Every true Christian believer would love to be a ‘better’ Christian.
In our best moments we echo the apostle Paul’s words: ‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord’ (Philippians 3.8). We know that the greatest possible value is given to our lives through the personal relationship we have with our Lord Jesus Christ and we long for that to deepen and strengthen, so that we become ‘partakers of the diving nature’ (2 Peter 1.4), reshaped and moulded increasingly into the likeness of Christ. But what does that look like, and how does the desire for progress translate into the reality of everyday life, in a pressured and frenetic world like ours?
God’s priorities
First, we need to be convinced that this is God’s primary concern and desire for us, so that when we are attending to our spiritual growth, we are entirely justified in devoting time and energy to God’s priorities. Not many of us live that way. We have vague and somewhat general desires to be making progress in our discipleship, but we are not always very intentional about it, or very consistent in our experience. We are told that we need to read our Bibles more and pray more regularly, to learn to trust and love Jesus more, but there is often a disconnect between these noble pious resolves and the facts of ‘real life’. We are so adept at balancing many different parts of our experience — work, home, family and friends, leisure, church, blogging and tweeting and all manner of calls on our time that we lack a unifying vision and integrating centre to all that we do and are.
