6. Growing into Christlikeness: Healthy Christian Experience
Growing into
Christlikeness: Healthy
Christian Experience
The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.
TITUS 2:11-14
Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
2 PETER 3:18
We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
2 CORINTHIANS 3:18
Spiritual Healthiness and Growth
“I hope you are well.” “Keep well!” “Stay well.” We constantly read and write versions of that sentiment in letters. So, too, we regularly wish people “Good health!” and get wished it ourselves, as we quaff our Coke (or whatever else we are quaffing) at parties. What are we talking about? Physical well-being, of course, in the first instance, that pain-free, elegant, and efficient bodily condition that all our jogging, workouts, health clubs, and exercise units are meant to promote. For we are a very health-conscious lot. What we are doing is generously wishing others the bodily benefit that we passionately desire for ourselves.
Is that unnatural? Not in the least, though an obsessive preoccupation with one’s health is intrinsically unhealthy, just as any other obsessive preoccupation is. But wanting to be healthy is in itself just one mark of being human. Sober concern about the health of one’s relatives and friends is natural and right, and it has always been thought of as good manners to express it. So the ancient Greeks and Romans would start their letters by wishing the addressee good health. The New Testament contains one example of this: “Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health” is how John starts his letter to Gaius, in a sentence that ends: “even as your soul is getting along well” (3 John 2).
John’s words alert us to the twin truths that personal health is more than physical well-being, and that the health of the soul (mind and heart) is ultimately more important than the well-being of the body. That is something we must never forget. Sometimes God sends us people whose physical condition effectively reminds us that this is so. Joni Eareckson, a quadriplegic with a marvelous ministry who spends her days in a wheelchair, is one such person. Twice it has been my privilege to introduce Joni from a platform. Each time I have ventured to predict that her message would show her to be the healthiest person in the building—a prediction which, so far as I could judge, came true both times.
As one can be a sick person with a body that works well, so one can be a healthy person with a body that is a wreck, even a mass of pain. The secret is to accept one’s lack of physical well-being as from God, to offer it back to Him to make what He can of it for His own praise, and to ask Him to keep you sweet, steady, and patient as you live with it.
As we noted a moment ago, it is not wrong to want to be well and able-bodied. What is wrong is to get sour and resentful about present bodily limitations—like the pretty Californian Christian with the colostomy who told me, “I hate my body,” and whose face as she spoke showed me that she really did. At that moment, as it seemed to me, she was sicker mentally than she was physically. It is noteworthy that “sound” in the New Testament phrase “sound doctrine” (see 1 Tim. 1:10; 6:3; 2 Tim. 1:13; 4:3; Titus 1:9; 2:1), literally means “healthy,” clearly in the sense of health-giving and health-sustaining. The thought is that those who internalize and digest sound doctrine will be healthy persons before the Lord, in a way that others will not be.
So while bodily wellness is important, wellness of soul is more important. Personal health has more to do with one’s mindset than with the way one’s limbs and organs are functioning at any particular time.
The health of children and adolescents is bound up with a growth-pattern. Part of what is meant by saying that children are healthy is that they are growing more or less as they should. It is important to realize that the same is true of Christians. As we have seen already, they are destined to be conformed at every point to the image of Christ—to be like Him in outlook, aim, and attitude, and also in mode of bodily life. The transformation will be perfected beyond this world, when sin is finally rooted out of their system and they are “clothed” with resurrection bodies of the same order as Christ’s own (2 Cor. 5:1-4). In the meantime, here on earth, constant growth in the moral and spiritual dimensions of Christlikeness is one aspect of spiritual health. Peter writes, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation . . . grow in the grace and knowledge of . . . Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:2; 2 Pet. 3:18). Through mutual service in the body of Christ, “we will no longer be infants . . . speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ,” explains Paul (Eph. 4:14-15).
God intends that all Christians should grow. Parents of newborns find great joy in them, but imagine the distress they would feel if the months and years went by and their baby still remained a baby, smiling and kicking in its crib, but never growing! We should not allow ourselves to forget that God must know comparable distress when we, His born-again children, fail to grow in grace.
The general idea of growth covers change, development, enlarging, gaining strength and showing energy, advancing, deepening, ripening, and maturing. What, precisely, is the nature of growth in grace? How should we describe the growth that we are concerned with here?
In chapter 5 we looked at one aspect of it, growth downward through repentance into humility, but there is far more to spiritual growth than that, just as there is far more to physical growth than regular bowel movements. Two paragraphs from the Victorian classic that we have met already, J.C. Ryle’s Holiness, block in both negatively and positively what growth in grace involves:
When I speak of growth in grace, I do not for a moment mean that a believer’s interest in Christ can grow. I do not mean that he can grow in safety, acceptance with God or security. I do not mean that he can ever be more justified, more pardoned, more forgiven, more at peace with God, than he is the first moment that he believes. I hold firmly that the justification of a believer is a finished, perfect and complete work; and that the weakest saint, though he may not know and feel it, is as completely justified as the strongest. I hold firmly that our election, calling, and standing in Christ admit of no degrees, increase or diminution. . . . I would go to the stake, God helping me, for the glorious truth, that in the matter of justification before God every believer is complete in Christ (Col. 2:10). . . .
When I speak of growth in grace I only mean increase in the degree, size, strength, vigour and power of the graces which the Holy Spirit plants in a believer’s heart. I hold that every one of those graces admits of growth, progress, and increase. I hold that repentance, faith, hope, love, humility, zeal, courage and the like may be little or great, strong or weak, vigorous or feeble, and may vary greatly in the same man at different periods of his life. When I speak of a man growing in grace, I mean simply this—that his sense of sin is becoming deeper, his faith stronger, his hope brighter, his love more extensive, his spiritual-mindedness more marked. He feels more of the power of godliness in his own heart. He manifests more of it in his life. He is going on from strength to strength, from faith to faith and from grace to grace. . . .
Ryle was apparently up against some form of the idea, falsely ascribed to Luther and Lutherans, among others, that there is no such thing in this world as character-changing sanctification. For he now takes time out to vindicate against skepticism the reality of the growth in graces that he has described. He deploys two arguments. The first is from the New Testament, where such growth appears:
• as a possibility, prescribed (1 Thess. 4:1,10; 1 Pet. 2:2) and prayed for (Phil. 1:9; Col. 1:10; 1 Thess. 3:12);
• as a reality, recognized and celebrated (2 Thess. 1:3; Col. 2:19); and
• as a necessity, the divinely commanded (2 Pet. 3:18) and engineered (Heb. 12:5-14) road that leads to final glory.
The second argument is from fact and experience:
I ask any honest reader of the New Testament, whether he cannot see degrees of grace in the New Testament saints whose histories are recorded, as plainly as the sun at noonday. I ask him whether he cannot see in the very same persons as great a difference between their faith and knowledge at one time and at another, as between the same man’s strength when he is an infant and when he is a grown-up man. I ask him whether the Scripture does not distinctly recognize this in the language it uses, when it speaks of “weak” faith and “strong” faith, and of Christians as “new-born babes,” “little children,” “young men,” and “fathers” (1 Pet. 2:2; 1 John 2:12-14)? I ask him, above all, whether his own observation of believers nowadays does not bring him to the same conclusion? What true Christian would not confess that there is as much difference between the degree of his own faith and knowledge when he was first converted, and his present attainments, as there is between a sapling and a full-grown tree? His graces are the same in principle, but they have grown.1
Ryle is surely right in all this, and we shall treat his understanding of growth in grace as growth in graces; that is, transformation of character, as the launch pad for everything else that the present chapter contains.
Viewing the Glory of Holiness
Some years ago my wife and I spent a few days near the foot of one of New Zealand’s tallest mountains, Mount Egmont. There we were treated to some striking cloud effects. One day we could see only Mount Egmont’s lower half, the top being completely covered with a flat-bottomed white canopy, so that what was visible looked like a huge replica of the late Buster Keaton’s hat. The next day, what we saw was the top half, which seemed to be floating in space, since the clouds, flat-topped this time, were now making the bottom half invisible. Only on the third day, when all the clouds had cleared, did we see Mount Egmont whole, in its very real glory. In the same way, we are unable to appreciate the glory of holiness as the path of healthy growth for the child of God until we get beyond half-truths and incomplete briefings, and come to see it as the Christlike whole that it really is. That is the point I want to develop now.
Partial views of holiness—by which I mean, half-truths about it treated as the whole truth—have abounded. That we saw in chapter 4. Inevitably, any lifestyle based on these half-truths ends up looking grotesque rather than glorious; one-sided human development always does, whatever form the one-sidedness takes. Now, those who long with all their heart to be holy are most certainly the salt of God’s earth. I hope that you who read and I who write will always be found among their number. But such people often manifest the narrowness of tunnel vision when it comes to the specifics of sanctity, and one can see why.
Passion preempts concentration. It confines and restricts one’s attention to whatever has grabbed one’s heart. This happens notoriously in boy-and-girl love affairs. Since being a Christian is a love affair of a particular kind, we should not be surprised to find that it happens here too. The Christian with a passion to please God in holiness will hold tenaciously to whatever prescription for achieving a holy life he or she has been given, embracing it as subjectively precious and dismissing as unspiritual the question whether it is objectively adequate. Any set of directions for holiness may in this way become a sacred cow. But if the prescription is a half-truth only, obeying it is bound to result in a life that one way or another is lopsided and lacking, and as such odd and unimpressive (just as each half of Mount Egmont looked odd and unimpressive without the other half).
At the risk of caricature, I must illustrate this, for it is so important.
Rhapsody Without Realism
Here at one extreme are those for whom holy living means what I call rhapsody without realism. Their heart concentrates totally on devotional exercises, experiences of divine love, ecstasies of assurance, expressions of their own love to God, and the maintaining of emotional warmth and excitement in all their approaches to Him and communion with Him. Of this ardor, they feel, true holiness essentially consists.
But they do not seem to think or know much about human relationships. They are not noticeably wise or patient or caring, at least when caring requires them to move beyond words to action (see Jas. 2:14-16; 1 John 3:16-18). They are like the top half of Mount Egmont appearing without the bottom half. Their feet are, if I may put it so, firmly off the ground. Though the rhapsodic ardor of their love and adoration of God is great, they fall short when it comes to love of neighbor, sometimes even love for their own families. The problem with these people is not that they are insincere, but that their tunnel vision, born of their all-absorbing passion to know, love, and praise God, keeps them from seeing that holiness involves being a responsible realist in the life-situation in which God has placed you.
Holiness requires us to show our love for God by the quality of our love for others, whom we must assume that He loves as He loves us. Rhapsody without realism is not Christlike, and it is a failure in holiness rather than a form of it.
Rule-keeping Without Relating
And here at the opposite extreme are those for whom holy living means rule-keeping without relating. Their heart glows with love of God’s law. They see holiness as essentially a matter of keeping that law. They are meticulously honest in business; meticulously careful to observe a male-leadership pattern at home, and constitutional correctness in the church; meticulously conscientious in shunning evil and avoiding activities classed as worldly (smoking, drinking, dancing, gambling, use of make-up, etc.); meticulously insistent on maintaining God’s truth and fingering error and sin in any company; and their passion to be correct by the code merits unfeigned admiration and applause. But relationally they are cool and distant people, who see rulebook rightness as the essence of holiness and who concentrate on formal correctness of conduct rather than personal closeness either to God or to their fellow human beings. Paul distinguishes the righteous (upright, just, conscientious, correct) person, for whom no one under ordinary circumstances would die, from the good person (loving, caring, outgoing, generous) for whom, out of affection, someone might even die, were that necessary to save the good person’s life (see Rom. 5:7)—and it is righteous as distinct from good persons that I am spotlighting here.
These people are like the bottom half of Mount Egmont appearing without the top. The correctness of what they do is unquestionable, but they do not labor to get alongside other people in compassion or to commune with the Father and the Son in friendship. In other words, they fall short relationally. Verbal orthodoxy (right belief) and formal orthopraxy (right behavior) are there, but that is all.
Their problem is that their tunnel vision makes their passionate, grace-given commitment to law-keeping appear to them as the whole of spiritual life. But rule-keeping without relational closeness to God and one’s fellow human beings is not Christlike, and is a way of missing holiness rather than a method of achieving it.
Between these extremes you find various types of moral and spiritual nondescripts—disciples of sorts, but not very zealous in devotion nor very conscientious in obedience; mediocrities, in fact, who could not in any way be described as modeling holiness, only as muddling along with the Lord. I expect that description covers most of us. I shall not stop to diagnose the lack of seriousness that appears here, other than to say I suspect it springs from the folly of not viewing this life as preparation for heaven. Focusing on extremes will teach us more than we can hope to learn from looking at conventional half-heartedness in any form. Therefore, that is what I shall continue to do.
The point I am trying to drive home is that holiness is the healthy growth of morally misshapen humans toward the moral image of Jesus Christ, the perfect man. This growth is supernatural. It takes the sanctifying work of the indwelling Holy Spirit to effect it. Its result, as it progresses, is an all-around personal wholeness, God-centered, God-honoring, humble, loving, service-oriented, and self-denying, of a kind that we never knew before. One-sidednesses are corrected, undeveloped and underdeveloped aspects of our personhood brought into action, and the likeness in us of the moral beauty of Christ’s character begins to appear.
Moral beauty, like every other kind of beauty, is largely a matter of parts being balanced within the whole, in this case virtues and strengths of character. As the Marxist ideal is of a new person in whom mental and physical skills are developed in balance with each other, so the Christian ideal is of a renewed person in whom love of God and neighbor; love of God’s law and of His fellowship; love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; love of worshiping God and of working for God; love of righteousness and love of sinners, blend together in balance. Disproportion and imbalance in the formation of our spiritual identity are not a mode of holiness, but a negating of it.
“You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1), wrote Paul to Titus. “Sound,” when applied to doctrine, means, as we saw, healthy in the sense of health-giving. These words of Paul open a chapter that is entirely concerned with the forming of Christian character, in older men (v. 2), older and younger women (vv. 3-5), young men (vv. 6-8), slaves (v. 9), and in all Christians generally (vv. 11-14). The chapter ends with the very clear apostolic directive: “These, then, are the things you should teach” (v. 15). In verse 2 the word “sound” recurs. “Teach the older men,” writes Paul, “to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in endurance.” “Sound” in this verse means healthy in the sense of functioning in the way one was made to function, the way that is natural in terms of the ideal manhood that the powers of redemption are restoring.
Such healthiness is, in fact, holiness, and such holiness is the health of the soul. In effect, Paul is saying that faith, love, and endurance, within a frame of sobriety, dignity, and self-control, constitute spiritual health. Any distortion of this moral pattern would be a focus of spiritual unhealthiness, like an ulcer or a cancer in the soul.
Earlier I likened the life of Christian holiness to a three-legged stool, in which the three legs were D (doctrine: truth taken into the mind and heart to live by), E (experience: the conscientious pursuit and conscious enjoyment of fellowship with the Father and the Son), and P (practice: in the sense of the specific and habitual response of obedience to the doctrinal truth one has received). The point of the illustration was that a stool cannot stand on less than its three legs. In the absence of any one of them, the stool falls down. If one leg is larger or smaller than the other two, stability is lost, and the stool is in danger of tipping over as soon as any weight is put on it. So it is only when D, E, and P are balanced together in proper proportions that the spiritual life is solid and steady.
Unhealthy Spiritual Growth
I shall now use the same illustration to diagram three types of unhealthy Christian development, all three of which, unfortunately, I find to be common today. All three are apt to fancy themselves as holiness, but none of them has a right to that description, for in reality they are all distorted.
You probably know what proportions a diagram of a healthy human body (say, a beautiful Californian body, male or female) would have? Holiness would be pictured that way. You would draw it as head, trunk, and limbs all the right size in relation to each other, all fitted to play their part in truly godly living.
But now consider the following:
What you have here is a figure with a huge head on a matchstick body with matchstick limbs. This pictures the unnatural development of the Christian whose passion is all for doctrine, and whose discipleship revolves round the study of theology. You know the sort of person I mean—one who is always reading, always exploring questions of truth, poking half the time into esoteric aspects of typology, unfulfilled prophecy, the millennium, the symbolic chapters of Revelation, and the problems of Bible harmony. He or she is not much concerned about experience, not very active in obedience and service of others, and not distinguished for a radically changed life. But the head is always busy with theological questions, and is full to overflowing with doctrine.
In an anti-intellectual age like ours, such love of truth, and such devotion to the task of determining it, are rare and precious; and as we saw earlier, interest in the truth about God is natural to all the born-again. But is that interest, in and of itself, a token of good spiritual health? With so little E and P, no, it is not.
Now consider this:
What you see here is a figure with a pinhead and an enormous abdomen, carried on matchstick legs as before. This pictures the unnatural development of the Christian who knows very little doctrine and cares very little about doctrine (hence the pinhead), but who thinks of Christianity as a matter of constantly churned-up feelings and exciting experiences (hence, the huge abdomen). Zealous for experience, Christians of this sort are constantly running around to meetings at which they hope to be warmed up to the point where the glorious feeling of being in God’s presence and overwhelmed by His love is renewed. For them, Christianity is all experience, all feeling, all thrill. The Christian I picture is not outstandingly active in trying to change the world for the Lord (hence the matchstick legs). He or she is too busy chasing experiences to have much time for that.
Now it is entirely right and natural for Christians to desire experiences of God. Joseph Hart was altogether on target when he wrote, “True religion’s more than notion/Something must be known and felt.” But is the dominance of this desire, in and of itself, an index of good spiritual health? With so little D and P, no, it is not.
Now look at this:
Here you have the pinhead and a matchstick body, but with them a massive pair of legs. This pictures the disproportionate development of the activist Christian: the restless do-gooder whose interest is not in doctrinal truth nor in the devotional disciplines of the spiritual life, but in programs, organizations, and world-changing tasks of one sort or another. As with the big-headed and big-bellied believers pictured above, so with the big-legged activists: the concern that they show is in itself fully Christian. But is it, in and of itself, a sign of good spiritual health? With so little D and E, no, it is not.
My point is simply that the life of Christlike consecration to God which is holiness, the health of the human soul, requires of each of us a balanced threefold concern, for truth, for experience, and for action. Where this proportioning of zeal has not yet become habitual, personal spiritual development is lopsided, just as when one’s Christian life is a matter of rhapsody without realism, or rulekeeping without relating. When that is the case, however ardent one’s heart for that for which one so much cares, neither authentic Christian holiness nor personal spiritual health is being achieved to any significant degree. This is an issue, not of temperament or natural aptitude, but of will. Not to be concerned about the things that concerned Jesus is real moral failure. The only way to get beyond it is to look harder at him, the faithful witness, the man of prayer, the doer of good, and as such, in the conjunction of the D, E and P interests, the model of holy humanity.
Our calling is to imitate Christ, both in the humble love with which He related to His Father and His fellow human beings and in the range of His aims and concerns. As in golf they say, “keep your eye on the ball,” so in Christianity we must say, “keep your eye on the Savior.” Any unlikeness to Him, whether by being what He was not, or by not being what He was, or by lack of concern about something that concerned Him, is not holiness, but lack of it. The point is, I trust, now clear enough, so I move on.
Holiness and Sanctification
We just completed an exposition that sought to draw verbally a wide-angled picture of holiness that would keep us from taking up with too narrow a notion of what it is. The next task is to frame our picture, so to speak, in theology, by redefining and circumscribing the grace that induces growth in holiness through the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification. The doctrine of this grace is expressed in seven propositions which I have cited already,2 and which I discussed in detail in my book, Keep in Step with the Spirit (see chapter 3 especially). Here I shall reproduce these propositions with comments as brief as I can make them in light of the line of thought we are pursuing.
The Nature of Holiness Is Transformation Through Consecration
This is the formula, so to speak, from the inside. What is this consecration? It is the flip side of repentance. In repentance one turns away to God from what is wrong; in consecration one gives oneself to God for what is right. Both terms express the same “no” to the siren-songs of sin and the same “yes” to the saving call of Christ.
What is this transformation? It is the change into Christlikeness of which Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 3:18. The Revised Standard Version renders very accurately thus: “All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Through the Holy Spirit’s agency, we become like the One we look at as we absorb the gospel word. Each step in this character-change (for conformity of character is what Paul is talking about) is a new degree of glory, that is, of God’s self-display in our human lives.
How are the consecration and the transformation linked?
Paul explains this in Romans 12:1-2, which the New International Version renders well:
Therefore [as your way of glorifying God for his grace: see Rom. 11:36], I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy [which has laid the groundwork for the gratitude we must now show], to offer your bodies [not bodies as opposed to souls, but your entire selves, body and soul, as in Phil. 1:20] as living sacrifices, holy [consecrated] and pleasing [a delight] to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind [your heart, your desires, your thoughts and purposes, your entire inner life].
Paul’s thought is that by our self-offering, we open ourselves to God, and thereby bring to an end any resistance to the indwelling Holy Spirit that may have been in us before. As a result the planned and promised supernaturalizing of our inner life through our sharing in Christ’s risen life will proceed unhindered. “Then you will be able to test and approve [in each situation] what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (v. 2). “Test and approve” renders a single Greek verb that means discern through examining alternatives. The renewed mind, enlightened by the Spirit, and tuned by regeneration to seek God’s glory, will compare the options and thereby perceive what course of action will best please God.
The Context of Holiness Is Justification Through Faith in Christ
Sanctification is in no sense the ground of justification; on the contrary, holy living presupposes justification, being the response of grateful love to it.
All we need do to establish this point is remind ourselves of the order of things in Romans, where the justification of sinners through faith in Christ, apart from works, fills Romans 3, 4 and 5, and the gift of new life in Christ to the justified precedes the summons to consecrated living (see Rom. 6, especially verses 12-14,19-22 and 12:1, just quoted).
The Root of Holiness Is Co-Crucifixion and Co-Resurrection with Christ
Heart-hostility to God, which is natural to all the unregenerate, makes holiness impossible for them (Rom. 8:7-8). The taproot of holiness is love for God and His law, which the Holy Spirit imparts by uniting us to Christ in His death and resurrection.
That is a momentous transaction that changes our heart forever and ends sin’s rule over us for good, so that we do not, and in fact cannot, go on living under sin’s sway as we did before (Rom. 6:1-10,17; Eph. 2:1-10). After this has occurred after our regeneration and the birth of our personal faith, the Spirit permanently indwells us (1 Cor. 6:19; 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5; Eph. 1:13) to help us do what now we will and plan to do, namely to give God pleasure (Phil. 2:13).
The Agent of Holiness Is the Indwelling Holy Spirit
The Puritans, following Calvin, as we saw, analyzed holiness as the mortifying of sin (killing it in all its many forms) and the vivifying of graces (strengthening holy habits). Paul tells us that we mortify sin “by the Spirit” (Rom. 8:13), and that our holy habits are the “fruit” of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22).
Think of a child who wants to help his father paint the fence. The father holds and guides the hand in which the child holds the brush, and both are active in each stroke. When we labor, carefully and prayerfully, to mortify sins and practice virtues, the Spirit works with us, guiding our hand as it were. All actual achievement must be ascribed to Him, however much self-denial and sweat it may have cost us. Without His controlling and empowering activity we would never be able to achieve any conquests of sin, or any reshaping of our lives in righteousness.
A classic statement on the Spirit’s agency in our holiness, drawn up almost three and a half centuries ago, is The Westminster Confession, chapter 13, “Of Sanctification.”
1. They, who are once effectually called, and regenerated, having a new heart, and a new spirit created in them, are further sanctified, really and personally, through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them: the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified; and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.
2. This sanctification is throughout, in the whole man; yet imperfect in this life, there abiding still some remnants of corruption in every part; whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.
3. In which war, although the remaining corruption, for a time, may much prevail, yet, through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth overcome; and so the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
The Experience of Holiness Requires Effort and Conflict
Holiness means, among other things, forming good habits, breaking bad habits, resisting temptations to sin, and controlling yourself when provoked. No one ever managed to do any of these things without effort and conflict.
How do we form the Christlike habits which Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit? By setting ourselves, deliberately, to do the Christlike thing in each situation. “Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character.” That might sound very simple and straightforward, but in practice it does not prove so. The test, of course, comes when the situation provokes us to cut loose with some form of ungodly tit-for-tat.
We should think out our behavioral strategy with such situations directly in view. Thus, we should think of:
• love as the Christlike reaction to people’s malice;
• joy as the Christlike reaction to depressing circumstances;
• peace as the Christlike reaction to troubles, threats, and invitations to anxiety;
• patience as the Christlike reaction to all that is maddening;
• kindness as the Christlike reaction to all who are unkind;
• goodness as the Christlike reaction to bad people and bad behavior;
• faithfulness and gentleness as the Christlike reaction to lies and fury; and
• self-control as the Christlike reaction to every situation that goads you to lose your cool and hit out.
The principle is clear: the Spirit is with us to empower us, and we know that Christlike behavior is now in the profoundest sense natural to us. But still, maintaining Christlikeness under the kind of pressures I have described is hard.
How do we “by the Spirit . . . put to death the misdeeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13)? This too is hard. It is a matter of negating, wishing dead, and laboring to thwart, inclinations, cravings, and habits that have been in you (if I may put it so) for a long time. Pain and grief, moans and groans, will certainly be involved, for your sin does not want to die, nor will it enjoy the killing process. Jesus told us, very vividly, that mortifying a sin could well feel like plucking out an eye or cutting off a hand or foot, in other words, self-mutilation. You will feel you are saying good-bye to something that is so much part of you that without it you cannot live.
Both Paul and Jesus assure us that the exercise, however painful, is a necessity for life, so we must go to it (Matt. 5:29; 18:8; Rom. 8:13). How? Outward acts of sin come from inner sinful urges, so we must learn to starve these urges of what stimulates them (porn magazines, for instance, if the urge is lust; visits to smorgasbords, if the urge is gluttony; gamblings and lotteries, if the urge is greed; and so on). And when the urge is upon us, we must learn, as it were, to run to our Lord and cry for help, asking Him to deepen our sense of His own holy presence and redeeming love, to give us the strength to say “no” to that which can only displease Him. It is the Spirit who moves us to act this way, who makes our sense of the holy love of Christ vivid, who imparts the strength for which we pray, and who actually drains the life out of the sins we starve.
Thus, habits of self-indulgence, spiritual idolatry, and abuse of others can be broken. But while surrendering sins into which you drifted casually is not so hard, mortifying what the Puritans called “besetting” sins—dispositional sins to which your temperament inclines you, like cowardice or thoughtlessness, and habitual sins that have become addictive and defiant—is regularly a long, drawn-out, bruising struggle. No one who is a spiritual realist will ever pretend otherwise.
The Rule of Holiness Is the Law of God
Holiness sets its sights on absolute moral standards and unchanging moral ideals, established by God Himself. God’s law defines the righteousness He requires of believers.
What is God’s law? The Hebrew word torah, which is the basic term, means not legislated regulations as such (which is what “law” means in the modern state), but family instruction, which a father—in this case, the heavenly Father—gives to his children. All the directives for right living that God gave through His spokesmen in Old Testament times, the maxims of the wisdom books no less than the sociopolitical and liturgical legalities laid down through Moses and the diagnostic exhortations to righteousness voiced by the prophets, were in essence the Father’s admonitions to His family (which is what Israel was; see Exod. 4:22) and were centered on the Ten Commandments.
The sociopolitical and liturgical laws, which were for Old Testament Israel exclusively, have lapsed. But the Decalogue, as interpreted by Jesus’ two-commandment summary (“love God” and “love your neighbor”; see Matt. 22:37-40), stands as the all-time expression of God’s moral will for His people.
What then is the kingdom edition of the law? The kingdom of God (the new life of heaven on earth through the Holy Spirit) came into the world with Jesus, and now releases new moral power and energy in the lives of believers, whom Jesus called “sons of the kingdom” (Matt. 13:38). What I mean by the kingdom edition of the law is the exposition that Jesus and the apostles give of the breadth and depth of God’s requirements.
Their exposition stresses the motives, attitudes, and virtues proper to one who is consciously enjoying God’s salvation. Also, it reflects their expectation that the Holy Spirit will change people into law-keepers from the heart, so that their “good works” will no longer be role-play, but an eager doing of what they now really want to do. So it focuses on moral character in a way that goes beyond the Old Testament.
Thus the law of God—the “royal law” as James calls it (Jas. 2:8), meaning the King’s law for His household and realm—is first and foremost a family code. God’s born-again children, who make up the royal family, are required to live up to His standards.
Human royal families nowadays live in goldfish bowls, constantly watched by media people poised to headline their lapses. In the same way God’s children live under the eye of a watching world that licks its lips over lapses among the supposedly godly. As it is no credit to Britain’s Queen if her children run wild, so Christians who flout God’s family code dishonor Him. They fail Him, and let Him down. We never dare forget that while holiness honors and glorifies God, unholiness does the opposite.
The Heart of Holiness Is the Spirit of Love
The Bible views love, whether moved by affinity, gratitude, or both, as a purpose of making the loved one great in some way. Affectionate feeling that indulges its human objects, like parental spoiling of children, is precisely not love in the biblical sense, though the world insists on giving it that name. Love, whether to God or to others, is a responsible commitment to persistent, intelligent, self-denying service, according to the terms of God’s own Word. Love knows itself to be blind and to need the law as its eyes. Jesus embodies love to God and others. He was, we might say, love incarnate. The nature of love may be learned by watching Him.
Law-keeping love is the epitome of holiness, though love in any other sense negates it. Law-keeping love is God’s prescription for the fulfilling of our humanity. Any alternative to it pulls us, more or less, out of our proper human shape. Grace restores and perfects nature by teaching us truly to love. Let us not permit ourselves any vagueness or confusion about that.
The New Testament regularly portrays holy living as the practice of “good works.” What makes good works good? Two things: they are works of obedience to God’s law; and they are works of love, aimed at exalting the God whom one loves out of affinity and gratitude, and enriching human beings whom one loves out of compassion and fellow-feeling. Love to one’s neighbor, and love to the Father and the Son, do in fact blend, for the first is the required expression of the second (see John 13:34; 14:15,23; 15:10-14,17; 1 John 3:11,16-18,23; 4:7-11; cf. Matt. 5:43-48; Luke 10:25-37).
Outwardly, holiness is obedience; inwardly, holiness is love in action. The love for God that prompts the obedience that expresses love for fellow human beings is holiness’ true heart and heartbeat: heart in the sense of essence and core and fount, and heartbeat in the sense of energy-center and driving force. As it is God’s love that makes the world go round (yes, it is!), so it is love for God that makes the holy person tick, and care, and serve. Gospel-taught, God-wrought, grace-given love is what holiness in the final analysis is all about
Ongoing Growth in Grace
This chapter is exploring holiness as an ongoing process of growth in graces that constitutes a condition of personal spiritual health. We have framed our picture of healthy growth with some of the larger truths about God’s grace in action to show us how the process of growth in graces takes place. The next step is, so to speak, to get the lighting right: to shield our picture from false lights, whose dazzle imposes distracting patterns on it and obscures features of it that are really there, and to arrange illumination that will help us to see what we are looking at as we fix our gaze on it. So this section will be devoted to detecting some common mistakes about spiritual growth.
Growth in Grace Is Visible
The first mistake is to think that growth in grace is always clear to see.
Bodily growth, as we noted earlier, can be measured very straightforwardly. There is no problem involved in checking the height and weight that a person has gained. Spiritual growth, however, is a mystery in the theologians’ sense of the word—a reality that has in it more than we can ever understand or monitor. In this sense such realities as the Trinity, creation, providence, the Son’s incarnation, and our regeneration, are all mysteries. Indeed, everything involving God’s interaction with His world is mystery as defined, and growth in grace is a case in point.
Through God’s own teaching in Scripture we know a good deal about all these mysteries, but it is only the sort of knowledge that enables us to identity, conceive, and circumscribe them. It is not exhaustive knowledge, nor is it the sort of knowledge that enables us to control them. However fully we master the biblical revelation of divine truth, the mysteries of God to which that truth testifies remain mysteries still.
Growth in grace is a process wrought by the Holy Spirit that centers on the human heart, in the non-physiological sense of that word. The heart, as we have seen, is the dispositional and dynamic core of our selfhood. It is the source from which our thoughts and words, our desires, decisions, and deeds, all spring. We can guess the state of the heart, our own or another’s, by noting what comes out of it, but we cannot inspect it directly to see what is happening in it.
Scripture highlights the inaccessibility of the heart to everyone except God Himself. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the LORD search the heart” (Jer. 17:9-10). “You alone know the hearts of all men” (1 Kings 8:39). Processes in the heart are beyond human power to track.
This does not mean, however, that it is impossible ever to tell when spiritual growth has been taking place. The quality of a person’s responses to a crisis, a shock, or the demands of any new situation, may tell us all sorts of things about them that we did not know before-and one of those things may well be their spiritual stature.
Thus it was (to take just one example) with the unnamed lady whom we call Mrs. Manoah, whose story we read in Judges 13. The angel of the Lord (God acting as His own messenger: a pre-incarnate manifestation, apparently, of God the Son) had told her she was to have a special child (Samson), who would become Israel’s deliverer. The angel messenger gave her special instructions on how to prepare for the birth. When she told Manoah, he (a pompously pious male chauvinist, as it seems) prayed that the messenger might return and give them both further instructions. Clearly he was very conscious of his spiritual leadership role. Equally clearly he did not trust his wife to have gotten the message right. The messenger graciously reappeared and repeated the instructions. Then came the traumatic moment when Manoah realized that their visitor had been the Lord Himself. Pomposity gave way to panic. The man who had hitherto assumed his own spiritual superiority totally lost his head. “ ‘We are doomed to die!’ he gibbered to his wife. ‘We have seen God!’ ” (v. 22). He knew, in a general way, that no one is fit for God’s fellowship, and hence he nose-dived in despair.
Happily, his wife, who thus far in the story seems a very low-key person, now emerged as a woman of wisdom, faithfully ministering to her husband with some good straight thinking about God’s faithfulness to his own purposes. “If the LORD had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and grain offering from our hands, nor shown us all these things or now told us this” (Judg. 13:23). “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . you’ll be a Man, my son!” wrote Kipling. Humanly and spiritually, Mrs. Manoah appears here as a “Man” in Kipling’s sense, while her husband behaved like his own idea of an irrational woman—in fact, like a frightened child. Thus Mrs. Manoah’s reaction to the shock revealed her as a woman who had been growing spiritually, in a way that her spouse, for all his careful and laborious religiosity, had not. God’s children are not born with stature, but gain stature through growth. The lady has the stature in this story.
Again, a critical moment of testing may evoke a response that shows that a person has grown spiritually in a particular way since a previous testing. So it was with Abraham, whom God purposed to exhibit as a model man of faith for all time (see Rom. 4; especially Rom. 4:11; 16-25; Gal. 3:6-9; 14; Heb. 6:13-15). Faith, which brings justification, fellowship with God, and inheritance of promised benefits, is a matter of obedient trust and trustful obedience. God keeps both our trust and our obedience under constant scrutiny, and in this case both were challenged together.
God put Abraham’s faith to its supreme test by telling him to kill teenage Isaac, child of God’s promise and heir of God’s promises, as a human sacrifice. One can hardly imagine the turmoil of bewilderment, agony, and despair in Abraham’s mind as he plodded up Mount Moriah with Isaac at his side and his knife at the ready. But Abraham passed the test magnificently, so that when at the last minute the angel of the Lord (again, God acting as His own messenger) intervened to halt the sacrifice, he was able to declare: “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son” (Gen. 22:12).
Three decades before, however, it had been a different story. Promised a son when he was seventy-five, Abraham at eighty-six had fathered Ishmael upon Hagar, evidently believing, with Sarah, that there was now no hope that Sarah herself would ever be pregnant—whatever God might have said eleven years before (Gen. 16). That was a very obvious failure of faith.
What then had happened during the years between the birth of Ishmael and the sacrifice of Isaac? In a word, Abraham had grown. When, thirteen years after Ishmael’s birth, God renewed to Abraham and Sarah the promise of a son (Gen. 17:15-19), Abraham was a different man. This time he trusted God’s word absolutely. Paul waxes eloquent about the way in which “without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:19-21). Over those thirteen years, Abraham had grown in faith.
Doubtless it was the memory of Isaac’s miraculous birth that sustained Abraham at Mount Moriah, so that it could be said of him: “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’ Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death” (Heb. 11:17-19).
Abraham’s actions under successive tests reveal his growth in the specific grace of faith. In a similar way, the contrast between Peter’s craven cowardice when he denied Christ and his later defiant courage in refusing to keep quiet about Him (see Matt. 26:69-75; also Acts 4:13-20,29; 5:17-32) shows growth after Pentecost in the specific grace of boldness (which, says J.C. Ryle, is just “faith honestly doing its duty”3).
The inward work of God that induces growth remains hidden from us, but testing times evoke responses that show growth to be a fact. This, however, is all that can be said about tracking the growth process. It does not really get us very far. Moments of pressure and decision will bring out of persons what is in them spiritually, as well as in other respects. But at other times their growth in grace, if any, the intensity of their zeal, and their current gift and ministry potential, which ordinarily grow out of their growth in grace and their increase of zeal, are far from plain to see. It is a mistake to expect that they would be. Our judgments as to who has and has not grown in grace, and how much growth there has been in those who have thus grown, can only be provisional. All such judgments are hazardous, and may easily be falsified by the next round of events, so that it would really be better and wiser not to pass them at all.
Growth in Grace Is Uniform
A second mistake is to think that growth in grace is always a uniform process, either in itself throughout the stages of a believer’s life, or in comparison with what God is doing in the lives of others. Growth in grace is not uniform in either sense.
This mistake is linked with the first one, but I treat it separately because it is so common and so easy to make. Superficiality betrays us. We think of physical growth as a steady process, and of human beings as all the same. We then simplistically project these ideas into the realm of grace. The truth is however, that as physical growth is really a somewhat irregular business, and as people are really quite different from each other, so the changes and developments in individuals that sanctifying growth involves vary from one to another in speed, in degree, and in what we may call internal proportioning.
Bluff, impetuous, warm-hearted, unthinking, unstable Simon passed through Pentecost and suddenly became clearheaded, solid, resolute, discerning, leader-like Peter, the Early Church’s anchorman—Cephas, the rock that Jesus had said that Simon would be (John 1:42). Ardent, raw, fire-eating John, whom Jesus had nicknamed Son of Thunder (Mark 3:17; for his fire-eating rawness, see Luke 9:49,54), also passed through Pentecost. There is, however, no indication of equal suddenness in the process that turned him, without in the least blunting his black-and-white, for-or-against, adversarial quality of mind, into the apostle of thoughtful love, deep simplicity, and patient restraint whom we meet in his letters. But if Simon was changed quickly while John was changed slowly, what of it? They were different men. Sanctifying grace worked differently in them, maximizing their individuality (God likes variety; cloning is not His way), and giving prominence in the developed product to different facets of the glorious likeness of Christ, which no single person, not even an apostle, can ever embody in its entirety.
The precise quality of change involved in people’s growth in grace is always conditioned by their natural make-up. It is easy to underestimate the Holy Spirit’s achievement in the lives of those who, in addition to the God-opposing, self-deifying twist of original sin, suffer from badly flawed temperaments and characters. The trembling, quickly daunted faith of Bunyan’s clutch of memorable depressives in Pilgrim’s Progress: Mr. Fearing, Mr. Feeble-mind, Mr. Ready-to-Halt, Mr. Dispondency and his daughter Much-Afraid, who kept struggling on as Christians though tormented by the grisly feeling that they would never reach heaven, reflects a deeper work of grace than does the steadier faith and fortitude of a naturally equable person.
The partial moderating of some choleric’s furious temper, or the partial melting of some phlegmatic’s chilly aloofness, or the partial curing of some sanguine’s zany irresponsibility, or the partial deliverance of some melancholic from the paralyzing obsession of despair, may well argue a greater measure of growth in grace—growth in graces through God’s grace in Christ, as we are now analyzing it—than is present in more sturdy, forthcoming, realistic, energetic saints who never had to cope with these particular flaws in themselves. Having to fight your temperament for your Christian virtues makes you feel your progress is much slower than that of others, but that may not be so.
Christ finds us in different places in terms of our character and personal story, and He works on us by His Spirit in the place where He finds us. Though one of us may be naturally nice in a way that another is not, we are all at deepest level wrecked vessels spiritually, each needing a divine salvage operation geared to the specifics of our condition. No wonder, then, if God’s health-giving, growth-producing work of sanctification is differently shaped in detail, and appears to proceed at different speeds, in different lives.
Since so much of this work, in others and in ourselves, goes on in the heart, below the level of consciousness, we can never measure how far it has gotten, or how far it still has to go, in any single case. Any comparisons we make between its progress in one and in another are bound to be ignorant and fallacious, so we had better learn not to make them. The only generalizations it is safe to make are:
• moral and spiritual Christlikeness is the goal in every case;
• all Christians can testify that knowing God through Jesus Christ enables them now to live and act in ways that were simply beyond them before; and
• a professed Christian with no such testimony can hardly be genuine, and is certainly not growing in grace.
Growth in Grace Is Automatic
A third mistake is to think that growth in grace is automatic if you are a religious professional, whether minister, missionary, full-time Christian worker, televangelist, monk, or nun. In reality, growth in graces is never automatic. Being a Christian professional makes it harder to grow spiritually rather than easier.
Why is this? The reason is that since professionals are expected, as we may say, to perform—to fulfill roles, that and no more—the temptation to a professional to settle for an appropriate form of mask-wearing role-play, in which one’s own personhood is kept out of sight, is very strong. Professional identity then eats up personal identity, so that one is no longer closely related to anyone, neither to people nor to God. So one is lonely. Even worse, since life is relationships, and behind one’s mask one has distanced oneself from relationships, one is shrinking rather than growing as a person. And one cannot grow in grace while one is shrinking overall.
When my wife used to say to me, “I don’t want your ministry, I want you,” she was telling me that she feared this temptation was engulfing me. When that role-player extraordinaire, the late great film actor Peter Sellers, declined an invitation to have records made of him reading the Bible, the reason he gave was that you can only read the Bible aloud convincingly if you know who you are—and he did not know who he was. All Christians need God’s help to know who they are, and to live with Him and with their own human intimates in honesty, integrity, and vulnerability. But Christian professionals need this help most of all.
Growth in Grace Is Protection
A fourth mistake: to think that growth in grace shields one from strains, pains, and pressures in one’s Christian life. The fancy persists that growth in grace brings a kind of inner peace that insulates you emotionally against being torn the way others are torn. But, in fact, it does the exact opposite.
There are, to be sure, zombie states of mind in which people numb themselves, one way or another, to feelings of personal pain and grief. There are self-absorbed states of mind in which people muzzle all concern for those around them, so that they are unmoved by others’ misery. But there is nothing of God’s grace about these states of mind, even when the escapism and hard-heartedness that they express wear religious clothes.
The truth can be stated in two propositions. First, Christians have no more exemption from strains, pains, and pressures than did Jesus or Paul. (Think of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross, and of Paul with his thorn in the flesh—some painful disability, we do not know what—and his life in and out of persecutions, prisons, and shipwrecks.) Second, Christians can and do cope with personal pain in God’s strength, rejoicing like Paul in the way that that strength is made perfect in their weakness (2 Cor. 12:10). But as they grow in grace they become increasingly distressed at the sorrows and follies of others (think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem [Luke 19:41-44], and Paul agonizing over the unbelief of the Jews [Rom. 9:1-4, 10:1]). Compassion generates more distress for growing Christians than other human beings ever know.
That growing Christians enjoy God’s gift of peace more and more is true, but the peace in question is relational:
• peace with God Himself through the peace-making blood of Christ;
• peace with circumstances, which, however harrowing, God has promised to order for our good (that is, our growth in grace);
• peace with themselves, for Christ’s forgiving and accepting them requires them to forgive and accept themselves, hard though this might at first seem; and
• peace with those around them, to whom at Jesus’ bidding they go as peacemakers (Matt. 5:9).
It is not the peace of unfeeling Olympian tranquility, gained and maintained by ignoring other people’s agony.
Growing Christians grow in peace, but their growing in grace often has them groaning in grace as Christlike compassion comes more and more to possess their hearts. God does not mean the lives of His children in His tragically spoiled world to be sorrow-free, and we may confidently say that any who are sorrow-free, whatever else may be true of them, are certainly not growing in grace.
Growth in Grace Is a Retreat
A fifth and last mistake is to think that growth in grace may be furthered by retreating from life’s hard places, heavy burdens, and hurtful relationships. Centuries ago, people left the rough-and-tumble of the wider world for the sheltered life of the monastery in order to save their souls. One still meets the idea that for true spiritual development, this is the way to go. But that is not the case. There may be good reasons why some Christians should choose to live relatively withdrawn lives, but the belief that only so can they grow is not one of them.
A middle-aged Christian woman, distinguished in her profession, lived with her parents. They treated her still as their little girl, whose first task was to look after them. Feeling she could not survive, let alone grow spiritually, in that situation, she planned to leave. Ministry centered on the fifth commandment and Romans 8:28 transformed her viewpoint. She returned in peace to a galling relationship, knowing that that was where she ought to be. Thus she grew in grace.
Christians grow as they accept their destiny of self-denial and cross-bearing (Luke 9:23). Unlike orchids, they do not grow as hothouse plants. Jesus did not live the life of a hothouse plant, evading life’s abrasiveness, and He does not intend that His disciples should either.
Wisdom, then, directs us to avert our eyes from the unhelpful dazzle of these five false lights, and to look for better illumination to show up all that our picture of growth in grace contains. Here, now, are five true lights to replace the false ones.
When spiritual growth—growth in the graces of Christian character, and in intimacy with God—is taking place, one may expect to see at least these signs of it:
1. Sign one is a growing delight in praising God, with an increasing distaste for being praised oneself. A purpose of praise runs throughout the Bible. It roots itself in every Christian heart and becomes, not necessarily more exuberant, but certainly more emphatic, as the saint matures. And the higher one goes in praising God, the lower one will go in one’s own eyes, and the more passionately one’s heart will cry, with the psalmist: “Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness” (Ps. 115:1). When Christians feel this way more and more strongly, it would seem that they are growing in grace.
2. Sign two is a growing instinct for caring and giving, with a more pronounced dislike of the self-absorption that constantly takes without either caring or giving. Love, we have seen, is of the essence of Christlikeness; and love is entirely a matter of caring and giving. Jesus cared and gave without stint all through His ministry. Even in the agony of His crucifixion we find Him caring and praying for His executioners, that they might be forgiven (Luke 23:34); caring for His mother, and charging John to look after her (John 19:26-27); and caring for the penitent thief, to whom He promised salvation (Luke 23:43). When Christians become more committed to love, and more abhorrent of unlove in its various forms, it would seem that they are growing in grace.
3. Sign three is a growing passion for personal righteousness, with more acute distress at the godlessness and immorality of the world around, and a keener discernment of Satan’s strategy of opposition, distraction, and deception for ensuring that people neither believe nor live right. “We are not unaware of his schemes,” said Paul, with some grimness (2 Cor. 2:11). Every Christian needs to be able to say the same. When Christians show more grief that God is being dishonored and provoked by behavior that He hates, and more realism about the spiritual warfare involved in rolling back the evil tide, and more care lest they be drawn into sin themselves, it would seem that they are growing in grace.
4. Sign four is a growing zeal for God’s cause, with more willingness to take unpopular action to further it. This is not to defend foolish gestures, which will certainly be unpopular and deservedly so. Strategic and tactical wisdom, and mature understanding of the issues involved, are called for in any public action. “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war,” wrote David (Ps. 144:1). Similarly, Christians preparing to fight the Lord’s battles for truth and life need God to train, in this case, their minds. When Christians humbly allow wisdom to temper their zeal and yet remain ready (more so than at one time) to lay themselves on the line in what is unmistakably God’s cause, it would seem that they are growing in grace.
5. Sign five is a greater patience and willingness to wait for God and bow to His will, with a deeper abhorrence of what masquerades as the bold faith, but is really the childish immaturity, that tries to force God’s hand. It is the way of children to want things now, and to say and feel most passionately that they cannot wait for them or do without them. But the adult way of petitioning is the way of submission, modeled by Jesus in Gethsemane—“My Father, if it is possible . . . Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39). It is right to tell God what we long for and would like Him to do, but it is also right to remind ourselves and acknowledge to Him that He knows best. When Christians are learning to submit to God’s ordering of events with undaunted realism and humility, it would seem that they are growing in grace.
Applying These Principles Personally
It remains now only to pull the threads together and indicate how all this applies to the individual Christian. Since God’s teaching in Scripture on holy growth has been given to measure, guide, and direct me as much as anyone, it will once more be fitting (as well as straightforward) for me to formulate the application in personal terms.
First, then: Is my concern about growing in grace all that it should be?
Am I Concerned About Growth?
In 2 Peter 3:18, growing in grace is put forward not as an option, but as a necessity; not suggested, but commanded. Peter’s verb is in the imperative: “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” This is the apostle’s last injunction, set forth in the last verse of his last letter, at a time when he knew that his death was imminent (2 Pet. 1:14). So it has the special weight and solemnity that last words always carry. It is as if Peter is telling us, “Whatever else you forget of what I have said to you, remember this, for this is the most important thing of all.” So indeed it is; for the thought Peter was expressing was in truth bigger and richer than we have yet seen.
With Ryle, who on this point was following the Puritans, we have so far taken the phrase “grow in grace” to signify “grow in graces (virtues, facets of Christian character).” While this imperative is certainly part of Peter’s meaning, there is much more to it than that.
To grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ means:
• to strengthen one’s grasp on the whole doctrine of grace that we reviewed in chapters 2 and 3;
• to deepen one’s faith-relationship with Christ, and through Him with the Father and the Spirit, by involving the holy Three consciously and directly in the living of one’s life; and
• to become more Christlike as the Spirit assimilates us to the One we contemplate, leading us to pray for conformity to Him, to act in imitation of Him, and to manifest our progressive transformation into His moral image.
To obey this command on an ongoing basis (which is what Peter intends; “grow” is in the present tense, and means “keep growing”) is a matter of being consciously Christian, and trying all the time to be more Christian, in every department of our living. Thus, growing in grace is our true life’s work, a huge and never-ending task. Since it is a matter of command, we are bound to tackle it, and to labor to get as far in it as we can. This is real discipleship. This is how we show ourselves to be believers. Growth in grace is thus the acid test of us all.
Many Christians, however, seem not to grow in grace, nor to be concerned to grow in grace. Apparently they are content to mark time spiritually, or even to slip backward. That is tragic. Why is it so? There are various possible reasons. Perhaps they have never read Peter’s words, nor been told that God requires them to grow in grace. People do not have a conscience about that of which they are ignorant. Or perhaps they are held back by fear that a serious commitment to grow in grace would bring major disruption and upheaval into their lives—as it probably would. W.H. Auden testified to the paralyzing effect of such fear in his chilling line, “We would rather be ruined than changed.”
Or perhaps they are taking their cue from Christians around them who also have no concern to grow in grace. They may have concluded from this that they need not be concerned about it either, never mind what the Bible says. Or perhaps they have lost their first love for Christ and their appetite for divine things and are, like Paul’s one-time colleague Demas, “in love with this present world” (2 Tim. 4:10, RSV). But whatever the reason, their unconcern is disobedient, wrong, irresponsible, and indefensible. All Christians are charged to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ.
At the start of his second letter Peter had spelled out, in a vivid if wire-drawn way, the down-to-earth specifics of commitment to grow in grace. “Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1:5-8). Note how neatly D, E and P dovetail here! This is a formula that applies to all. I must, therefore, face the fact that this is the way of living I am called to, and that I lapse into an unholy, unhealthy state of heart the moment I cease to labor thus to grow. And what is true of me is true of each of my readers, too.
Do I Practice These Principles?
Second, then: Is my practice of the principles of growing in grace all that it should be?
What, we ask, are those principles? If one simply said: make use of the means of grace (Bible reading, prayer, church worship, and Christian fellowship, to cite the classic four), one would not be wrong. But it is helpful to say more than this. So here now are three maxims (principles for fulfilling the principle of required growth; middle axioms, ethicists would call them), plus four disciplines, all set forth for my guidance as well as for yours.
1. Work Out Your Salvation
This phrase, from Philippians 2:12, is Paul’s explanation of what his readers’ obedience to the call to demonstrate the mind (attitude) of Christ will really amount to. It will be an expressing in action, and so a perfecting and completing (all these ideas seem to be present), of the salvation that is theirs now. And they should work out their salvation “with fear and trembling”—that is to say, with awe and reverence for God’s work in them. For the ability that their obedience actualizes is not natural; it is the fruit of divine enabling. It is awesome to realize that “it is God who works in you to will and to act” (Phil. 2:13), yet that is the sober truth. As we express our salvation by divinely empowered obedience, so God the Holy Spirit transforms our moral nature to make us more like the Christ on whom we model ourselves.
This suggests the proper procedure every time a new act of obedience is called for. First, take it to God in prayer, acknowledging your own lack of strength for it and asking to be enabled from on high. Then go into action, expecting to be helped, and you will find that you are. Then thank God for the help you received. It is by this pattern of humble, dependent activity that our salvation is worked out. It is thus that we shall grow in grace.
2. Remain (Abide, Stay Put) in Christ
This maxim reinforces the first. It comes from Christ’s own lips. “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. . . . Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love” (John 15:4-5,9-10). Jesus’ point is that He Himself must be the focus of His followers’ lives. By faith in Him they are already united with Him in such a way that His life really, although mysteriously, flows through them (they are branches in Him, the vine). Now they are to look to Him as their source of power to serve, listen to Him to find what form that service should take, cultivate His company as they go about His business, and bask in the certainty of His ongoing love.
In this all-encompassing relationship to Him they are to “remain” (stay put, and stay steady). This is their secret of fruitfulness. The fruit that they will then bear—“fruit that will last” (John 15:16)—will consist of righteousness in their own changed lives, and spiritual influence changing the lives of others. For such fruitfulness, which embraces holiness, health, and growth as we have been defining them, Christ-centered living of the kind described is absolutely essential. It was so for the apostles to whom Jesus gave this teaching, and it remains so for us to whom John in his Gospel relays it.
Well, then, might the hymn writer say to the Lord:
O Jesus Christ, grow thou in me,
And all things else recede;
My heart be daily nearer thee,
From sin be daily freed.
Each day let thy supporting might
My weakness still embrace;
My darkness vanish in thy light,
Thy life my death efface.
In thy bright beams which on me fall
Fade every evil thought;
That I am nothing, thou art all,
I would be daily taught.
More of thy glory let me see,
Thou holy, wise, and true;
In joy and sorrow too.
Fill me with gladness from above,
Hold me by strength divine:
Lord, let the glow of thy great love
Through my whole being shine.
Make this poor self grow less and less,
Be thou my life and aim;
O make me daily, through thy grace,
More meet to bear thy name!
It is thus, through our decrease and His increase as described, that we shall grow in grace.
3. Watch and Pray
These are words of Jesus, spoken as warning to the three disciples whom He had asked to watch with Him (stay awake and alert, supporting Him by their presence and concern) while He prayed in Gethsemane. The full warning was: “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak” (Matt. 26:41).
The point of the warning was that Satan, the enemy of souls, is endlessly malicious and deceptive. All who serve God have to run the gauntlet of Satan’s unwelcome attentions for the whole of their lives. If Satan cannot keep us from being believers, he will certainly draw on all his resources to keep us from growing in grace and to ensure that God is dishonored, one way or another, by the way we live. “Fall [literally “enter”] into temptation” means becoming a victim of one of Satan’s schemes for dishonoring God by doing damage to one who is His. Inducements to “fall” in this way are constant in the Christian life.
Peter, to whom Jesus’ warning was first spoken (and whom within the next few hours Satan trapped into publicly denying Jesus three times), was later to write a poignant exposition of what it means to watch: “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Pet. 5:8-9).
As for praying, Jesus’ own struggle in Gethsemane to pray “thy will be done” from His heart shows us what we need to know about the prayer that will repel satanic allurements. As long as our hearts echo Jesus’ prayer, “Not my will but thy will be done,” and avail themselves of the precious truth that “because he [Jesus] himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb. 2:18, cf. 4:15), we shall be victorious. The essence of the spiritual warfare in which Christians are involved is battling to say “no” when the world, the flesh, and the devil urge you to say “yes,” and to say “yes” when weariness, dead-heartedness, and unbelief prompt you to say “no.” In these battles, those who have learned to watch, to pray, to fight, and to win grow in grace. It is through just such experiences that we, too, shall grow in grace.
Wrote Eric Liddell, the legendary Flying Scotsman of the film Chariots of Fire: “The Christian life should be a life of growth. I believe the secret of growth is to develop the devotional life.”4 Surely he was right. But the devotional life can be undermined by folly and neglect, and thus kept from developing in a truly healthy way. So I close this chapter by calling attention to four disciplines that have to do with clearing the path to healthy growth. All were suggested by the contents of 2 Peter, and particularly of 2 Peter 3, the chapter that has God’s call to grow in grace as its climactic conclusion.
• First discipline: acceptance of facts. Realism is a Christian virtue that acknowledges God’s sovereignty over His world. It interprets unexpected disappointments and deferrings of hope as acts of God’s wisdom and goodness, according to His promise. No discouragement, bitterness, or cynicism (the wasting diseases of the soul) find any foothold in realistic hearts. Peter tells his readers, who were seemingly daunted and perplexed because the Lord had not yet returned, that Christ’s apparent slowness to end history was really patient mercy, making for the salvation of some who would otherwise be lost (2 Pet. 3:3-9,15). Acceptance of this, in the confidence that God does all things well, was necessary for their continued devotional growth. To hold a grudge against God, for this or any other fact, would block growth completely.
• Second discipline: avoidance of folly. Righteousness is a Christian obligation, and what Peter calls “the error of lawless men” (2 Pet. 3:17)—namely, the immoralism and proud unconcern about holiness described in 2 Peter 2—is folly flying in the face of God’s requirement and provoking judgment. Rejecting such folly is necessary for continued devotional growth. Yielding to it, settling for some form of moral slackness, and thereby displeasing God, would block growth completely.
• Third discipline: assimilation of food. Bible truth, the Word of God, is the true soul food. In his first letter, Peter told his readers to long for it (2:2). In this second letter, he tells them to pay heed to the Scriptures written by the prophets (1:19-21; 3:2) and to make sure they do not misunderstand the letters of St. Paul (3:15). Confidence in the divine truth of Bible teaching, and constant thoughtful absorption of it, are necessary for continued growth in grace. Doubt about the Scriptures, however, would block growth completely.
• Fourth discipline: affirmation of fellowship. God did not create, nor does He redeem, anyone to be a lone wolf in His world. We are made, and we are saved, for affectionate togetherness and mutual help. Peter models this: first, he calls his readers his “brothers” (2 Pet. 1:10, cf. 2 Pet. 1:7) and then, four times in 2 Peter 3, he addresses them as his “dear friends” (literally, “beloved ones”), just as he refers to Paul as his “dear [beloved] brother” (2 Pet. 3:1,8,14,15,17). The uniqueness of the apostles’ role and authority never restricts or inhibits their fellowship with their converts as brothers who love and are loved in God’s family. Taking our place in the interdependent brotherhood of the Christian fellowship is necessary for continued growth in grace. Voluntary isolation from it, however motivated, would block growth completely.
Avoiding the Peter Pan Syndrome
A haunting twentieth-century literary creation, haunting because he mirrors so much uncomfortable truth about us, is J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, “the boy who would not grow up” as Barrie’s subtitle for the play puts it. For two generations Peter Pan has been celebrated and enjoyed as quality entertainment for children. Generations have perceived it simply as the story of Peter and the pirates, with Wendy in tow, and have loved it as such. I read the play often when I was a child; it was, indeed, a favorite book of mine, and that was what I got out of it. Steven Spielberg’s movie Hook, which came out in 1991, gave the pirate part of the story a new lease on life. No doubt Peter Pan will still be rated a children’s classic throughout the twenty-first century.
Yet Peter is not a person with whom any wise child, or wise adult for that matter, will identify. His twice-repeated declaration, “I just want always to be a little boy and to have fun,”5 is really bad news. Peter represents the fixation of a phase that a boy goes through and, if all is well, grows out of. His choice (for such it is) to arrest his own development leaves him so flawed that we have to describe him as an anti-hero, a character significantly unsympathetic and even repellent. Though brave, clever, and leader-like, he is also a conceited show-off, self-absorbed, heartless, and unable either to love or to accept love from others. Through thick layers of the sentimental ambivalence (joking and sad by turns, for that was Barrie’s specialty), the play makes clear that, after their sojourn in Never Land, Wendy and her brothers are well off to be back in a family committed to adulthood as childhood’s normal destination. For Peter to turn his back on the world of relationships and work, in order endlessly to play his Pan-pipes among the fairies, is a small-scale tragedy. Grown-ups in the audience are meant to feel it as such.
The Western world’s current drift from its Christian moorings into secular materialism has generated what can only be called a Peter Pan culture. Here all the facets of Peter’s childish egoism are encouraged to emerge and entrench themselves, and are treated as virtues when they do. In such a culture it is hard to become a responsible adult, particularly in the realm of the emotions. It has been truly said that the greatest social problem of the modern world is extreme emotional immaturity masquerading as an adult lifestyle. In God’s ordering of things, the human family is meant to function as a relational network in which the lesson of responsible love and life-strategy will be thoroughly learned. But with the weakening of family life almost everywhere this is not happening. Today’s world is full of people with adult bodies housing a juvenile, even infantile, emotional make-up—people, in other words, who just always want to be little boys or girls and to have fun. Affluence allows childish self-indulgence to become a lifestyle from one’s teens onward, and the results in later life are painful.
Christians, no less than others, are conditioned and shaped by the culture of which they are part. They also get infected by this Peter Pan syndrome. Maxims and disciplines of devotion cannot help us if we are not prepared to be changed at this point. Am I willing to learn whether I need to grow up emotionally? Are you?
Once more, it is Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2), who stands before us as the model of that emotional and attitudinal maturity to which our growth in grace is meant to bring us. It is supremely through measuring ourselves by Him, as we meet Him in the pages of the Gospels, that we shall come to see what our true needs in this area are, and what growth towards His stature will require of us.
May you and I be enabled to grow in grace at this present time, “perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (2 Cor. 7:1).