On No Longer Being a Human Being
Former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox was known as an avowed racist. When I spoke at his funeral I said he was not a human being – – – he was a human becoming. By this I meant it was not that at a point in his life he reached a state of arrested growth beyond which he did not change. He grew beyond it and became a new man with new ideals and aspirations. In that sense he became a human becoming, a new man. He included in his administration more blacks than any governor before him.
Are you a human becoming, developing in your faith and Christian life, or have you reached a point of arrested spiritual development? Many people did so long ago and became spiritually stagnant.
Believers are under the mandate to “…grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ… Amen” (II Peter 3:18).
Two distinct areas are noted, which are grace and knowledge.
You can’t grow grace, but you can grow in grace. God’s grace is boundless. It can’t be increased, but in the sphere of grace you can grow. It is not the grace that grows, it is the believer who lives in grace that must grow. How? Knowledge is the means of growth. Therefore, it is imperative that the believer study to show self approved in knowledge. It is knowledge of Jesus that is to be gained not minutiae that feeds a sense of curiosity, but does nothing to aid spiritual growth. If a person is intrigued by insignificant Bible issues that should be a separate study. Many Christians are so spiritually lazy they don’t devote themselves to a regimented study of God’s word.
Christian growth is not just garnering information, it is dependent on growing by exercising. It comes by being a doer of the word not a hearer only. It is a human becoming more like the Lord.
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food” (Hebrews 5:12).
“For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe” (Hebrews 5:13).
Time spent growing in knowledge is essential “…that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God…” (Colossians 1:9-10).
There it is again the necessity of increasing in knowledge.
Ephesians 4:22-24 gives guidelines as to how to grow spiritually, “that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”
Resolve today to grow as a human becoming.