Summer 1993

The Process of our Spiritual Growth
John Wright Follette

The atonement of Christ on Calvary's cross was God's gift to a lost mankind. We become partakers of the Divine nature by accepting this gift.

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 which God places in our pattern of life. As we do this, we are released from the confines of the old and set free for the real thing that the Lord desires to accomplish within us - 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.

That "part" of us which God can take into eternity will be the amount of spiritual life, vision, and receptivity that we have attained to while we are yet in this life.

The Lord 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 - He has forgiven them; rather it is our resistance, conscious or unconscious, to the power of this new creation life that would push its way up through us.

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

This seed that we are, for awhile, is sustained by its own decay. 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 death and breaking that a sprout comes up and begins to grow.

First the little shoot, then the blade pushing its way up out of its old formerself-world into which it was born. Please, leave the husks of the formercreature in the ground as it will do terrible damage if allowed to come up. Itwill interfere continually with this life principle that is pushing its wayupward.

When we are seeking to be 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; it will not be the thing that went under. Then this new life will develop, until there is a full corn in the ear. This will 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," as 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 the necessary 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 carry within us all the potential for our experience in heaven. We have all 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 for a higher purpose.

He does not exempt anyone, each one of us has to learn how to face the enemy. 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 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 cannot be moved.

"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 seethe projection of the workings of God, or the results of our responses to Him through our life experience, 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 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 that He may fully accomplish all that He has purposed to do.