.  Keep adding positive changes to your spiritual life, but only add one at a time.  See if that helps you grow without facing spiritual burnout.

What suggestions do you have towards spiritual growth?