Six Movements in our Spiritual Growth Journey Podcast Series

I remember when I was younger in faith, and maybe you guys have had similar experiences, where you anticipated your journey looking different than it did. Everybody has this winding, turning road, this journey experience. The journey itself is where Christ is going to do some of the most important work in us this side of eternity. 

Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent, as always, to have you along. Arlan Miller and Isaac Funk are with me today. Great to see you guys. Good to be here again, Matt. Yeah, glad to be here. We’re going to be talking a little bit about mapping. 

I loved maps as a kid. The atlas. Dad would get an updated atlas every year. So, when we were on family trips, I’d just follow with the finger where we were. It’s a bit of a lost art. I’m not sure my kids would do very well with that. Yeah, Google Maps has made it a very different game these days. 

Yeah. But the idea of a map on your lap has some real advantages, and I think one of the advantages is you really have a really good understanding of where you’re at. Yeah, it gives us some context for what’s around us, helps us locate ourselves. Somehow, I still find myself incredibly directionally challenged, and I think that’s because I see just the arrow in front of me on the Apple Maps or Google Maps right now or whatever, right? 

And so yeah, it would help us just to zoom out and to take a look at the whole landscape around us. I think it’s that perspective of where we are in the scheme of things, and that’s what a map helps provide. As much as we could probably fill an hour on pontificating and reminiscing about map reading, as we think about the journey of growing in Christ likeness, the journey of spiritual formation, the journey of the Christian life is one for which a map could sure be helpful. 

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that this concept of a map for our spiritual journeys is immensely helpful, and it’s something that Christians throughout time have tried to put their finger on because we’ve experienced life with Christ and that it’s not always turning out the way that we anticipated it. 

I remember when I was younger in faith, and maybe you guys have had similar experiences, where you anticipated your life looking different than it you’re your journey looking different than it did. And to understand that everybody has this winding, turning road, this journey experience is just helpful to me to know that I’m not alone in that. 

And that it is the journey itself where Christ is going to do some of the most important work in me this side of eternity. So yes, the idea of a map for my spiritual life is a real aid to my ability to live today. You mentioned expectations and things being different than what you expected, but certainly having some expectations is really helpful, right? 

Even the expectation that it’s going to look different or the expectation that, “You know what? I’m probably going to have to take some turns and the journey’s not going to look exactly the way I thought.” But that’s partly the blessing of mapping, is that you have some sort of shape that you can expect your life to take. 

This idea of mapping growth and having expectations and knowing benchmarks is good. Why is it that sometimes we feel like we’re blind and nobody knows? Yeah, so this is the thing to point out here that the map we’ve been given for our spiritual lives is not, “Here’s point A to point B.” It’s not a straight line. 

It’s not a straight shot of growth. It’s an organic picture of growth, and it’s slow, and it takes time. The pathway is winding, and I think part of the reason for that is how we define discipleship. Here is the journey of learning to live our entire lives in the way of Christ and helping others to do that, too. 

Jesus is reaching into every aspect of our life, our thoughts, our reactions, our habits, our relationships, our work, our hurts, our deepest wounds, our desires. All of that stuff, Jesus is reaching into and wanting to change into his image. And that’s what spiritual growth looks like. All of those parts of us being more and more formed or conformed to his image to look more like love. 

And so, that journey is not a straight line. Here’s point A, here’s point B. But you’ll start off where you are, and then you’ll go on this winding journey with God and with each other and with other people, too. And we’re going to step through six different movements of spiritual growth. 

Arlan, maybe give us a little bit of a preview, and then we will step into them one at a time. Sure. And you use that word movements intentionally, Matt, and I think that’s important. Sometimes you’ll hear the word stages or sometimes you’ll hear something a little bit more defined. 

As we see so often in life it’s maybe not quite as exact. There’s a uniqueness. There’s a winding-ness to it. And sometimes you come in one or you go out of another one quickly. Sometimes they happen fast. Sometimes they happen for years. Sometimes you can get stuck in a stage. But there’s often just progression through the six movements. 

We start with this idea of abiding in Jesus. Then you often see growth in God’s family where others come into the picture. Training in Christlikeness would be another movement that we identify where you’re building up practices. Then often there’s joining into God’s work, where might he have you engaging in a place where you see your gifts, your talents being used for his kingdom. 

Being formed in the heart is the fifth movement we identify, where there’s the inner formation, the inner change. And then the final movement is this vision of walking in the Spirit. It’s almost full circle because it’s another depth of abiding but at this much deeper level of where you see that union with the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and his work within our lives. 

I think every seasoned believer would resonate with that cyclic of, “I feel like I’m back at the beginning.” Isaac, let’s just take these one at a time and just move through them. Six different movements. Yeah, I like this idea of movements being something – that there is no hierarchy to these. 

It’s not like someone who is in abiding in Christ is further behind someone who is joining God’s work or walking in the Spirit or whatever, but that these are. You can even be in multiple ones of these perhaps at the same time. So just acknowledging that at the get-go I think can be helpful. 

But if we were to take each one as its own movement, abiding in Jesus is related to this reawakening to a new reality before you that God is alive, that he loves you, and that he’s calling you to himself. And so, abiding is just to make your home somewhere. 

You abide you make your home there. So, you make your home in God, in Christ. This is the John 15 language that Jesus uses for his disciples’ relationship to Him. “You will abide in me. And so, you’re going to draw your life from me. You’re going to draw your identity from me. You will be changed by that connection with me and bear my fruit.” 

And as that’s going on, he’s actually weaning us off of the attachments from other things that are competing for our attachment to God. There are a lot of things in life that I come to desire and a lot of things in life that my thoughts will circulate around, my anxieties, my fears, my dreams for my life, whatever. 

My thought life can make its home in those things, but Christ is calling me back in some seasons of my life more clearly than others, to leave those things behind and to find my thought life, to find my identity, my greatest desires in his presence alone. The word that sticks out to me is attachment, both the loosening of unhelpful attachments or unhealthy attachments and then to reattach, which I think those who study the maturation of a child would say in infancy that attachment to the mother is like super important right out of the gate, right? 

Isn’t that what research is showing? And so, for that to be first mentioned, again, not that we wouldn’t come back to it, we certainly will, but there is a beautiful foundation there that we’re talking about attachment formation here, and that attachment is being attached to the Father. 

And you can think of all of the damage that is done when the child is not well attached to its caregiver and that breeds all sorts of issues later in life and just real challenges. And it would be the same in our own spiritual development and growth if we are not sufficiently attached in a loving relationship with God, then none of the other things will stand. 

We get a lot of tangles, a lot of mess-ups along the way if we can’t get this foundational piece in order and return to it again and again. You’ll never graduate from this movement of abiding in Christ. Everything comes from there. Yeah. I’m mindful of what Christ said there in the Sermon on the Mount where he just sums it up and he basically says, “If you build your house upon the rock, it will stand. If you build your house upon the sand, it will fall.” And this movement really just keeps asking us that question over and over again. “Are you abiding in Me? Are you attached to Me? Are you grounded foundationally in me, or is there something else?” So foundational and yet a recurring foundational–type movement. 

There are some questions that you might ask yourself to reflect on this particular movement and say what’s next for me with this? Yeah. So, if I’m going to respond to Christ’s invitation to come and abide in him, I’m going to have to leave other things behind and focus my attention on him. 

How could I be with him if I’m not thinking of him? And so, I might create habits in my daily life, including the first thing when I wake up and the last thing before I go to bed, and I’m training my mind to think about God and to think of his words to us through the Scriptures and meditating on those and mulling them over. Mine would be similar, Isaac, in the sense of the first thing in the morning and last thing at night, definitely, but even just throughout the day, what are the practices or the habits that bring me back to have God and Christ in the forefront of my life? 

Yep. I think as many times as you can do it throughout the day and just call us back home to him. You go back to that infant child being attached to the mother. It’s a function of time and presence, isn’t it? You don’t learn your way into attachment with mom; you live your way into it by she being present with you and caring for you. So, allowing ourselves to be cared for repeatedly, yeah, continual behavior.  

Let’s go to the next one. This movement is growing in God’s family. It becomes more about where do we belong? And the Christian life is not a solitary life. There’s an aspect of it that’s solitary. But early on and often, God calls us into relationship, into community. And you will see that in this movement where that growth of faith should transcend from just myself in Christ to myself in Christ’s people. There were disciples that he called the Church as an early portion of it, and that community aspect is a key aspect. 

And so, how do we continue to grow in our relationships with others? So, do I belong in Christ’s family? Am I a part of his family? But part of healthy spiritual growth over time is this engagement with his people. Absolutely. So, if the movement of abiding in Christ is allowing God to form our hearts through our loving attachment to him, growing in God’s family as a movement is allowing God to form our hearts through belonging to his people, as you said, and allowing those relationships to be the very things that hHe forms us through. 

I don’t know if you’ve had that experience or not, but oftentimes we experience the good, the bad, and the ugly in close community that Christ calls us to, and all of those things are tools in his toolbox to form us more to look like him. We learn to really love people, and we learn to really allow ourselves to be loved and known by other people. 

So, all of that happens in community. And Christ took this very seriously. There are Scriptures on “If you say you love me, but you don’t love your brother, the truth’s not in you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “As much as you’ve done it unto the least of all these other people, you’ve done it unto me.” 

So, our lives with other people, our relationships matter a great deal and are an essential part of how we follow Christ as his disciples. There are some questions that you might ask yourself to reflect on this particular movement and say what’s next for me with this? I think it’s going to look different for every person. Some of us are more extroverted, some of us are more introverted, some of us like large groups of people, some of us like smaller and more intimate type settings. But there is a heart question that says, am I drawing myself closer to his people? Do I have a desire for connection with God’s people? That’s a heart level question that I think is a really important litmus test or gauge to an aspect of the health of my spiritual life versus am I moving towards isolation? Am I moving towards withdrawal? Because maybe it’s uncomfortable. 

I was telling someone just recently that I’m always right in my own mind, right? And then when I start to engage with others, I find out that maybe I’m not completely right. And that takes humility. That takes love. And those are things that I think we need to be asking ourselves with this stage. 

Yeah. So just along that line, am I allowing myself to be corrected by others would be a good question to ask if you’re growing in God’s family, am I allowing myself to be exposed before others? Am I teachable? That, and also the other side of it too is, how am I doing that for other people? 

Because not only do we learn by being exposed and being corrected, but we also get to engage lovingly with other people, showing them compassion, showing them the love of Christ as they are exposed to us. And how are we serving our community? How are we serving our local church? All of that is part of how God forms us in community. 

Yeah, I really love it. I think it’s easy to see in this movement how this happens at different levels. Yeah. Everything from showing up at church, being baptized into a church. That happens for the early believer, baptized into a group. How to grow in that community I think is really excellent. 

Let’s keep moving. A third movement. Isaac, you want to take this one away? Yeah. The third movement is training in Christlikeness, and training in Christlikeness is God forming us through the practice of habits in our life. Are we practicing things that we generally would call spiritual disciplines? 

Are we intentionally becoming people who are looking more like Jesus and his character? So, the question we would ask ourselves here is, what are the habits of my daily life that I’ve lived into just as a matter of course? I woke up, I went through the day. Okay, what are the things that I’m doing on a normal daily basis that are actually forming me or that are changing me on the inside, the kind of person that I am, the kinds of desires that I have, the kinds of thoughts that I’m thinking? 

And are those what Christ would have for me, or are they different? Are they what he wants for me? Are they making me more like him, more loving towards him and other people or not? And so, in this movement, it’s coming to terms with that. My life is not necessarily arranged in a way that helps me become a person of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and the rest. 

So, what are the things that I can plan into my life and with other people? We don’t have to do it alone, just my life alone, but how can I engage with other people to do this well over time, not immediately, but over time to form new habits in me that actually help me grow, help me spiritually mature? 

I think it starts with that fundamental understanding that we are being formed. We are being shaped by everything around us, and then it goes into this place of saying, “Okay, so if that’s a truth, if I am being formed, what is forming me like Christ? What type of person am I becoming, and am I ready to be serious about that?” 

So again, if you think about just mapping the journey, at some place within that journey, there’s a movement that says, “Okay, this is more than just showing up. We use the word, training intentionally. There is a training that takes place there because I’m going to be intentional about thinking about who I’m being formed into and trying to turn that formation into a Christ-like manner. 

Yeah. Eventually, we find out along the journey, and at recurring times, that I’ve just fallen into a pattern of habits that actually aren’t serving my life with Christ at all anymore. And maybe at one point they did, but now it’s just not that. And so yeah, it’s just revisiting that. Okay what can actually be changed in my daily life that can help direct me more towards Jesus? If either of you would be willing to share. You’ve both been on this journey with Christ for a long time. What were some of the early practice regimens, training that you found yourself in as a young believer and how has that matured? 

What does that look like at this juncture in your life? I was challenged early on in my spiritual life by a group of young men. We were early believers together, and we established this thought that we were going to spend a certain amount of time every day with God. And we made a pact. We called it a pact, right? And accountability and all that kind of thing. And I would say, early on, that looked a certain way, right? Okay, this much maybe prayer and Bible reading and maybe a little bit more formal. It just seemed to be. 

And almost regimented. I set the timer, and if the timer doesn’t go off, you stay in there. But the heart of that discipline has stuck with me to the point where every morning there’s quiet time, you call it whatever, and it’s a longer period, and it’s communion time, right? But that sets my day in a good direction. It re-emphasizes what is most important, what type of person I want to be formed. And 30 years later now, it’s still a practice that is near and dear. I get cranky if I don’t get it. Which is not godly, right? It reveals certain things. 

But it’s there. Yeah. I would say fundamentals seem to be Scripture intake, getting God’s Word into you, especially as a foundation, so important. However you can do it, whether your schedule allows and your stage of life allows for quiet time in the morning for an extended period of time or a lunch break or driving in the car audibly listening to the Bible, whatever. 

Getting the Word into you, praying, getting into a habit of prayer is so important, and then regularly connecting with God’s people. So, whether that’s your Sunday time together and a Wednesday night, other times scattered throughout the week, as much as possible, build in rhythms, build habits into your life of getting with God’s people, praying, and taking the Scripture in. 

Now, in all of those things you need a real good healthy dose at the start, and you never want to let those things suffer. Keep those as a priority. And then as time goes on, you’ll find that these alone are not sufficient for Christ’s full life to be formed in every part of us either. 

And so, you’ll adopt things, practices like silence. Being quiet especially with all the noise around us, digital noise, phones, all of that stuff. Unplugging, you could just tie that into silence perhaps. Unplugging is a way to train in Christlikeness, forming a habit that helps point me towards Christ. 

Generosity, giving, tithing, things like that. Other types of service and witness-bearing to Christ in our communities. All of these things are ways that we train over time. But I would say the big three to start with, and that really should stay quaint cornerstones, Bible intake, prayer, regularly gathering with other disciples of Jesus. 

That’s good. What’s a warning that you’d say, “All right. With this movement, bear this in mind”? And maybe another thing would be like “This made a huge difference for me when I understood this. Fill in the blank about this particular movement that has come over time.” Yeah. I think continually finding that balance between what is my effort and what is God’s working. 

What’s Philippians say? “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it’s God that worketh in you.” Just that balance between that, because it can quickly go into this place of like I talked about earlier, regiment and performance and then my attitude and emotions are based upon, did I do well or did I not do well? And that’s not the heart of it, right? To try to keep it in this place of more of a communion opportunity. Being able to evaluate it appropriately. That’s an important warning. 

That’s good. Yeah, I think right along those lines is recognizing that all of these activities that I partake in are just cooperating with grace to do what only God can do in my life, and that by doing these things I’m not earning anything from God. I think that’s the legalism trap. This attitude that I earned this. Or that I can actually control my spiritual growth and my spiritual maturity. I can be more spiritual than that person over there. I can be more mature. I can have greater grace in my life, favor on my life, whatever, because I read the Bible for an hour, and that guy only reads it for five minutes every morning. 

Can you imagine that? Okay? That’s a huge distortion of the role of spiritual discipline. We don’t get to control our likeness into Christ. But it’s something that we intentionally offer ourselves for him to form us through disciplines like reading. What I hear coming out of that, too, is for the love of God I do these things as opposed to some other objective, which could be good, actually. Yeah. It’s like any intimate relationship you have in your life, over time it grows to this sweetness of just being together that is really beautiful. 

I think these do map somewhat on the growth of a child, right? From attachment, to coming home into a family, to learning to do things in rhythms and to build this young child as a person who says thank you to people or please and thank you, all these things, right? So, we have a concept for the maturation of a life that I think does map spiritually as well, and I think we’ll see that in the next movement, right? The next movement, I think, as you explained it or introduced it, Arlan, is joining God’s work. What I get is a sense of, okay, now actually living for God. 

But we will take on that movement and two more next time when we return in part two. Before we go Isaac, I want to take a few moments and just share with our listeners some exciting opportunities in this spiritual formation space and what’s available. We had a wonderful week that we call Abide Week, down in Peachtree City in May, where a small group of people got together and there was teaching and an opportunity for retreat and time for growing in God in some beautiful ways that we’ve really touched on here today. 

We’ve got a few more opportunities coming up in the near future. Say what you want to say about the Abide Week, when it is, where it’s at, and how a person might say, “Hey, that might be for me.” Yeah. So, as you said, the Abide Week is a six-day event through Scriptures. We have time in stillness, time with reflection in a small cohort of other people from our church that is designed to help you live from that deep connection that you have in Christ, what we had talked about in this episode of abiding in Christ. 

So, it’s really a week to slow down, to rest in God’s love, and to learn to notice his presence in the ordinary moments of your life. So, we have a couple more of these weeks coming up. The next one coming up is August 30th through September 4th. That’s going to be in Monticello, Illinois, at the Allerton Retreat Center, a beautiful location. We’ll gather with a small group there and spend those days together. And then the one after that is September 27th through October 2nd, and that’s in Syracuse, Indiana, at the Quaker Haven Camp. Both of these beautiful locations are great opportunities to connect with like-minded believers in a small group and reflect together, just rest in God together, and learn along the way. 

You can sign up at accounseling.org. There is an Abide webpage there that shows all of our upcoming events. There’s a registration button right there on the webpage. There is a link in the show notes. You can find those there. It will take you to the registration page and more information on the website. 

Thank you, each one, for listening. We trust that this has been a blessing.