Spiritual Growth
God formed you! He formed your body, He scripted your days and He thinks of you more than you can count. This means God is intimately interested in your life. This amazing truth should bring joy and confidence into our lives. This kind of confidence can help us open our lives to His examination. This kind of joy and confidence can help us be GROWERS!
Risk is an inescapable part of life. No matter how careful you try to be, risk is there. The fact is that risk is beneficial. It causes us to trust. It causes us to grow. All of the great hero’s in the Bible are great because they took great risks for God! Growers risk! They read God’s Word, trust God’s Word and act on God’s Word, regardless! In our passage the Lord challenges us to risk it all for Him!
No one is perfect. We all fail. The disciples of Jesus sure did. And the believers living in the city of Corinth did. The bad news is that failure, especially significant failure, can be so very destructive. The good news is that we can recover from failure and grow through it. Growers Fail Productively! Our passage shows us how to turn failure into growth.
Ever since Adam blamed Eve for his disobedience, mankind has been making excuses. Yes, some excuses are legitimate. But most are false justifications for doing what we shouldn’t or not doing what we should. The problem with excuse-making is that the more we make them the less we grow. Not only does excuse-making limit growth, it puts our life in reverse. Let’s compare our lives to a variety of bad excuses taken from the Bible.
Growing can be tough work! And one of the toughest things about growing is that sometimes God can seem so far off right when we feel we need Him most. What’s up with this? Is He really there? And how does a so called relationship with God really help us become better versions of ourselves? Growers…
People shouldn’t use people. We may use things but it is not right to use people. Well, yes and no. Of course it is wrong to use people to gratify our own desires. But people are one of God’s primary provisions for growth. Growers know how to utilize people in their own quest to be a better version of themselves. This is Biblical and Powerful. Let’s find out how it works.
The Bible is supposed to help us grow, to become better and better. But how does this actually work? Many read the Bible yet remain unchanged. Others misapply the Bible and suffer consequences. So how does the Bible actually help us grow? How can growers use the Bible to become better servants of our wonderful Lord, Jesus Christ? A few passages provide the basics for using the Bible to attain real, eternal value, growth.
Every so often we find ourselves wanting to yell two words – Grow Up! When faced with petty, immature people we want them to face the music, smell the coffee, step up to the plate and GROW UP! But what about us? Over and over again the Bible encourages each of us to BE GROWERS, people who are continually in the process of growing! Over the upcoming two months we will consider how God’s Word can help each of us be an intentional grower. This morning let’s ask three questions about growers.
