Are You Growing Spiritually? Making Progress?

Ponder these probing, painful questions:

• Are you growing (2 Pet 3:18)?
• Are you showing progress (1 Tim 4:15)?
• Are you working harder (1 Cor 15:10; Phil 2:12)?

“It is not imitation (work/effort) that makes sons; it is sonship that makes imitators.” Martin Luther

Progress in obedience happens when our hearts realize that God’s love for us does not depend on our progress in obedience.

For a whole host of reasons, when it comes to measuring spiritual growth and progress our natural instincts revolve almost exclusively around behavioral improvement. It’s understandable.

The truest measure of our growth is not our behavior (otherwise the Pharisees would have been the godliest people on the planet); it’s our grasp of grace–a grasp which involves coming to deeper and deeper terms with the unconditionality of God’s love (2 Pet 3:18). Our main problem in the Christian life is not that we don’t try hard enough to be good, but that we haven’t believed the gospel enough and received its finished reality into all parts of our life (John 19:30).

Of course, work hard. But hard work is not what you think it is–your personal improvement and moral progress. The hard work is washing your hands of you and resting in Christ’s finished work for you–which will inevitably produce personal improvement and moral progress.

When Paul says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12), he’s making it clear that we’ve got work to do—but what exactly is the work? Get better? Try harder? Clean up your act? Pray more? Get more involved in church? Read the Bible longer? What precisely is Paul exhorting us to do? Clearly, it’s not a matter of whether or not effort is needed. The real issue is Where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? To achieve certain visible results? To receive man's commendation and approval? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ’s performance for us?

Christian growth does not happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. Rather, Christian growth happens by working hard to daily swim in the reality of what you do already have. Believing again and again the gospel of God’s free justifying grace everyday is the hard work we’re called to (Phil 2:12).
God works his work in you—which is the work already accomplished by Christ (Phil 2:13). Our hard work, therefore, means coming to a greater understanding of his work. In his Lectures on Romans Martin Luther wrote, “To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress, in other words, requires a daily going backwards.

When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better! When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that is what it means to improve! The Apostle Paul referred to himself as the chief of sinners at the end of his life (1 Tim 1:15). It was his ability to freely admit that which demonstrated his spiritual maturity–he had nothing to prove or protect because it wasn’t about him!

I’m realizing that the sin I need removed daily is precisely my narcissistic understanding of spiritual progress. I think too much about how I’m doing, if I’m growing, whether I’m doing it right or not. I spend too much time pondering my failure, brooding over my spiritual successes, and wondering why, when it’s all said and done, I don’t seem to be getting that much better. In short, I spend way too much time thinking about me and what I need to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he’s already done. And what I’ve discovered, ironically, is that the more I focus on my need to get better the worse I actually get. I become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my performance ... makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective.

Gerald Forde insightfully writes:

Am I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, I don’t seem to be getting better. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a little slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. Am I making progress? Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I’m getting tired! It’s just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn’t think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification! But can it be, perhaps, that it is precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain humor, a certain down-to-earthness.

What you’ll discover is that once the gospel frees you from having to do anything for Jesus, you’ll want to do everything for Jesus so that “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do” you’ll do it all to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31). That's real progress.

The above was copied and pasted from Tullian Tjavidjian's blog: Rethinking Progress.