New Morning Mercies #273

God calls you to grow in your faith and then feeds you with the growth-producing nutrients of his grace and truth.

Are you growing in your faith? Do you care if you’re not? Have you become satisfied with a little bit of Bible knowledge and a little bit of doctrinal understanding? Have you stopped feeding on the spiritual food of God’s grace even though that grace has not yet come anywhere near to finishing its work in you? Do you hunger for the grace you’ve been given to continue to do its transforming work in the places where there’s evidence that there’s more work to be done? Are you satisfied with being a little more religious or a little more spiritual? Could it be that you claim to be a believer, but are satisfied to have parts of your life shaped by other values? Does your relationship with God really shape the way you think about and act in your marriage, in your friendships, in your parenting, in your job, in your finances, as a citizen or neighbor, in your private pursuits, or in your secret thoughts and desires? As you examine yourself, are you able to be satisfied in places where God is not? Are you pursuing the grace that you’ve been given because you know that you regularly demonstrate that you are not yet a grace graduate?

When I think on this topic, my mind immediately runs to two passages:

So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Pet. 2:1–5)

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Heb. 5:11–14)

Be honest today—which passage best describes you? Are you that ravenous baby who can’t get enough of his mother’s milk or the person who should be mature enough to digest solid food, but isn’t ready? Remember, you don’t have to defend yourself or deny the evidence; the grace of Jesus has freed you from that. The cross of Jesus welcomes you to be honest because all the places where you need to be honest have been covered by the blood of Jesus. And remember too that it takes grace to admit how much you still need grace. That grace is yours in Jesus.

For further study and encouragement: Hebrews 5:11–6:12