Kingdom Life: Keys to Spiritual Growth

Spiritual growth is offered to every true believer, resulting in an ever-increasing experience of the abundant life Christ died to supply (John 10:10). Yet while it is offered, it is not automatic. Spiritual growth requires your participation for it to take place.

Spiritual growth may be defined as that transformational process by which we allow the indwelling Christ to increasingly express himself in and through us. This, then, enables us to bring God greater glory as we also experience more of his power and presence in our own lives. As you mature spiritually, you gain access to the kingdom benefits that result from living as a fully committed kingdom disciple.

The process of spiritual growth occurs through feeding the seed you were supplied by the Holy Spirit at the moment of your conversion so that you may, as Peter wrote, “grow up into your salvation” (Eph 4:15; 1 Pet 2:2; 2 Pet 1:2-11; 3:18). In so doing, you progressively learn to let Christ live his life through you, as you abide with him in an intimate relationship (John 15:5; Gal 2:20.)

Information about the Christian faith is critical, because our faith has specific content. But it is also critical that this information gets connected to the living reality of Jesus Christ if you are going to experience spiritual growth. God will transform you as you make him your focus, thus reflecting his glory and becoming more like him (Rom 8:29; 2 Cor 3:17-18).

The Essentials of Spiritual Growth

1. Conversion: The Foundation of Spiritual Growth. Conversion, or salvation, is the process whereby God deposits within every believer a new nature that is from him and is, therefore, perfect. When you receive Christ, everything becomes new at the core of your being, giving you the disposition and the capacity to know and serve God rather than serving sin and self.

God’s will for a believer is spiritual growth, to the end that what is on the inside becomes visible on the outside. God often applies the heat and the pressure to bring about this release. That’s why our greatest times of spiritual growth are almost always our times of greatest trial. Lasting spiritual growth comes about through internal transformation, not just external reformation. Paul wrote, “I say then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Gal 5:16).

We think that if we can just stop fulfilling the lust of the flesh, then we can begin walking in the Spirit. But it’s just the opposite. The Holy Spirit working on the inside produces spiritual victory on the outside. All that we need to walk in victory and grow in Christ is already present within us (2 Pet 1:3).

2. Identity: The Key to Spiritual Growth. The moment you placed your faith in Christ alone for salvation, God implanted a new nature deep within your being. This new nature, also called the new birth, is the reference point for your identity. But when God gave you this new nature, through which you are now alive spiritually, he also put to death your old nature. This death occurred on the cross of Jesus Christ, when he died for the sins of the world. This is why your identity as a Christian begins at the cross.

The truth of this is expressed so clearly in Gal 2:20, which contains all we need to know about our identity as believers in one power-packed capsule. If you can absorb and apply the truth of this verse, you are well on your way to growing spiritually, because your identity is the key to your spiritual development.

Our old self is dead and gone, crucified with Christ on the cross and buried with him when he was buried in the tomb (Rom 6:4). Since that’s true, we had better be looking for our identity somewhere else. A key step in spiritual growth and our identity with Christ is coming to grips with the fact of our death to sin and the old life.

3. Sin: The Hindrance to Spiritual Growth. Sin’s impact on our lives is not by accident, since we have three formidable enemies arrayed against us. These include the world (an evil system, 1 John 5:19), the flesh (our evil desires, Rom 7:14-15), and the devil (an evil spiritual being, Rev 12:9). They join forces in a well-planned campaign to use sin to block our spiritual development.

But we are not alone, because Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33; 1 John 4:4), God has given us victory over our evil desires (Rom 7:25), and he has stripped the devil of his power through Jesus’s death on the cross (Heb 2:14). That’s why it’s so important that you grow in Christ. The more you grow spiritually, the more the Spirit dominates the flesh rather than the flesh defeating us and thwarting the Spirit’s work in your life. When we confess our sins to God, we have the tremendous promise of his forgiveness and cleansing (1 John 1:9).

4. Grace: The Environment of Spiritual Growth. A failure to understand and grow in grace (i.e., God’s unmerited favor) inevitably results in faulty development and stunted spiritual growth. Christians who do not learn to function under grace are underdeveloped saints. This failure is the single greatest cause of spiritual regression.

Read Eph 2:4-5 and notice especially the last sentence: “You are saved by grace!” This is the key. Do you understand that if you know Christ as your Savior, you are saved not because of your decision or anything else you did, but because God took the initiative to reach down and save you by grace? Salvation is God’s work from beginning to end. Similarly, it is by grace that you need to live the Christian life after you are saved (2 Pet 3:18). God’s promise of abundant grace is found in 2 Cor 9:8, a verse you ought to memorize if you haven’t already done so.

5. Faith: The Action of Spiritual Growth. Faith is so important to our spiritual growth because it is the mechanism God has given us whereby we can tap into the spiritual realm that is above and beyond the world of our five senses. Living by faith is so crucial that spiritual growth is impossible without it, because the absence of faith means we are displeasing rather than pleasing to God (Heb 11:6).

In other words, faith and spiritual growth are inextricably woven together. A life of faithfulness to God demands that we live by faith, just as we were saved by faith. Biblical faith is a settled confidence in the person and the promises of God as revealed in his Word. Faith trusts in the integrity of God because it believes that God has told the truth about unseen realities. Faith also transports us to a supernatural realm that transcends our senses—a truth Paul prayed we would grasp (Eph 3:14-21). Practically speaking, faith is acting like God is telling the truth.

6. The Holy Spirit: The Enabler for Spiritual Growth. Only as we are empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit will we produce what our lives are supposed to produce. The Holy Spirit is God’s supernatural gift to make experiential, alive, and real the new beings we have become. The Spirit is the heart and soul of a growing, flourishing Christian life, and if we don’t get plugged in to him, we will continue to stagnate and remain stunted in our spiritual development. The Spirit is the most active member of the Godhead when it comes to the matter of spiritual growth.

The issue for believers is not how much of the Spirit we have, but how much he has of us. Ephesians 5:14-17 tell us that it is possible to be a Christian, and yet be asleep spiritually as well as unwise and foolish. This is why Paul issued the familiar command of Scripture: “Don’t get drunk with wine, which leads to reckless living, but be filled by the Spirit” (Eph 5:18). We are to live our lives from a spiritual perspective (Rom 8:1-13; Gal 5:16-18).

7. Scripture: The Food of Spiritual Growth. In refuting the devil’s temptation, Christ explicitly stated the connection between spiritual health and the Word of God (Matt 4:4). Given the essential part the Word plays in our spiritual growth, it is unfortunate today that the Bible has been reduced to a menu to be studied rather than a nourishing meal to be enjoyed and consumed.

When learning the Scriptures becomes merely an academic exercise, we can actually increase in biblical knowledge while regressing in spiritual understanding. Jesus told the people of his day that while they were diligent to search the Scriptures, their study didn’t do them any good because it did not lead them to believe in him (John 5:39-40).

We need to be absolutely clear that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant revelation of God (Isa 55:8-9; Matt 5:17-18; 2 Tim 3:16). But its purpose is not just to give us information for our heads, but food for the new nature to feed upon so that spiritual growth can be maximized (1 Pet 2:2). What milk is to a baby’s body, the Word of God is to the soul. It is the food that fuels healthy spiritual growth.

8. Prayer: The Access of Spiritual Growth. Prayer is that which causes all the parts of the Christian life to relate properly to one another, because prayer is the primary means by which we relate to and communicate with God (Matt 6:5-7).

God has made us in such a way that the power of the Holy Spirit flows along the wires of prayer, which makes prayer absolutely vital to our spiritual growth. Prayer is so important that the Bible tells us, “Pray constantly” (1 Thess 5:17). The Holy Spirit understands prayers that we can’t express adequately, and makes sense of thoughts that we don’t even understand ourselves, because he knows the language of prayer and can interpret it for us (Rom 8:26).

We need to pray constantly because prayer is the link between the physical and the spiritual worlds. And since the spiritual world controls the physical world, getting connected to and accessing the authority of the spiritual world affects your functioning in the physical world.

9. The Church: The Context of Spiritual Growth. The church is the most exciting entity that God has placed on this earth, because it is the life-support system for individual Christians. God never meant for us to grow spiritually in isolation from other believers. Spiritual growth is a group project, which should be good news to you because it means you don’t have to do it all yourself.

The Bible uses a number of terms to illustrate this community, corporate aspect of the church. One of these terms is the family. One of Paul’s synonyms for salvation is adoption, the act by which God places all believers into his family (Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5).

The great thing about God’s adoption program is that no believer is left out. The church is not just a classroom for spiritual instruction, but a living and growing organism to enhance our spiritual development. The book of Ephesians especially teaches the importance of the church to the spiritual development of its members (Eph 2:19-22; 4:11-16; see also Heb 10:23-25).

10. Giving: The Generosity of Spiritual Growth. Everything we have, including the breath in our lungs, is a gift from God (Jas 1:17).

Our giving is part of what the Bible calls our stewardship—the fact that we are merely managers of God’s possessions and called to handle them wisely (2 Cor 4:4). But before we can understand this responsibility, we need to be reminded that we have been given everything, including the money God entrusted to us. So anything we give back to God is just returning to him a small part of what he has given to us.

A steward is a manager who oversees the property of another. God owns everything (Ps 24:1), yet he has given each of us time, talents, and treasures to manage for him until he returns (Matt 25:14-30). A key text on the stewardship of giving is (2 Cor 9:6-7). It teaches that the person who gives little will receive little, and the person who gives generously will receive much. Tithing, as well as using resources to carry out good works, gives tangible evidence that we recognize God as our source and that we take him seriously (Deut 14:23). It also testifies that we recognize and are submitted to the priesthood of Jesus Christ (Heb 7:1-25).

11. Trials: The Test of Spiritual Growth. A lot of people don’t want to hear that trials are necessary for Christians, but it’s true. Scripturally, a trial comes as an adverse set of circumstances in your life, either permitted or created by God, to develop you spiritually.

Each part of this definition is important, because we don’t want to gloss over or deny that a trial is an adversity. Trials are not easy to handle. But God is behind our trials, which means we are not the victims of random fate. And because God is in control, our trials have a good purpose, which is to grow and mature us spiritually.

Christians can even rejoice in the middle of a trial (Jas 1:2) because we know trials are opportunities for us to grow into spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is the process of our becoming more like Jesus Christ (Gal 4:19). God assures that he will successfully guide us through our trials when we look to him in the midst of them (1 Cor 10:13).

12. Temptation: The Battle of Spiritual Growth. We need to be clear that the temptation to sin we face in the Christian life is not from God (Jas 1:13-14). God won’t cause you to sin, and the devil can’t make you sin. Satan can offer you a temptation and make it look inviting, but he cannot force you to sin. You have to cooperate.

The devil’s power is influence and deception, not coercion. Jesus experienced all of our temptations without sinning (Heb 4:15). So don’t let the devil put you on a guilt trip for being tempted. Your response determines whether a temptation becomes sin. The problem with sin is that the devil uses false advertising. Sin almost never comes with a sticker that says, “Warning: Will Cause Death.” Sin looks attractive, and its price seems reasonable. But it always costs more than the advertised price. Satan’s goal is to use sin to break our fellowship with God.

13. Calling: The Ministry of Spiritual Growth. Your calling is the customized life purpose that God has shaped, fashioned, and equipped for you, in order to expand his kingdom and bring himself greater glory (Jer 29:11).

Ephesians 2:10 also deals with our calling, which is to produce “good works” that bless and help others and glorify God (Matt 5:16). So your calling is not just what you do for a living, but your divinely preplanned service for God that is your response to the great grace he has shown you in salvation (Rom 12:1-8). God has a calling that is tailor-made for you (Acts 13:36).

14. Obedience: The Response of Spiritual Growth. The connection between the new nature that God put within us at salvation and our obedience to him is so vital that I want to establish it first.

God announced in Jeremiah 31:31-34 that someday he would relate to human beings in a new way called the new covenant. This covenant is not based on law and animal sacrifice, but on the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The main feature of the new covenant is this: “I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts” (v. 33). The fact that these desires are built-in, or internal, is crucial, because it revolutionizes our understanding of obedience.

Not only has God given us his law, but when he made us new creations in Christ, he also gave us the internal desire to obey his law by walking in his ways (Phil 2:12-13). Jesus called our obedience his “yoke,” which he also said is the source of rest for those who are weary (Matt 11:28-30). Obedience activates the word and work of God in our lives (Jas 1:19-25).

15. Maturity: The Goal of Spiritual Growth. Paul challenged the often infantile Corinthians to grow up (1 Cor 14:20). Spiritual maturity is the ability to consistently view and live life from the perspective of the Spirit rather than the flesh, with the result that we maximize our God-given capacity to bring him glory.

In other words, mature Christians consistently see things that human eyes can’t see. They hear things that the most acute hearing on earth cannot detect. And they have thoughts that they did not originate on their own because the Holy Spirit is helping them think God’s thoughts. The Holy Spirit is free to send his message clearly and directly to the spiritually mature (see Heb 5:11-14).

The promise to a person who is listening to the Spirit is that he or she will “understand what has been freely given to us by God” (1 Cor 2:12). This puts you in another world from the mass of people (1 Cor 2:14). A mature believer is worlds removed from the understanding of the unsaved person. Mature believers have transformed lives that reflect and transfer the values of the kingdom of God (2 Cor 3:17-18).

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