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  Jeremy Hoover's Ministry Website

How to Grow Spiritually

9/6/2011

1 Comment

 
On Sunday, I preached from Colossians 3 on the theme of "How to Grow Spiritually." If you think of spiritual growth as a puzzle, these are the pieces of the puzzle that will enable you to grow spiritually.

In my opinion, if you do these things, you will grow spiritually. Obviously, I am not taking away from the work of God. This is about creating space for God to work. We need to both cooperate with God and build basic foundations for God to work with.

Look over this list. How many of them are you doing? Which are you not doing? How good or consistent are you with them? Is anything missing? What do you think?

1. Attend worship every Sunday.
2. Attend at least one class each week for teaching and fellowship and to model good behavior for others.
3. Read at least one chapter of the Bible each day, reading through books.
4. Record the main idea of each chapter in a notebook and compile, over time, a base of information you can use in your own teaching and understanding.
5. Look for ways to apply the main idea you took from your daily reading.
6. Pray every day over your main idea, for yourself and for others.
7. Always be working on training and teaching one other believer to do these same things.
8. Always be working on mentoring an unbeliever in faith, doing these same things, and teaching by example.
1 Comment
Noel Walker link
9/6/2011 06:14:14 am

Hi Jeremy,
We're preaching through Colossians too! Such a great text to work from. Put to death and then put on the new self. The list is good but what I think is missing is that Spiritual Formation cannot be formatted. It's a sobering thought but I can think of actual people who have done nearly all of these eight things but haven't demonstrated any growth in their love for Christ in decades. It is possible to do these things and show no fruit at all. I think it is a mistake to think that doing righteous acts makes one righteous. I am sure that's not what you mean. Paul brings us all up short in Rom 4 - 8 when he says that the law is good and righteous but it does not sanctify.
It's kind of like reducing what it means to love your spouse into a list of steps. Doing the steps doesn't make you their spouse. A guy could send my wife flowers and call her every day and put her needs first but that wouldn't make him her husband. (It would make him a stalker! :) It's a deep affection and covenant love that makes the difference.
I've been reading a book recently that talks about the recovery of Praxis: where we read and study and worship and pray and then apply what we have learned but there is another half of the cycle.
The second half is reflecting what we are doing and what God is up to and lining that up with what we read in Scripture. We read the Bible and then we let the Bible read us. I think spiritual formation is a two-way reflective process: Read, Study, Pray > Participate, Engage > Reflect, Evaluate > Read, Study ....

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