On to perfection…

There is no neutral in your walk with the Lord. If you are not fighting to move forward by faith, you are sliding backwards. If you are not maturing, you are regressing. The length of time that you have known the Lord is not a guarantee of spiritual maturity. This is what the writer of Hebrews communicates when he writes:

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe” (Hebrews 5:12-13).

Even more intriguing and convicting is that Scripture seems to say that you can grow—and then regress in your spiritual maturity in Christ. These verses seem to say that some believers mature in Christ and then for a variety of reasons not only slow down, but slide back in their spiritual maturity. 

That is why we need to fight to move forward in our faith. We need to fight to add to our faith “virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love” (2 Peter 1:5-7). The elementary principles outlined in Hebrews 6:1-2 isn’t an exhaustive checklist for the Christian—it is a foundation on which to build and grow.

So how do we fight to move forward? Practice—a lot of practice. There is grave danger in merely listening to the Word and not doing what it says to do. When we do what God tells us to do and obey with a willing heart full of faith, we grow and mature and move forward.

Help me, my Lord, to grow more like Thee,
Thy wondrous love to know, Thy face to see.
Lord, fill my soul with light, dispel the gloom of night,
And make me through Thy might more like Thee.