Spring 1989
The Process of our Spiritual Growth
taken from a spoken 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's cross was God's gift to a lost mankind, that whosoever believes and accepts this gift will enter eternal life.

The Lord gives salvation to us, but He cannot give us a Christian character. This has to be built. We grow by learning to be subjected continually to all of the arrangements that God places in our pattern of life. As we do this, we are released and set free for the real thing that God wants. This is a new creation life that is pushing its way up through our being, enabling us to become disentangled from the law of our old self.

We have become a new creation in Christ Jesus. We are not that creature that God saved when we first repented and accepted Him as our Saviour. What there is of you and me, that part of us that God can take into eternity, will be the amount of spiritual life, vision, and receptivity that we have attained to while in this life.

He is saying, "Surrender and give to Me the complete control of this creature that you are, I can come inside of you and work a miracle." The hindrance to this is not our sins, because He has forgiven them; rather it is the resistance, conscious or unconscious, of our warring against the power of this new creation life that would push its way up through us.

The little seed that is planted has an awful time pushing its way up through the ground. We too are ground, man is made of the dust. This little seed of our new creation life seeks to push through our earth. Can you let your little ego rot? Yes, and a fresh new life will come forth. A lovely new life in God.

The little seed, for awhile, is sustained 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 we have while God breaks the tight covering that holds us in the earth realm. It is out of that breaking and out of that death that a sprout comes up and begins to grow. 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 its way upward.

When we are baptized in the Spirit, the Lord tells us "I will submerge you, bury you under the power and dominion of the Holy Spirit." When we come up out of that, we will be a new creature 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 happen in a minute, rather it is the result of a progressive process.

Do not quarrel with what you find in your pattern of life. That is the Lord's concern because we have chosen His will. We are all typed and we are all different. Each one of us is a special edition of the creature that we are, there are no duplicates. Knowing us as He does, He places within the pattern of our spiritual 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 (Moffatt). Before we were born, He knew us. He knows what is within us. As we accept His will for our lives, we will discover that the circumstances of our lives have been prepared according to what we need. The Lord cannot make the same will and plan for each one of us, for 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 have the potential for this vast unfolding within our heart right now. Why? Because this new creation, that we are becoming, holds potentially all of the things that God wants. In eternity, these will not be added to us, rather they will be released from within us.

Therefore, the Lord throws into our daily life experience all of the things that He sees as being necessary. 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. All of these things are performing within our pattern of life.

He does not exempt anyone, each one of us has to learn how to face the enemy. Yes, the Lord did this with Job in order to get him through. God had to sift Peter. This is very hard, but He never said that we were 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 thy 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?" Rom 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 sure as anything that we now have." 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" Rom 8:25,26.

The Holy Spirit knows our frailties. He lives within us. Because we cannot see the projection of the workings of God, or the results of our responses to Him through life, we do not realize our utter dependence upon Him. Therefore, 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" Rom 8:27. If we will cooperate with God, even through difficult things, there will be within us an inner consciousness that this is the will of God for us, and that the Holy Spirit is praying, bringing us through.

God's objective is to come toward us to meet us because He accepts 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 tracing in our immortal spirit this image of His Son.

Our objective then is to move through all of these things to the glory of God.