“We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.”
2 Thessalonians 1:3
When you think of growing, what do you think of? I think about the wisteria in my backyard. I pretty sure that thing can grow one foot in a day, especially when we get the kind of rain that we’ve been having recently. That wisteria is growing on a chain-link fence between my house and my garage. I have to continuously cut it back to keep it from overtaking either. It’s not allowed to grow on to buildings but I let it grow up as much as it wants and out to a point (I want to use all of my driveway).
Reading through Acts, it’s interesting how Paul and Co. are led to go some places but prevented from going others. You get the impression they are willing to go in any direction so that the church will grow but God guides them in particular paths. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to grow in the faith? Wouldn’t it be nice to be willing to grow in your understanding of scripture, in your relationships with other people, in your prayer life, in generosity, in every aspect of your faith and simply let God guide you in the particular paths He would like you to take?
I think we often like to pick the path ourselves. We think that God wants us to pray more and so we try to get better at that. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there are more aspects to the faith than prayer, just like there are more places in the world than the few that Paul visited. There’s something to be said for being open to all different kinds of growth in the faith. You don’t have to excel at all of them. If your gifts are not there, they’re not there, but a broadly growing plant sure is a lot easier to train than a plant that thinks it needs to grow in only one direction.
In what aspects of the faith do you have room for growth? In what ways can you love God and your neighbor more? June begins the time of the church year that is the longest, the “Sundays after Pentecost”. The color of this season is green, for growth. It’s a time to think about how you can grow personally and maybe even think about how we can grow as a church.
Congregations can grow in many different ways. We can grow in our understanding of scripture and theology. We can grow in our worship life and in our prayer life. We can grow in service to our neighbor, both near and far. We can grow in our relationships with each other and with those we have not yet met. Are we going to excel at all of these things? No, but it is worth trying. It is worth being a little bit better at least in all of these categories. And when you’re growing in all directions God may just have an easier time letting us thrive in the direction He intends us to go, personally and as His people.
For Guidance in Our Calling 193
Lord God, You have called Your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go but only that Your hand is leading us and Your love supporting us;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.