Just Keep Growing

Posted on Jul 12, 2018 in BLOG, Traveling Together |

It has been a great week here at Southwest. We’re thankful for everyone who worked on VBS in decorating, cooking, teaching, acting, games, clean up and countless other ways. It’s always a fun, tiring week, and it is encouraging each night to hear kids talk about the lessons they have learned about God and His word. Those kids will grow into adults who we pray will live out the lessons they learned this week.

On Wednesday, we had an excellent lesson in our summer series from my friend, Nathan Mellor. If you were working with VBS or were just unable to be here, I would encourage you to listen to the audio of his lesson on the church website. It is a great reminder of the importance of service and humility, and it fits very well with the parables we talked about on Sunday.

As we were getting ready to leave the building Wednesday, Nathan (the guest speaker) noticed that Nathan (my son) might be taller than I am. I attribute it his thicker hair, but he may actually be. David already passed me about a year ago. I’m glad they are growing, but it really took me by surprise. There are people who are even more surprised though. Friends who haven’t seen them in a while can’t believe it, because they remember the younger, smaller version of our boys. The whole thing made me think about our spiritual growth. Would people around us or those who have not seen us for a while be amazed by our growth in our walk with God? We talked about that kind of growth recently in the parables from Matthew 13.

We read in Luke 2:52 that “Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” Even Jesus grew, and that growth was in ways much more important than height. Paul also considers maturing and growing in 1 Corinthians 13:11 where he writes, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” In Hebrews 5:12-14 we find an even more forceful message about growing: “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.” Spiritual growth is even more important than our physical growth. Let’s just keep growing!   
 
– Brian

 

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