Video transcript below. Videos are transcribed by voice activated software. Please excuse any typographical errors.
Welcome back to the basic Bible concepts. This is Video nine, and the title of this is Spiritual Growth, Living Out Your Glorious Purpose. So we learned in the last video about how to appropriate the gift of salvation. In other words, how to be born again. And the Bible tells us in 2 Corinthians chapter five verse 17, Therefore if anyone is in Christ, meaning born again, he is a new creation: old things have passed away; behold all things have become new. What does that mean? That means that we are new person, we have a new purpose. We aren’t chained any longer to living in the sinful and destructive ways, self-destructive ways of the culture of this world. We have the ability to communicate with the creator of everything, the creator of everything good who has given us this new life.
So we now have this eternal purpose, this a glorious, eternal purpose.
And the Bible says in 1 Corinthians chapter six, it says, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own, for you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. See, when we are born again, we belong to a new kingdom, and that is the kingdom of heaven. And we have a new purpose. Our purpose is no longer to live in the selfishness of sin, but rather we are free to live in God’s love, which is selflessness. And that’s impossible for us to do without Jesus Christ. And so all the time that we were trying to do these good works without Christ living in us, we were failing to find our glorious purpose.
You know, if you’re an athlete and you were born to run, you were born to be fast, but you never used that gift, then you will fail to reach the pinnacle of your success. Well, when we were born in Jesus Christ, we were created to run. We were created to run a race, the race of all races. And, we need to develop that. That’s what this video is about. It’s about spiritual growth. How do we do it? What does it look like? And of course, you know, there could be hours and hours and hours of teaching on this subject, and we’re going to do it in 15 minutes. So, I’m going to try to compile as much information in here as possible. But I’ll tell you this, our podcast, our Truth and Love podcast, and our entire website is dedicated to Christian growth and of course to salvation as well, knowing how to be saved. But there’s some basic verses. There’s some basic things that you need to think about If you truly want to become all you can be for God’s glory.
One of them is right in Romans chapter 12, verse two, it says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God? An athlete has a mindset. The best athletes, everything that they do is around training for the race, the way they eat, the way they dress, what they drink, when they go to sleep, how they go to work, everything they do. And it matters. It matters what we do with our time, what we do with our resources. It matters if we want to run our best race. And, the Bible says that, one of the big things is if we don’t grow, then we remain babies. And we’re vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to the enemy. In Ephesians 4:14, the Bible says that we’re supposed to grow, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. That we have an enemy. The next video is about spiritual warfare. And so I’m not going to go into that too much, but we have an enemy, that is, the Bible says he is seeking whom he may devour. He prowls around like a roaring lion seeking to devour us. So we need to grow. A baby is much more vulnerable to an enemy than a grown person with full armor and weapons, right? So we have to determine, we have to renew our mind and say, I’m going to grow. I’m going to do this every day. This is part of my race. This is part of me becoming part of this glorious plan that God has for me. And so, I want to go and give you some high points on how to grow, okay? Because like I said, this is a huge subject.
First of all, remember that we have security. We can live with complete security. We do not have to live like we are insecure, emotional train wrecks, okay? We have been passed from death to life. Nothing can take that away from us. When I say that, remember we talked about the difference between physical death and spiritual death, right? When we sinned, we died. Our soul and our spirit died, we could not communicate with God. When Jesus gave us life we now have a direct communication with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. The Prince of Peace, right? The Almighty God, the one who created everything. We are in direct communication, direct communication with him. And we have no reason to be insecure about anything, about what people say, about what people will think about us, nothing. And so we need to capitalize on that. And when we are thinking about our mind and what we’re going to fill our mind with, we need to fill our mind with things that God has given us to fill our mind with. And, so that’s of course going back to reading God’s word, which we’ll talk about here in just a minute.
But another thing is we need to live with the attitudes of Christ. Oh, if you have not heard our series, either the podcast series or read the devotional series, or even watched the video series that’s on this website, go faith strong.com on the attitudes of Christ, it has been the most pivotal study I’ve ever done, and I read it over and over again. Actually, we’re putting out a book so that you can read it and it’s going to be short books, so you won’t lose your attention span. But this is so important. You know, Jesus said, we need to be poor in spirit, which means we have a complete dependence upon him, right? Because that was original sin, independence from God. We need to mourn, that is to have a strong aversion to sin. We need to be meek, meaning submit our will to the will of God so that his strength can pour through us. We can learn that when I am weak, he is strong, right? We need to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Where is righteousness found? It’s found in God’s word. The path of righteousness is found in God’s word. And the Bible says, thy word have I hid in my heart that mayI not sin against thee. When we’re constantly reading God’s word and applying it to our life, then we are following that path of righteousness that is going to make us actually grow an appetite for God’s righteousness. And righteousness, it’s just doing what’s right according to God’s standard, right? It’s not boring. It’s not chains on our arms. It is free. It frees us. God’s righteousness brings us peace and brings us rest. And oh, it’s such a good attitude to develop this hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Another attitude of Christ is to become merciful because we have received so much mercy through Jesus Christ in salvation. He forgave us as far as the east from the west, more debt than we could ever pay. And so when we understand that and we develop that attitude of the mercy that we have received, then we give mercy away freely. We don’t hang on to grudges. We don’t hang on to silly things that don’t matter in five years or even tomorrow. We give that mercy. And mercy, of course, is withholding the punishment that you are entitled to give, right? Which is different than forgiveness. But that’s discussed in the beatitudes videos if you want to watch those.
And so also, Jesus talked about the attitude of being pure in heart, right? This means that we want to see God, we want to see more and more of God. Well, God is holy. God is pure. He can’t look at sin. And we have been made holy inside if we’re born again. Jesus Christ has made us righteous. We stand before God as righteous, but we don’t always realize that if we’re dabbling around in things, we ought not to. Things that God said, if we’re holding grudges, if we’re not praying, if we’re not doing things we know to do, if we’re doing things we shouldn’t do, then we are not going to be able to be pure in heart and therefore see more of God, the more we see of God everywhere. We look in the eyes of children, in the eyes of people who are hungry, in the eyes of people who are sad, the more we see them like, like God sees them, the more we want to be like Jesus. We want to develop these attitudes of Christ in Matthew chapter five; they’re really addicting. They’re an addicting way to grow because the more that you develop them, the more you want them.
Jesus said for us to have the attitude of being a peacemaker, which isn’t us, we all want peace, right? For ourselves. But to be a peacemaker means that we are out sharing the gospel of peace, right? And we can’t share what we don’t have if we are not born again. And if we are not living with the fruits of God’s spirit, meaning his love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, gentleness need, right? If we are not having those in our own life, we can’t give away what we don’t have. So to be a peacemaker is to understand how to present the gospel, right? Which is the power of God unto salvation. And it is to live out the fruits of the spirit in our life. And then we become this powerful peacemaker more powerful than any army, right? We become the person who makes peace between mankind and God. And that’s the best kind of peacemaker. Because it lasts forever, right? And so to have an attitude of peacemaker, means we’re intent on doing this.
And then finally, Jesus taught us in the beatitudes that, you know, we can turn our pain into a great opportunity to show light to the world. You know, the greater the darkness, the greater the persecution, the greater the torment of people around us, the enemies that hate us, whenever our neighbor is mean to us, the greater the light shines. You know, think about it. How well can you see a small pen light in a cave in the darkness? You can see it very well, can’t you? You don’t see it as well when it’s light outside. But man, what an opportunity to shine the light of Christ when we are persecuted, when we suffer for righteousness sake. Not just because we’ve done something stupid, but because of righteousness sake.
So these attitudes of Jesus teach us to shine the light into the world. And when you grow spiritually, your light will shine. It’s one plus one is two all the time. Right? When you grow spiritually, your light will shine. That is a natural cause and effect. And that’s what Jesus commanded us, to let our light shine, right? So that all the world may see God and glorify your Father in heaven. Going back to our purpose, right? When we learn the attitudes of Christ in Matthew chapter five, we better glorify Christ, right? We need to remember. We need to live like we know what we represent. The Bible says our citizenship is in heaven. And that’s in Philippians 3:20. We only get one shot. You only get one shot to live this life. And who are you representing? Who are you representing? You know, if we’re an ambassador for Christ, an ambassador for a foreign country only goes to a different country for one purpose. It’s not to make more money. It’s not, you know, becoming more popular. It’s not to gain more interest for themselves. No. It’s to represent the country they came from.
We are citizens of heaven and we can represent Jesus Christ in the kingdom of heaven. And what I mean, we live in a lost and dying world. How are they going to know how great our savior is? How great God is? How marvelous the opportunity for eternal life is, unless we’re representing it, right? How will we follow out the great commission that Jesus gave us in Matthew chapter 28, to go and make disciples of all nations? How will we do that if we’re not a disciple ourselves, right? We cannot sell what we do not have. Not that we’re selling this, but you know what I’m saying? You can’t convince anyone of anything if you don’t believe in it too. We need to learn everything we can about Christ.
You know, this is another part of this growth. We have to understand who he is. You know, if you learn the fruits of the spirit and you look at the fruits of the spirit, which I’ve repeated a couple times here from Galatians chapter five, which are love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, gentleness, meekness; the gospel thrives on those fruits being manifested in our life, then we are credible.
You know, if you were in a tornado, and after the tornado, there were people that were wounded and needed to be dressed and people who had broken arms and that sort of thing, and a guy who was completely drunk came out and said, I’m a doctor. I’ll fix everybody. I’ll bet you no one would want him to fix them because he is not representing a doctor very well. And if we don’t represent the truth in presenting ourselves like Jesus, we cannot present the gospel effectively. We cannot lead them to the great physician if we are not representing what he stands for. We have to represent Him. And you know, if the prominent quality of God is love, and you know, in 1 Corinthians 13, the best definition of God’s love. Love suffers long and is kind. It doesn’t envy, it doesn’t parade itself. It’s not puffed up, it’s not rude. It doesn’t seek its own. It’s not easily provoked. It doesn’t think evil. It doesn’t rejoice in evil. It rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it never fails. That’s who we need to be. When people see that in us, they’ll say, how are you this way? And we can say, guess what? I’m not. This is Jesus. This is who you really want. It’s not me. It’s Jesus.
So, and then, finally, I want to, I know this is a lot, but I want to kind of wind this up by saying, you know, in order to grow, we have to eat well and exercise often. You know, if we are not doing that, when I say eat well, I’m talking about God’s word, right? Talking about the things that we bring into us. We cannot be bringing in the rubble and the trash of the world and expect a good outcome. What’s going to come out of us is just more rubble and trash. We have to bring in God’s word. And you know, the Bible says that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. This is Second Timothy chapter three. And it’s profitable. It’s profitable for everything that we need in our life. It’s good food for us. It’s profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness, that we may be complete and thoroughly equipped for every good work.
You know, there are disciplines that God’s word teaches us. Read your bible, pray, live in obedience. Go to church. Be a member of a church. Not just a pew warmer, but a serving member. We need to serve, right? That’s what love is, is servanthood. We need to be adding to the faith that we have been given elements of maturity, which are like virtue, which is a clean life, right? Patience, godliness, brotherly kindness. God’s word and maturity should change us. We should go from a newbie to a mature Christian that can share the gospel, that can lead somebody to Christ, that can disciple somebody. That’s the goal of spiritual growth. And when we do that, we are living our best life. We are running our best race. And God has given us all the resources in his word to help us. He’s given us the resources in church. He’s given us the resources through our experiences and applying God’s word, these beatitudes of Jesus to our growth. And we can look at those and we can use those as a recipe for growth. Just like an athlete, an athlete will run and maybe try one thing and say, oh, that doesn’t work. You know? And if an athlete is listening to their coach, they’re really going to run much better than if they’re trying their own experiments, right? Well, God is our coach. The Holy Spirit is our coach, and he’s given us a whole manual to read and to memorize and to take into ourselves. And Jesus has given us these wonderful beatitudes.
You know, there are real bad consequences for Christians who don’t grow. Their growth is stunted. They’re chastened by God. They’re unfruitful. And someday we’re all going to stand before God. And all Christians are going to give an account for their lives, that they live for Christ. And you know, Paul kind of summed it up. He said, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, Philippians 3:14. And if you are looking to grow and to be your best, have your best life, your life for your highest purpose, then I would encourage you to do everything you can, get passionate about your growth. The most important thing you’ll do every day is spend time growing in your relationship with Christ and then you’ll run the race and God will blow your mind every day.
So I hope this is helpful, and please, if you need growth resources, jump on our website. Listen to our podcast, get in a good church. Read your bible, pray and teach. Teach somebody else. That’s the best way to learn. So I’ll stop now. The video’s kind of long, but I hope this has been helpful for you.
