Grace and Knowledge

I have never been a fan of the "spiritual growth" concept. Growth I get. As I mentioned previously I grew up on a farm and so the process of growth and maturation was clearly visible year after year but you don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere to see this transformation. Anyone who has ever had kids is amazed to see just how fast their little ones grow and develop. Perhaps the home you grew up in has one of those doorways with little notches or lines and your name by it where you can see how ‘tall’ you were when you were 3. Perhaps you have a pair of jeans you wore in high school or college that now serve as an unwanted reminder of how much you have ‘grown’ since then. Growth is everywhere and in many ways it can be measured and quantified.

Perhaps that is why I have such a hard time when a word like ‘spiritual’ is placed alongside ‘growth’. So much of what most people would deem as ‘spiritual’ could also be classified as ‘unseen’. Spiritual terms such as faith and hope seem so internal that it would be an impossible venture to attempt to quantify them. And so, when I think about spiritual growth I can’t help but think that this is a feeble attempt to quantify what can’t be quantified. If I had placed some sort of notch on my doorframe 10 years ago assessing where I was spiritually I wonder where I would have placed it. What criteria would I have used? Time in prayer? Verses memorized? Time spent serving others? And now 10 years later and looking back at where I was at that time where would I place the current notch? Would I use the same criteria in figuring out how much or little I have grown? Is it possible that maybe I would have to make a notch lower than where I was?

The thing about being a Christian is that we have a clearly visible standard that isn’t to be found in the notched wood of a doorframe but we see it, or rather him, nailed to a cross. What we see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus speaks volumes about how we are to live our lives in this world. What makes this so tough is that Christians live in a world filled to the brim with people who know about Jesus. People who don’t follow him but they know the story and know enough verses that they can point to that notch and say, "You don’t measure up." Isn’t that the regular slam against church going folk? "I know what your bible says and you just don’t live up to it." How do you respond to that kind of critique? Especially when the critique is true?

It is impossible to follow the life of Jesus and read his words without simultaneously seeing the people he is interacting with. The lame, the blind, the paralyzed, the tax collector, the woman caught in adultery, the centurion, the Pharisees and the disciples are continually in the context of what Jesus says and does. Of these groups it is the religious know it all’s who point out those who don’t measure up. Jesus is regularly rebuked for eating with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. I can’t help but feel that our world has got more than enough religious know it all’s inside and outside of the church. There are those pointing at the church and saying it doesn’t measure up and those inside the church pointing to the world saying it doesn’t measure up. But the fact remains that our measuring up has never been the standard for being recipients of God’s love.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

My aim this year is to ‘grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’ which is why I chose 2 Peter 3:18 as a theme for this blog. This isn’t a new aim and is something that in no way could be checked off my list when the year is done. My hope is that as I go along I can get a better feel for the interaction between grace and knowledge. Does growth in one area naturally lead to growth in the other or do I need to do separate workouts to strengthen each of these areas. I would hate for my life in Christ to resemble workout freaks who only do upper body stuff. They walk around thinking they look impressive with their huge arms all the while people are laughing at their chicken legs! I think the same can be said of people filled with the knowledge of Christ but have not grown in the grace of Christ. Only there’s no one laughing.