Lying to ourselves…

I ran across a great quotation this morning that really spoke to me:

Some of us in the church never progress spiritually, because we lie to ourselves and to each other. We tell ourselves that we have a New Testament church and that we’re New Testament Christians when neither our church life nor our personal lives resemble very much of anything in the New Testament. We don’t grow automatically with the passage of time. Some of us have been Christians a long time, but instead of progressing beyond the novice level we’ve ended up repeating the same mistakes, one…after another. We have not only become content with a Christian experience far below that of the New Testament, we have even developed theologies to justify our inferior experience. Without a realistic New Testament assessment of our spiritual experience, we will never progress in the kingdom of God.

Growth begins when we realize our spiritual poverty and powerlessness. There was a time in my life when I felt my church experience was so superior to everyone else’s that I couldn’t even begin to make a realistic assessment of my walk with God or my church’s experience of the Holy Spirit’s power. But in his mercy God showed me how bad my spiritual form was. ((1 Jack Deer, Surprised by the Voice of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 160.))