The Most Spiritually Mature Thing

Mark Groutas, LHC's Worship Pastor, was telling me about his workout program earlier this week. His trainer Scott Hennig insists that his training regimen always be moving toward a specific, measurable goal. Whether it's to dunk a basketball, create core strength to improve posture, drop weight, add strength--whatever it is, it has to be identifiable and measurable.

Spiritual growth and development prove much more difficult to measure and evaluate. The religious ditches are littered with people and programs that stripped faith of its mystery and beauty by reducing it to "4 Steps to God," or "7 Habits of Highly Defective Dogma," and on and on...

But, there is an equal number of ditches on the other side of the road littered with people and programs that evade evaluation under the guise of "spiritual authenticity." This bent conveniently hyper-spiritualizes and then ignores the promise that our work will be tested as by fire.

So, how do you measure Christ-likeness? Clearly, no one solution can exhaustively answer that question.

But, how about this for openers: Identify (measure, evaluate, ...) the impact your life is having on people far from God. Jesus said that he abandoned heaven to seek them. IF I'm growing and becoming more like him, I'll orient my life more like he oriented his.

This weekend, I'm kicking off a message series called MARRIAGE TO THE H-N-L~Taking Husbands & Wives to a Hole Nutha Level. It is a prime opportunity to invite someone you know--someone you care about--to discover 2 things:

1. What marriage can be, and
2. How relentlessly and unconditionally God loves them.

The most spiritually mature thing we'll ever do is introduce one more person to the love of God.