Spring 1978
The Process of Spiritual Growth
Taken of a message by
John Wright Follette

We become partakers of the divine nature purely on the basis of a gift. The atonement of Christ on Calvary was God’s gift to lost mankind, that whosoever would believe and accept that gift could enter eternal life. He gives us salvation but He cannot give us a Christian character. We have to build it; we have to grow and learn to be subjected continually to all the arrangements that God has put into our pattern of life to release us and set us free for the real thing that God wants. It is a new creation life that is pushing its way through, becoming disentangled from the law of our old self. We are a new creation in Christ Jesus. We are not that creature that God saved back there—that sinner. What there is of you and me, that part of us that God can take into eternity, will be the amount of spiritual life and vision and reception that we have come to here in this life. He is saying, “Surrender and give to Me complete control of this creature that you are, and I can come inside of you and work a miracle.” The hindrance is not our sins, because He has forgiven them; but it is the resistance, conscious or unconscious, of our warring against the power of new creation life that would push through. That little seed has to have an awful time pushing its way through the ground. We are ground; man is made of the dust. This little seed of new creation life pushes through our earth. Can you let this little ego rot? Yes, and a fresh, new life will come forth. A lovely new life in God. The little seed, for awhile, is held by its own decay, but that is the way it grows. It has to live there until the husk is broken. What a terrible time when God breaks the little tight covering on some heart. It is out of that breaking and out of that death that a sprout comes up and it grows. First the little shoot, the blade pushing its way up, out of its old former self-world in which it was born. Leave the husks of the former creature in the ground. It will do you terrible damage if you allow it to come up. It will interfere continually with this life principle that is pushing through.

When we are baptized in the Spirit the Lord says, “I will submerge you, bury you under the power and dominion of the Holy sprit.” When we come up out of that, we should be new creatures indeed. It should not be the thing that went under. This new life begins to develop, until there is a full corn in the ear. This does not come in a minute but it is a process.

Do not quarrel with what you find in your pattern. That is the Lord’s concern because we have chosen His will. We are all typed and we are all different. We are all a special edition of the creature that we are and there are no duplicates. Knowing us as He does, He places in this pattern of our living all these things for our edification, correction, and growth. “God has made us what we are, creating us in Christ Jesus for the good deeds which are prepared beforehand by God as our sphere of action” (Ephesians 2:10, Moffatts). In other words, before we were born He knew us. He knows how we were made and if we would accept His will for our life, we will find it is made according to what we need. The Lord cannot make the same will and plan for each of our lives because we are all different.

We are born again and filled with the Spirit, but we are not born just to go to heaven. We are going to heaven, but heaven is a condition before it is a location. We carry in us all the potential for our experience in heaven. We have all the potential of that vast unfolding in our heart right now. Why? Because this new creation that we are holds potentially all the things that God wants. In eternity, they will not be added, but released. So He throws into our pattern here all the things that He sees necessary for each life. In this life we will have both positive and negative forces working continually; we will have things which are agreeable and things which are disagreeable; we will have times of peace and times of war; we will have angelic movings, and we will face the devil. Al these things are performing in our pattern. He does not exempt anyone and we have to learn how to face—the enemy. Yes, the Lord did that with Job in order to get him through. God had to sift Peter. This is very hard, but He never said to pray for any exemption from this. It is for our good. The Lord is going to sift us until we feel we cannot take it. Stay in it. “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen by brethren” (Luke 22:32).

To encourage us, Paul says: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” (Romans 8:24). The word “hope” in the New Testament means “a fact, a truth, a promise, which has not yet fully come to pass, but is just as real as anything we have here.” There is no uncertainty. The whole redemptive plan of Christ is our hope, because it is certain and it is fixed; it is established and cannot be moved. I rest all that I am in that hope. “But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit Itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:25, 26). The Holy Spirit knows our frailties. He lives in us. Because we cannot see the projection of the workings of God and the results of our responses through life, we do not know. He allows this so that we will know our utter dependence upon Him. So the Holy Spirit makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. “And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). If we will cooperate with God, even through the hardest things, there will be an inner consciousness that this is the will of God and the Holy Spirit is praying, bringing us through.

Our objective then is to move through all this to the glory of God. God’s objective is that He is coming toward us from the heavenlies to meet us because He is only accepting us in His beloved and lovely Son. As He sees His Son, He sees us. Through all of these things which He subjects us to, He is conforming us to His image. He traces in our immortal spirit the likeness and image of His Son. This is His goal and purpose.