The family at Godstone Baptist Church recently began an eight week campaign, combining Sunday messages, weekly home groups and personal devotions, all with the aim of helping us grow. The complete sermon series can be found here.
“Grow into what?“I hear you ask. That’s a really important question! Maybe a quote from writer and author, Adrian Plass, would be helpful here;
“We tend to think that our ‘spiritual’ lives are helped by ‘Spiritual’ things, like worship, prayer, and bible study, especially if that Bible study doesn’t land us in Leviticus or the minor prophets! Of course, God is not interested in our ‘spiritual’ lives, but our lives. He doesn’t aspire to make us more spiritual, but more authentically human, with Jesus as the model of true humanness, and the Holy Spirit working away in us to actually make us something like Christ. After all, God invented the human condition. ”Adrian Plass, “Seriously Funny 2”
I was chatting to a Christian colleague at college the other day and they gave the impression that they wanted to get away from being human as fast as possible! Perhaps we’ve taken that word the English Bible translates ‘Flesh’ and used it to encourage an irrational scrambling to be something other than human.
The trouble is, the idea of becoming ‘something else’ has done damage to us all. Christians start compartmentalizing their lives into ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ and start leaving God at church, when he’d rather follow them home and into the office. People with no faith stay as far away from the church as possible, convinced that becoming ‘spiritual’ will either make them very boring, or worse, very weird!
If you want the truth, God is simply not interested in creating some people like that. He’s in the business of making us truly human. His plan has always been to restore our authentic humanity, not bin it in preference for something we like to call ‘spiritual’. His plan is to reclaim what has been lost.
If you’ve ever found yourself shouting at the six o’clock news and the ‘inhumanity’ you see there, congratulations! You’re getting the point. But the point is a little more personal, because that inhumanity exists in me too; whenever I’m selfish, or proud, or jealous, or bitter, or deceptive or… well, the list goes on!
My prayer for all of us, is that we’ll become more human, not less. And if you want to know what that looks like, God gave us an amazing insight when:
“The Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.”John 1:14 (New Living Trans.)
Biblical Text: John 1:14
