Daily Meditation

Avoiding Stagnated Growth

Ligonier Ministries

Millions of children in the United States begin piano lessons. I was one of them. At age eight, I embarked on a musical career that featured a blazing start and a whimpering finish. My teacher introduced me to the magic of the keyboard with the first lesson of the first volume of the ancient and venerable John Thompson instruction series. The first lesson was simple. So was the entire first book. I raced through it in what I was sure was record time. In a matter of weeks I finished Volume I and began Volume II. Five years later, I quit taking piano lessons. I was still in Volume II. I had reached a plateau of difficulty and could not progress further without serious practice and discipline. I became a piano dropout like millions of other children.

As a seminary student, I resolved to start again. After a year, I could play Chopin (at least one piece). I moved away after seminary and ceased taking piano lessons. I was confident that I could progress on my own without the aid of a teacher. It didn’t work. I wound up playing the songs I already knew and could not bring myself to practice the difficult sections of new ones. I had reached a new plateau, but I was as stuck on that one as I had been in Volume II of John Thompson.

The story of my music woes is an illustration of what is typical of us in a multitude of endeavors. It is particularly tragic when we see the same pattern emerging in Christian growth. Multitudes start the Christian life with a flair. They learn a few Bible verses, make a cursory reading of the New Testament, take a crash course in evangelism, learn a few perfunctory prayers, and then level off on a plateau of stagnated growth.

Coram Deo

Where are you spiritually? Have you leveled off at a plateau of stagnated spiritual growth?

Passages for Further Study

1 Peter 2:2
2 Thessalonians 1:3
2 Peter 3:18

Daily Meditation

The Key to Spiritual Maturity

Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14)

John Piper

Now this is amazing. Don't miss it. It could save you years of wasted living.

What this verse is saying is that if you want to become mature and understand the more solid teachings of the Word, then the rich, nutritional, precious milk of God’s gospel promises must transform your moral senses — your spiritual mind — so that you can discern between good and evil.

Or let me put it another way. Getting ready to feast on all God’s Word is not first an intellectual challenge; it is first a moral challenge. If you want to eat the solid food of the Word, you must exercise your spiritual senses so as to develop a mind that discerns between good and evil.

The startling truth is that, if you stumble over understanding Melchizedek in Genesis and Hebrews, it may be because you watch questionable TV programs. If you stumble over the doctrine of election, it may be because you still use some shady business practices. If you stumble over the God-centered work of Christ in the cross, it may be because you love money and spend too much and give too little.

The pathway to maturity and to solid biblical food is not first becoming an intelligent person, but becoming an obedient person. What you do with alcohol and sex and money and leisure and food and computers has more to do with your capacity for solid food than where you go to school or what books you read.

This is so important because in our highly technological society we are prone to think that education — especially intellectual development — is the key to maturity. There are many Ph.D.’s who choke in their spiritual immaturity on the things of God. And there are many less-educated saints who are deeply mature and can feed with pleasure and profit on the deepest things of God’s Word.

Our Disease of Discontent

The Good Life

Where can wisdom, joy, and peace be found in the monotony of daily life?  The Book of Ecclesiastes has much to teach us about what is, in effect, the daily experience of  most of our lives: the dull drudgery of existence.  But it is teaching not understood by many in the West.  It represents our particular curse.

 For most Western cultures, drudgery is a calling to be pursued by machines, not souls.  Therefore, there is a subterranean discontent, a roiling of soul, because we cannot escape the tedium of life, its repetitiveness, nor its dullness.  For so many in the West, life is one long boring monotony interspersed by seasons of desperate excitement originating from the occasional spectacle of entertainment.  The Western soul is deeply discontented.

Here is the biblical perspective on dull monotonies:

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. [Ecclesiastes 3:9-13]

What is God's gift to man?  It is that he should accept his limitations, as Clint Eastwood so sagely remarked in one of his movies,  and learn to live joyfully all his days, taking pleasure in his eating, his drinking and his toil.  All of these, our entire existence, is God's gift to man.  Seeing this, learning it, accepting it is the path of life--as we learn to worship God and His gifts in the (otherwise) mundane monotony.  When we do this, the mundane life becomes a glorious uplifting symphony of praise and worship to our Lord.

In his book, Recovering Eden, Zack Erswine takes up these themes. Speaking of our "lot" in life, he remarks:

Of Sin, Ships, and Radar

Worlds Apart

Christians normally have a very high doctrine of human sinfulness.  We mean "high" in the sense of substantial.  Sin for us is not a matter of small peccadilloes.  We believe human sinfulness to be universal (For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. [Romans 6:23]).  We believe that in our natural state, before the application of Christ's saving mercy and grace to us, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

The heart is deceitful above all things,
    and desperately sick;
    who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart
    and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
    according to the fruit of his deeds.” [Jeremiah 17:10]

The experience of the Christian is a daily war against one's own sinful nature and tendencies.  The goals, motives, and standards of our actions and thoughts are all too often contrary to God' law.

This "high" doctrine of one's own sinfulness and depravity is part and parcel of the normal, ordinary Christian life.  One is required to see the log in one's own eye, before noticing the speck in our neighbour's.