How Can I Get More Mature And Stable In My Faith?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

So when you consider growth, there are certain types of growth that just kind of happen automatically. Some of that is children grow taller, our bodies age and decay, flowers spring up from the ground and blossom, saplings turn into trees. There are all types of growth in life that just kind of happen automatically. One type of growth that does not happen automatically, however, is maturity. You can have someone who is an adult, but they still act like a child. me and my wife affectionately refer to these type of people as grown-up kids. They're now at adulthood. They've passed that 18-year-old mark, and they may even be in their 40s, but they are still stuck in their childish ways. They still are maybe emotionally unstable or anything of that sort. And the same can be said about Christians and following Christ. You may have someone who's been in the church for years and years and years,

but they're still pretty immature in the way that they act and the way that they think. Someone can still struggle to share their faith, even though they've been in church for years. Someone can still be vulnerable to false teaching, and even though they've been in church for years, someone can still be completely unstable with their emotions, even though they've been around Christianity for a long time. And so, and to some extent, we can't expect some type of immaturity to happen in the church. I mean, if you're a new believer, then you're obviously not a mature believer yet. You just come to the faith. And then also, we just have things that happen in life that can kind of throw us off and deter us a little bit and kind of make us go off track. And so there's definitely immaturity that's bound to happen within the church. We can't escape that, but our goal should be both individually and as a whole

to move away from that immaturity and to grow up into Christ. And so today we're going to discuss how to grow and mature in Christ, both individually and as a body, so that I am stable. And to do that, we're going to turn to the book of Ephesians. We're going to be in chapter four, verses 11 through 16. And after last sermon, my wife told me that I only said the verse of what we're in one time and that she didn't hear it. So she was kind of lost for the rest of the sermon. So for the sake of not having that happen to anyone else and me not getting in trouble with the wife, I will repeat it is Ephesians four, verses 11 through 16. It is up here on the screen. You can't miss it. Okay. I've got that covered. And I'm tempted to just say when it comes to growing and maturity that just read your Bible and pray and we'll be good to go. But figure that wouldn't make for the

best sermon. So we're going to do the opposite instead and we're going to completely dissect what growth looks like, how we can go about it, and what the results of growth are. And a quick side note before we do that, growing up, I always kind of associated maturity with maybe like celebrity status or age. You've been a Christian for a very long time, and so you just kind of mature in your faith, or you are a famous Christian who is, you know, very knowledgeable, and you're able to share your faith well. And so growing up, I kind of always associated maturity with that type of stuff, of being a little bit older and having more experience with Christianity and then just being kind of famous and being super involved in that world.

And those same pastors that I would see and those same people that I would see that I thought were mature, I would also see committing egregious sins and doing things that didn't resemble Christianity. And so it kind of gave me a little bit of a mixed idea of what a Christian should actually look like. And obviously in every church and everywhere you're going to have Christians who don't act like Christians and you're gonna have Christians who do so we're not gonna be able to escape that either But I will say it did confuse me And so we're gonna be trying to kind of cover that today and and put some clarification on that And so we're gonna start in Ephesians 4 verse 11, and we're gonna read just the first two verses

But real quick before we do that little context for where Paul's at in this chapter He is writing to the church of Ephesus and he is discussing their different spiritual gifts that have been been given to them. And so when it's saying that He Himself, it's talking about Jesus bestowing these gifts onto the church. So that's what we're going to pick up. And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So first thing to point out is that Jesus is the source of all that we do and all that we are. Jesus says in the Gospel of John that apart from me you can do nothing. He doesn't say you can't do much. He doesn't say what you're gonna do is we. He

said you can't do anything. All that we are and all that we do starts with Jesus. He is who starts our salvation, he's who continues our salvation, and he's who finishes it. He is the author of everything that we do, and so it is to Him that we must go if we want to do anything involving growth. And we read Paul in 1 Corinthians, he says that, I prayed, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So he still uses his people, Paul ministered, Apollos watered when Paul was gone, but it was ultimately God that gave the growth. So if we're going to grow in any sort of capacity, we have to realize that it's going to come from Jesus. Even our best efforts that we try to do are not going to grow us without Jesus being involved in it. And we see this laid out pretty well in verse 12 when it says that the saints were equipped for ministry. He equips his members to serve in ministry so that it builds the rest of the body up.

He doesn't want people just serving in church because it looks good and it kind of makes a church more organized. No, he himself wanted to establish a whole growth system where people can come and be a part of a church and grow inside of it. And so we see that there's two desires being presented here. One is that we use our individual gifts not only for our own personal growth, but for the growth of the church. If I have a gift of discernment and I'm pretty decent at being able to deter truth from error, but I don't attend a church and I don't apply that to a church, then I'm only benefiting myself. I'm only watching out for myself and making sure that I avoid error. But if I go and take my gifts of discernment and apply them into a church setting, then now everyone is benefited by my gift that Christ has given me. So, I mean, one, it's not my gift anyways. Christ gave it to me.

So it's his choice of how it's used, and he wants us to use it for the church primarily. Obviously, it's our gifts for us to grow and mature ourselves, but each member has a different gift for a reason so that when they all come together, they're in harmony and they work. And then the second goal is that both individually and as a church, we grow into Christ-likeness. When we start as brand new Christians, like I said earlier, we're pretty immature, we don't know much about the faith, we don't know exactly how to act, But by the time that we die and we meet Christ, whether that's a year after we become a Christian or 50 years after we become a Christian, the idea is that we've somewhat become more like Christ. That is the goal, is that we've gone drawn closer and closer to Christ. We're never gonna reach Christ because he's perfect and we're not, but he's still the goal

and still what we are attaining to achieve to. And like I said, none of this can be achieved in our own effort. It's through Christ, but he's still the goal, is to be like Christ. So really a question to ask yourself, isn't necessarily am I maturing as a Christian? You can answer that and find some proof in scripture, but a better question to ask yourself is, am I becoming more like Jesus? Am I becoming more like Christ? Because you can read Jesus all throughout the gospels. You can read how the apostles thought about him, and you can get a very good idea of his character. You can see how he talked to people. You can see how he dealt with suffering. You can see how he dealt with conflict. You can see how he dealt with family. I mean, you can see how he dealt with false teaching. Almost everything that is in our life that we deal with, you can go straight to Jesus and see how we dealt with it.

So he is our ultimate role model when we are looking at how to mature. So better question is, am I becoming more like Jesus? So then Paul moves on from the desires of growth into a little bit more of why he wants us to grow. And so we're gonna be back in Ephesians starting up in verse 14. And by the way, in case anyone knows, I wore green today for growth. So if that inspires anyone, then my job was done. But so back in verse 14,

so that we may no longer, so this is obviously the idea for growth and the reason for it. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth and love, we are to grow up in every way and to him who is the head into Christ. So it's funny how Paul compares spiritual immaturity with being a child. Because as we all know, children are rather gullible, they're rather sensitive. If I'm gonna have a conversation about a war going on, It's got to be a little bit different of a conversation with a kid than it is with, you know, my friend or my good buddy. And my tone has to be a little bit different because they're a little more sensitive. If anything, most of what I tell them, they're probably just going to immediately believe it like that.

So he compares spiritual immaturity as type of the same way. When someone is spiritually immature, they're kind of tossed to and fro. They go from one belief to the other belief, how they're feeling one day might impact how they view God. And so they're just kind of tossed around based on whatever's going on in their life. And so that's pretty obvious. However, spiritual maturity isn't always as obvious. Sometimes spiritual immaturity can look like someone who doesn't know much. Maybe they haven't read the scriptures very much. They haven't been involved in any sort of church meetings where they dive into the Bible, no sort of Bible study. They're just kind of a little bit uneducated when it comes to scripture and when it comes to like church history theology and that type of stuff. Other times though, immaturity may look like someone who knows the Bible like the back of their hand. They know apologetics, they know church history, they know

they know every single book in the Bible, they have a lot of it memorized, but they're still very unstable in their emotions, or they still struggle to share their faith, or they still struggle to be able to teach that faith or teach what they know accurately. So there's spiritual And the spiritual immaturity that happens amongst all of us in all different areas, just because you're super knowledgeable of something, doesn't mean that you're just mature and you've reached a level where you don't need to worry about it. In fact, I would argue that once you know more, it is now more of a responsibility on you to then try to mature and help others around you mature more. And really, Satan knows scripture better than all of us here. Every single one of us in this room, Satan knows the Bible better than all of us. Our goal is to try to attain to spiritual edu- or biblical education and know the entire Bible.

Well, Satan's already got a speed on that and he's still damn to hell. So that's probably not the best goal if you're doing that in and of itself. So now we're going to look at some characteristics and evidences of what a true believer actually looks like. We're going to look at three of them. The first one I want to look at is what kind we've been talking about stability. An immature believer, as the Bible says, is tossed to and fro. They're not stable in their faith, so anything that comes in their life, they just kind of, I don't know, they just kind of hope for the best. I've seen people like this who are a little spiritually immature, and as soon as anything comes in their life, that maybe it's a financial hardship, or maybe they are in a new relationship with someone, or maybe they had just broken up up with someone and that relationship will split.

And I've seen those people completely fall away from Christ and instead of leaning on him during those times, they kind of use that as an excuse to leave God and say, well, oh, if this is happening, then God must not be looking out for me. And so I'm just gonna kind of abandon the faith altogether. And that's pretty immature thinking. We're going to go through things in life. There's going to be trials and tribulations, whether you're a Christian or not. So abandoning Christ isn't going to make your problems disappear. In fact, they're probably just going to make them worse over time. A mature Christian, however, is one who is stable and not uprooted in their faith whenever they're tested. A mature Christian might say, I don't know what God is doing right now, but I know who He is. I know the promises He has for me. Or I may be suffering right now, but I know God has a plan.

I may have this temptation, but I know God is stronger than my temptation. So all of those things are not without shaking. God still shakes us, but it's kind of like a boat without an anchor. A boat without an anchor, whenever a storm comes, it's just gonna be tossed to and fro. But a boat with an anchor when that storm comes is still gonna be shaken. It's not just gonna be completely still, but it's not gonna go anywhere because it has an anchor. And that anchor is Christ. Christ is what holds us down. And so the first one is stability. Second one, second evidence of growth is truth. Paul says in verse 15 that we must speak the truth. And so an evidence of maturing in your faith is that you do know more about the Bible, you do know more truth, you are able to speak truth in life more. So that's not to say that growing or having more, being more educated about the Bible

is a bad thing, we have to do that. It's what helps us mature, but it just shouldn't be the only thing that we do. But Jesus says in the gospel of John again, to God sanctify them in your truth, your word is truth. God uses truth in the Bible and truth in the world to expose lies in our life, to correct us when we're wrong, to reshape our mind about him and the world. And he also just uses it so that we learn, so that we just learn from it.

And so, and then when we read in Hebrews, Hebrews says that, sorry, I had a little sticky note, I had it written, I thought I wrote it down in my notes, but I realized after reviewing my notes this morning that I didn't write it down, so I had to grab a random sticky note from our cabinet that I found and write the verse down here. So here it is. Hebrews says, you need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their power of discernment trained. So what that means in power of discernment is that we're able to tell truth from error. And the only way that we're able to tell truth from error is if we are in scripture and we do know what the truth is. So it's important that we do understand what truth is because it makes us wiser.

Third evidence is love. Paul not only urges us to speak the truth, but speak the truth in love. Because truth without love can be a little harsh, it can be a little proud, but love without truth can be a little weak and shallow. So we need both. And we see in scripture that Jesus was the full embodiment of both. He didn't compromise one for the other. Whenever he was correcting someone, it was out of pure love. And not only did he correct them, but he provided a way out of that sin that they were dealing with through his death on the cross. So he deals with truth the same way he deals with love. He doesn't back down from either one. They go hand in hand. And Wes Huff said it best. He's probably got it from someone else, but I heard Wes Huff say it. God loves you too much, or he loves you so much that he wants you to come as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you as you are.

So he wants you to come with all the filth and the dirty rags that you have, but he loves you too much that he's going to leave you in that state. He wants you to get out of that filth, out of those dirty rags. He wants you to mature into Christ. And so we get a little glimpse of this when we look at Galatians 5, verses 22 and 23, that we see that these are kind of all of the fruits of the spirit of joy, love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law. And so what that's essentially pointing out is that these are kind of more fruits, more evidences of maturity. So if you wanna get a little more of an exhaustive list of what it looks like to be a mature Christian, then you can just go to Galatians and you don't have to go and be like, okay, yep, I have love, I have joy, I have peace. but this is just kind of a guideline,

kind of barriers for you to be able to walk around. And so we see the evidences of growth, but how does that growth actually play out in our lives? And how can I assist that process? And so to answer that, we're gonna dive back into our Ephesians and we're gonna be in verses 15 and 16. "'Rather speaking the truth and love, "'we are to grow up in every way "'into him who is the head, into Christ, "'from whom the whole body joined and held together "'by every joint with which it is equipped when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. So we get kind of a whole picture here in verse 16 that the purpose of God implementing shepherds and apostles and teachers into a church is so that they may allow the church to grow as a whole. Because that is the ultimate goal. It's not that we grow individually by ourselves, but that we grow as a whole. And like I said earlier, when they all dance, when all of the

Parts dance in harmony and work together, that causes everything to flourish and grow. And ultimately all of this, you could say, well, I mean, Jesus is just doing all of this so that we can glorify his name more. He's instilling all of these gifts inside of us, just so that we can glorify his name. That seems somewhat kind of selfish of God to just give us something just so he can get almost something in return. But I mean, if we think about it, God is the center and source of everything. So if there's anything that is going to be selfish in this universe or outside of it, it would be God. Because us, depending on God, us centering our lives around Jesus is what's most beneficial to us. And he knows that. So although he is wanting us to glorify him and worship him and go to him for everything, it's for a reason, it's for our own good. Just like the Bible says, he works all things

for his glory and for our good. So there's two hands that go, it goes hand in hand there. And I've often heard people say that, oh, I don't need a church to have a relationship with God, or my relationship with God is private. Well, the Bible doesn't speak any sort of way about your relationship with God. The Bible actually says the complete opposite. It says that the church is the environment where you are to grow. The church is what Christ planted 2,000 years ago, and he wants it to be used. He wants his members to be involved in it, and actually grow from it. He didn't just plant the church as a place where people can go and hear about God and that's it. He planted as a living body. We're a living body that has members and parts and we're all to work together. And when we do, we grow up in him. All right, now let's get practical. Now let's see about how what we can do

in our everyday life to achieve this growth. And so there's two mechanisms of growth that I wanna talk about. Active and providential. First one active is our intentional pursuit of Christ. That is our, on our own efforts, us going out of our way and trying to pursue Christ. Us going out of our way and trying to grow in Christ ourselves. This could be reading scripture and trying to become more educated. This could be praying to God and trying to deepen our relationship with Him. This could be worshiping at church or maybe worshiping with our family at home. This could be obedience, me trying to follow Jesus more and more and more closely. could be repentance, me asking God for forgiveness, or it could be the church, me getting involved in the church that he set up. So active growth has to do with things that are already given to us that we are able to pursue.

And so that is definitely a part of growing in Christ is that we play a part in doing that. We are to go out of our way to pursue him. We are to read scripture. We are to go and pray to him. And so we definitely have a responsibility on our part to do that. And John the Baptist sums up this whole active growth best in one sentence. He must increase, but I must decrease. I feel like a lot of us get stuck on that whole I must decrease part and we try to knock sin out of our life and we try to correct ourselves and we try to do this and this and this and we fail to forget what comes first. He must increase. Our focus is Jesus increasing in our life. It shouldn't be that we're here and that I just decrease a little bit. It's that Jesus increases, which causes me to decrease. His increase in my life should make my sin and my flesh slowly be cut out. Yes, we're still to attack our flesh and attack our sin.

We're not to just leave them alone. But just like I said earlier, Christ is the source. The more we grow into Christ, the more we read about Christ, the more we pray to Him, the more we're around other like-minded brothers and sisters who are doing the same thing, the more we will begin to become like Him. And the closer we are to Christ, the less we are of our sinful selves. And so the goal is that He must increase, which what follows is that I decrease, but He must increase. So that's active growth. The other one is providential growth. And this has to do with uncontrollable circumstances that happen to us in our life, but that still mature us and shape us. This could be suffering. Maybe I'm going through a health crisis right now and I didn't cause it, but I'm still going through it. And so that definitely is gonna mature me. It could be financial crisis where we got a baby,

that same illness now is hitting us with a big hospital bill and now we're kind of struggling there could be I'm having difficulties in my marriage. Me and my spouse have been going through a difficult time because maybe that just to follow the rabbit hole, maybe that financial hit is causing some difficulties in our marriage or taking care of a kid. I'm a parent, or another one is failure. Sometimes things are going well in life, and then boom, we get hit with a big failure that just kind of slaps us in the face. And then another simple one is just waiting. Sometimes we just have to wait. And in that waiting, we learn a lot about ourselves and we learn a lot about God. And so we never choose any of these things that happen to us. There are tons of things that happen every day that are completely outside of our control. And so, and James describes this and he says,

consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance and let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything. So the idea is there is that we don't just let these circumstances happen and we just experience them and that's how we grow. Yes, we do grow from that, But the idea is that it's how we respond to these circumstances that happen in our life. We all suffer, we all have gone through financial difficulties, we've all gone through being, or most of us have gone through being parents and whatnot. And so that, like I said earlier, that doesn't escape, but it's how we respond to that. Are we going to still be faithful in the midst of those circumstances? So whether it's active or providential growth outside of our control or inside of our control,

we still have a duty to respond faithfully. And so now we'll get into three things that I would like to list as kind of an application, something that you can do to take home with you and do it throughout the week, because the Bible tells us to be doers of the word and not hearers only. So let's do. First one that I would like to do, like to encourage you with is on the active growth side, and that is to pursue Christ intentionally. This week, choose one spiritual practice that needs work and commit to it. It could be prayer. Maybe you're not comfortable praying to God and you haven't done it much. Maybe you are comfortable praying to God, but you're not comfortable doing it in a public setting around people. So that's something that you can maybe ask your, ask some of your family members, see if you can pray around them. Or if you're comfortable, go ask a stranger

if you can pray for them. Another one is scripture reading. Constantly trying to get in a habit of reading scripture daily. And if you read scripture daily and you're in that habit, cool, next step for you, scripture memorization. I know you don't have the whole Bible memorized. So next thing is just memorize some scripture. I cannot hype up memorization enough in scripture. Whenever I have verses in my mind, memorized, ready to go, it allows me to bring them to my mind whenever I'm going through something difficult, whenever I'm suffering, I can recite these verses in my head and kind of speak that own truth into my life. And I can also share that with others whenever I'm sharing my faith or talking to someone about Christ. I have these verses in my mind that I can go to, and I can kind of pull this kind of like a library. So if you do have a daily reading plan,

definitely next step is try to start memorizing some of what you're reading. Instead of just reading it, and then it's out of your mind later that day, try to memorize it and go about it that same day memorizing it. And then the other one I just kind of alluded to a little bit is sharing your faith. If you're not comfortable sharing your faith, if you're not comfortable sharing your faith, all right, Drew was just getting on to my wife talking so I had to notice it, call it out. Not okay. So other one is sharing faith. If you're not comfortable sharing your faith, just like with praying, share your faith with one of your family members. You feel comfortable doing that? Pull a ray comfort, go out in the street and start sharing your faith with other people and doing that. But there's always something that we can do. And so my encouragement is read scripture, pray, memorize, share your faith,

take one sort of discipline that you can work on or strengthen. Because we can always, even if you're good at something, you can always get better at it and strengthen it. And it doesn't have to be grand. You don't have to pray for an hour a day or read a whole book of the Bible in a week, but it just has to be faithful. Similar to our offerings, we're not asking for anything grand. We're just asking for you to be faithful in the midst of it, whether that's $3 or $300. It's faithful. If it's coming from your heart and that's what you want to give, then that's what counts. That's what we're asking for.

The second encouragement has to do on the providential side, and that is responding to life circumstances properly. So this would be identifying one circumstance in your life that you're currently going through and asking yourself, how can I faithfully follow Christ within this? And then ask God to pray and guide you through that process. This could result in you maybe needing to switch some priorities around in your life. This could result in maybe you needing to forgive your spouse who you've been holding a little bit of a grudge against. This could be maybe quitting a job that has been toxic for your family for a long time. Or this could be just simply waiting and just having to wait in the process or just wait for Christ to do His work. And that's what helps us mature. So my encouragement is to identify anything going on in your life, any sort of uneasy circumstance

and ask yourself, how can I faithfully follow Christ through this? And maybe it even ties into your active growth and maybe you can even do something with reading the Bible daily and that will help you. But ask yourself, how can I do that? And then see what you need to do about switching priorities around or anything like that. Third thing has to do with the environment of growth. and that is participate in church.

Ephesians 4:16 says that the body grows, like I said earlier, when every part is working in unison together. So we ourselves must be a part of a church so that we're around a bunch of other like-minded brothers and sisters. We have several things here at our church that you are able to jump into that can help you serve and grow. One of those things is home group. We have home groups where they meet once a week for eight weeks and they have a dinner for about the first 45 minutes to an hour. And then the next hour, someone is leading some sort of Bible study or some sort of discussion revolving around the Bible or Christianity. And so it's just a quick two hour meeting each week where people come, have fellowship together, they read the Bible, and they just kind of grow as a community instead of leaving it all to growing it at our own rate, at our own pace, at our own place, we are able to grow

in a different environment with brothers and sisters around us. Another thing that we do is we have different ministry teams here. We have grade school, we have preschool, we have front line, we have all sorts of things. I'm not going to get into the list of all of them. But if you feel like you have a gift that God has given you and you want to use that gift as the church, then come talk to someone. Talk to me, talk to a deacon, talk to one of the pastors. Use that gift that God has given you. He didn't give it to you for you alone. He gave it to the church. He wants the church to be benefited from that. Just like I, the past two years or so, have felt somewhat of a calling to get up here, because I felt like I'm comfortable teaching the Word. I feel like I understand the Word well. I'm a soccer coach, so I'm already kind of used to being in front of people and having to kind of put myself out there. So I figured, why not? Why not

give it a shot? If I feel like God is calling me to do this and I feel like He's given me a gift, then I'm going to do it. So here I am. The other thing, and this one is a little less scary than the other two is, and especially if you're newer here, just seek out a mature believer. Seek out a deacon, seek out a pastor, seek out someone that you can develop a relationship with because that is maybe baby steps, but it's a start. We all here are on the same path and that's the growing to Christ. Whether you're a little more down that path than others, we can still help each other out. So my encouragement is if you don't wanna jump into a hung group, you don't wanna serve yet, then just find one person that you can develop a relationship with, or one couple that you and your spouse can develop a relationship with. We have plenty of people here, plenty of couples here that are more than willing to open themselves up and to sacrifice their

time to be with you. So my encouragement is find those people. And then if you're doing all three of those things and you're just a rock star Christian, then cool. Your job is to help others do that as well. If you are already serving, if you're already in a home group, if you already have a lot of connections with people here, then your job is to help newer believers, help new people coming to the church, get plugged into a group or get plugged into some sort of ministry or just develop that relationship with them. So there's no level of maturity where we can just kind of sit on the couch and chill and be like, okay, my job is done. We always have steps that we can do even at the highest level of maturity. So just a recap of all of that. We are to pick one discipline to begin or strengthen, find one role or relationship to pursue, and then find one circumstance that I can respond to faithfully in my lives.

You don't have to do all three of those things, but my encouragement is at least pick one of them and then stick to it for the next week. Like I said, it doesn't have to be grand. If I'm going to pursue a relationship with someone, I don't have to have dinner with with them twice before next Sunday, it can just be having a five minute conversation with them after service or something, or even texting each other. So it doesn't have to be grand, just some sort of steps to get you growing and becoming more like Christ.

So in summary of everything, and this is kind of gonna lay out the entire thing, Christ is the source of our growth. Christ's likeness is the goal. Stability, truth, and love are the evidences. The church is the environment in which we grow, and then active obedience and our providential circumstances are the mechanisms of which we grow. So I see some phones out. If you wanna take a picture of that, go ahead. But yeah, that's pretty much the whole thing is that it starts with Christ, but it also ends with Christ because the goal is that we become more like Him. So He gives us things to help Him become more like us. Like I said earlier, He's the start and He's the finish. Everything comes through Christ. So the question that I wanna leave you with all today is am I becoming more like Christ? Ask yourself that this week, pick a discipline and we'll see you guys next week.

Let's pray. Father, we know that we can't do any of this alone. We know that you give us everything we need. You give us the Bible, you give us yourself through prayer, you give us the church. And we just pray that you allow us to be encouraged by that and to use the resources that you've given us so that we may grow up into you and may grow to become like Christ, because we know that that's the ultimate goal. We may never be perfect here on this side of heaven, but we know that it's still a goal to try to become more and more like you and try to share your life with the world, because the more the world knows about you and about your love and your kindness and the mercy and the sacrifice that you did on the cross, the better the world will become. It takes baby steps, it takes one individual at a time, but we know that all together we can grow and we can become the body that you desire us to be.

So Lord, we pray that you just guide us as we go throughout this week and allow us to be bold and allow us to be filled with love and truth as we share our faith and as we just live out our faith. In your name we pray, amen.