I Don't Want to Be a Professional Christian! - No Growth

When I was a teenager, my mom pulled out a school report from when I was six years old and held it up next to the one she had just received the day before. They both said the exact same thing, “Ben is a good kid, he just never stops talking!”

I thought this was hilarious, but my mom was less amused. All of these years, and no growth.

In part one of my, “I Don't Want to Be a ‘Professional Christian!’ blog series, I shared that irreverence is the first sign that you are indeed becoming a professional Christian. In this post, I want to talk about the second sign: no growth.

In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he dealt with the issue of spiritual stagnation.

He wrote, “Dear brothers and sisters, when I was with you, I couldn’t talk to you as I would to spiritual people. I had to talk as though you belonged to this world or as though you were infants in Christ. I had to feed you with milk, not with solid food, because you weren’t ready for anything stronger. And you still aren’t ready.” (1 Cor 3:1-2)

Paul was frustrated with the Corinthian church because they weren’t growing. A clear sign that your faith has become stagnant, and that you are functioning as a professional Christian, is a lack of spiritual growth.

My daughter Lenna just turned one. For most of her life, she ate nothing but milk - and that was totally normal. But now she is moving on to solid food. This is a healthy part of her growth and development. If my five year old son only drank milk, something would be wrong.

A professional Christian settles into a pattern of Christian living and is content to stay there. He or she has subconsciously calculated what is required to fit in, and does no more. They can follow Jesus for years and remain completely unchanged.

God not only saves us through His son Jesus, but He empowers us through the Holy Spirit to change our attitudes and actions.

An intimate relationship with God should produce noticeable growth in our behavior - but often it doesn’t. There have been moments when God has painfully revealed the lack of growth in my life.

When I was nineteen years old, I spent a semester studying in Europe with a group from my university. I had been following Jesus all my life, but I was arrogant and unloving.

At one point, I was on a train heading to Austria and talking to one of the girls in our group. I was telling her about my desire to travel the world and use art and music to tell people about Jesus. She stopped me in the middle of a sentence and said, “How can you want to be a missionary? You don’t love people.”

I was stunned. This was coming from a very genuine, caring person. I was upset, but not angry. Honestly, I couldn’t argue with her point.

This experience jolted me out of my comfort zone and the “professional Christian” life I had been living. I stopped asking the question, “How close can I get to sin without being burned?” and instead, I pursued holiness.

That doesn’t mean I never sin. Of course I do! But I no longer tolerate or rationalize disobedience. My heart is grieved by things I do to hurt myself and others, and I daily ask God to change me.

What I’ve experienced is that when we submit to God, He empowers us to be doers of His Word, and we get to experience the extraordinary blessing of doing life His way!