24 God’s Way to Spiritual Growth

24

God’s Way to Spiritual Growth

(A message given in the early seventies in India)

I want to begin with two quotations. The first is by C.S. Lewis, from Screwtape Letters:

We have a tendency to think, but not to act. The more we feel without acting, the less we will ever be able to act and in the long run the less we will be able to feel.

That is precisely what is happening to the church of Jesus Christ today. For so long, we have not acted on what we have said that now we no longer feel it. That is why the people who really want to do something today are mostly young people. The older generation felt for so long—even to the point of tears without action, without revolution—that now they no longer can act. For 19 years I have preached the Word of God in over 1,500 churches in 30 nations, and I have seen this as the universal disease, exactly what C.S. Lewis describes. It frightens me. It is what I have tried to speak about in my book, Hunger for Reality. The double life is something we have got to think about at this convention. If you “get a feeling” for mission; if you “get a feeling” for Turkey, or Bangladesh or Bombay; if you somehow feel you want to do something, but you don’t. Then next year when you come to a missionary conference you’ll feel less and some day you’ll feel so little you won’t even bother to come. That’s how the process of degeneration sets in.

The second quote is by J.B. Phillips from Ring of Truth: Here is the first and most deadly casualty in our modern pattern of thinking. We do not seriously believe God is willing to penetrate the inner springs of human character and begin a solitary revolution there.

This unbelief is our incalculable loss. Two thousand years ago something similar was written by James, in the first chapter of his Epistle: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer that forgets, but doer that acts, he shall be blessed in his doing.”

What powerful words! Words that should challenge us to become spiritual revolutionaries for Jesus Christ! That will happen when we allow God’s Holy Spirit to begin changing our lives on the inside. As J.B. Phillips said, “. . .allowing God to get right into the inner man.”

Now it is very important to understand what I am going to say. We know about the miracle of the new birth, praise God. Have you been born again? Are you sure? Do you know the reality of life-changing, heart-changing faith? It is the only faith the Bible talks about. My Bible tells me nothing about the kind of faith that causes the hearer to raise his hand and say “I believe in Jesus,” but doesn’t make any change to his life. Do you have a revolutionary faith? I hope so. But just as the new birth is a miracle, I am convinced that spiritual growth also is a miracle.

We Must Grow!

One of the first countries I worked in was Spain. It is less evangelized than Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Tamil Nadu etc. My first son was born then. When he was small I used to throw him up in the air and catch him. In a few more years he may be taking daddy in his hands! That is the miracle of growth. I believe the need of spiritual growth is often neglected in our thinking. We preach the new birth. We preach various blessings and crisis that can take place after the new birth—and many seem preoccupied with that subject today, but we neglect the doctrine of spiritual growth.

Peter says, “Grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus.” There is no substitute for spiritual growth. The new birth has to be followed by a process or it will soon become an abscess. Oh, how important it is to understand the need for consistent, continual spiritual growth. And it is because people are not growing that they are not going to the ends of the earth. Before God can thrust you out, he wants to build you up. The great need of today is for intensive spiritual training, whatever way you may get it.

A Training Program

On the ship M.V. Logos we had a training program called the Intensive Training Program. It involved supposedly 14 hours a day of hard work. Each trainee had to read 3,000 pages of Christian literature, listen to so many sermons, 100 tapes, distribute tracts, speak to 100 people about Jesus Christ, spend a quota of hours in the ship’s engine room and doing some of the dirtiest jobs on board, and achieve a dozen other goals. Of course, they had five months to do it. We proved that this program works. It is not a guarantee of spiritual life, because only Jesus gives spiritual life; but it can be a tremendous help to people, who for too long have lived undisciplined lives.

I want to be very honest. I learned this from Billy Graham, my spiritual father, that unless you are ready for a disciplined life then forget your Christian commitment. You can get blessed in this meeting, you can be filled with the Spirit, but if you don’t learn something of daily discipline, you’ll never amount to anything for Jesus. I have had young people all over the world tell me, that their problem is that they do not have disciplined lives. Discipline means doing what you know you should do rather than what you feel like doing.

Feelings and Faith

I have “Himalayan feelings” that go up and down like a lift! Sometimes I feel so committed to Jesus Christ. Do you ever feel that way? I love music—Christian music, powerful words as Larry Norman and others sing them. I feed on the stuff. When I hear it I feel like shouting, “The world for Christ! Let’s go out on the streets. Let’s win souls!” My feelings soar. Any of you ever had that experience? The next morning, at 6:00 a.m., a brother knocks on my cabin door and I wish I could choke him! I love sleep. Good old-fashioned sleep! And this fellow has the nerve to knock on my door at 6:00 a.m. and get me out of bed to run with him one mile. He’s mad! I feel totally depressed in the morning. But I have discovered that God gives victory over feelings.

We need to get up in the morning, and whether you run a mile or not that’s up to you. But get into God’s Word, get on your knees and get with the Lord before you go out and face people, whether you feel like it or not. I have found that this is a very big thing in my life.

Now, somebody knocking is not enough for me. I have the arrangement with this brother that when he knocks he stands there until he sees me. Otherwise, that summon means nothing; I will just ignore him and go back to bed. But he waits. (The man with this job is 62 years of age and he’s got more energy than most people on the ship in their twenties and thirties.) I can’t leave him standing there; I have to get up. I open the door, and I want to tell you if you have to look at me morning after morning, eyeball to eyeball, you’d better get prayer supporters!

Well, I am not depressed every morning of course. I find if I go to bed early it helps. But my feelings are low. I don’t want to read the Bible. I don’t want to pray. I’ve been doing it for 19 years and I have read it all. Do I have to read it again? That’s why I need a method for breaking my depression. I strenuously exercise my body and run that one mile every morning. (Some mornings I do other exercises; some mornings, to prove I know liberty, I sleep.) I find 90 percent of the time that, when I have finished that mile, my depression has gone.

You can have other methods, but whatever they are you have to learn to overcome living by feelings. There is nothing wrong with feelings. If you feel wonderful, fine. I often do. But you can’t trust feelings. You can’t put confidence in feelings—it must be in God’s Word. The Lord himself said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” He doesn’t say, “If any man comes after me and feels like taking up his cross. . . .” The vast majority of Christians I believe, are having a great problem because they have never learned how to deal with their feelings.

Guilt and Grace

There are many feelings that hinder us in spiritual growth and none more than the guilt feeling. It is my belief that many of our churches today are legalistic. We have a Christianity often of rules and regulations: do this; don’t do that. I’m not saying there should be no rules in Christian life. There are rules. But you don’t grow in your spiritual life by keeping the rules. You don’t grow by determining that you are never going inside a cinema, or you are not going to do this thing or that thing. You grow through communion with God and feeding on his Word. You grow as you draw upon the promises of God.

As you grow there will be failures. Sometimes sin will catch you, and of course this will be your own fault. But I John 1:9 says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Praise be to God! That’s the only reason I am here. In my process of growing these 19 years, especially in the early years, I have failed so often. Not with sins that bring about scandal, but the “little sins” that are big in God’s sight and bring discredit in heaven. And that is my concern for you. You will never grow, you will never be mature, if you do not learn to deal with guilt.

But praise God for guilt! Guilt is necessary, but it should lead immediately to repentance, to the cross, to the forgiving grace of an all-loving God. And then the guilt is washed away. Sometimes, for Christian leaders, there must be a confession of sin to others so that our relationship may be put right and our service be effective. But basically when we come alone to God with repentance and confession, he cleanses us. Are you clean today? I can’t talk to you about missions if you are not right with God. I can’t talk to you about world missions if there is guilt in your heart because of unconfessed sin, or because you doubt God’s grace. You may have repented; you may even have confessed your sin and put it right with your neighbor, but if you doubt God’s promises of forgiveness then you are allowing Satan to grip you in a guilt complex.

For Example, Sex

If there is any area in life where we are phony, it can be in the area of sex. I have had people tell me, “Now brother George, this is India and not New York. We don’t talk about sex in the church.” But the Bible was not written by a Texan or a Londoner; it is an Eastern book. This book speaks about sex over 100 times and shows God’s answer for sex problems—what we can and cannot do. And it speaks about the beauty of sex within marriage, and its ugliness and defiling power outside marriage. I have got more feedback on this subject than any other I have preached on. I am convinced that often the worst effect of sin in this area is the deep guilt-scar it leaves. Somehow we do not allow God to heal us here.

Until you get your sex life disciplined, even just within the mind, and until you get your sex life under the control of the Spirit of God, he will not be able to use you the way he wants to. That means discipline, growth, and realizing what to do if you do sin. It means reality and revolution.

I will never forget listening to Billy Graham preach at the Urbana Missionary Conference in 1957. It shook me. I was a young Christian and I had many struggles. He said, “Young person” (he was addressing 6,000 young people), “if you lose the sex battle, you have lost all.” And I would beg of you teenagers and young people to discipline your life, to determine to stand against the wiles of the devil, to flee youthful lusts in whatever form they come to you. That means the books you read, the pictures you look at. I want to keep my eyes off from anything that is going to create the wrong subconscious drives in my life, because the big attack of Satan is on the subconscious mind. Everything you have ever seen or read is recorded in your subconscious mind.

All over India in the visits of the Logos we have seen young people coming into victory, not through some little short cut, but through God’s program of training and discipline. In Kerala, a young man came to me. He had been involved in Christian work in his college and now came to me for counseling. He began, “Mr. Verwer, I have a problem—dancing.”

“Dancing!” I said. “Well, I would not consider that a major problem. It isn’t the best thing for Christians to do and I am sure you can overcome it.” So, we talked and talked, and finally he broke down and said, “I am a practicing homosexual.” (The Bible speaks quite a bit about that problem.) And he just shook.

Apparently a university professor had seduced this young man into homosexual practices (which are going on more than any of us will ever know). He had been converted only some months before. Now he shared his failure with me, confessed it and repented. I had the privilege of corresponding with that man and see him go on in victory. There is victory even for problems as serious as this one, because God is love, God is merciful, God forgives.

I am praying that you will determine with all your heart to let the miracle of spiritual growth take place in your life. God will work if you want him to. You can grow. You can live the disciplined life. You can be an effective soul winner. You can be a missionary in Turkey, in India, in Bombay etc. God can use you. But you’ve got to determine daily to deny self, take up the cross and follow him. That is God’s way. It isn’t easy, but it is his way.