Submitted by admin on Thu, 09/16/2010 - 8:18am
MP3 File:
Designed to Grow: Grow Healthy-Living as God Intended
Mark 4:26-29 (NIV) 26 He also said, "This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man [a farmer*] scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how [he does not understand how it happens*]. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain-first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come." [*NLT]
If something is alive, it grows. It is the nature of living things to grow.
Parents know this all too well! Every year they have to buy new clothes for their kids. They keep outgrowing last year's pants, coats, shoes.
If it's alive, it grows!
One of our travel mugs disappeared from home. It was gone for two or three months before it was found-in my wife's office. So she brought it home and set it on the kitchen counter. So a couple of nights ago, I took the lid off and looked inside. It looked like it was packed with cotton balls. The mug was half-filled with a fuzzy, white growth. As I investigated further, I discovered there was still coffee beneath the growth of fungus.
If it's alive, it grows! The opposite is also true (with rare exceptions like crystals or stalactites or stalagmites): if something grows, it's probably alive.
The human body is an amazing example of growth and life.
· In only 3 weeks a newly conceived baby grows from a single cell to a small baby able to make a fist and suck his thumb. [picture: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/9572.htm]
- A human begins as a single cell, which multiplies to about 10 trillion cells (1 followed by 13 zeroes) by the time he's an adult. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flora
· By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
- An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
· In a lifetime the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid.
· Humans shed and re-grow outer skin cells about every 27 days-almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime. That's about 600,000 particles of skin every hour-about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
· There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
· Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute. But we keep growing new cells to replace them! http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_4_fun_facts_about_the_body_system
If a thing is alive, it grows!
This is true not only in the physical world, but also in the spiritual! Jesus said a primary or core characteristic of the kingdom of God is growth.
God's kingdom was designed for growth! God doesn't want us to plateau, stagnate, or decline-either as individuals or as a church. God wants us to grow in multiple ways-in our work for him, in our walk with him, and in our faith in him. Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a seed which "sprouts and grows," though we don't know how (Mark 4:26-28).
Verse 27: Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.
We can't explain how it happens, but growth is inherent in the kingdom of God. In fact, you can't have the kingdom without having growth!
Jesus described the kingdom of God as seed planted in the ground, growing all by itself without the farmer understanding the process at all.
The farmer can't make the seed grow; he can't use a tweezers to pry open the seed to start the process; he can't grab the leaves and stems to pull and stretch the tiny plants to make them taller.
The seed grows because once it is in the ground, it is the nature of seed to grow.
In the same way, the kingdom of God grows because it is the nature of the kingdom to grow.
So if we're not growing, we've somehow missed God's kingdom. If you've stopped growing as an individual, if you've plateaued in your spiritual development, if you've become stagnate with no spiritual fruit, then it would appear you're missing a key characteristic of the kingdom of God-growth.
Because God's kingdom is alive, because it's about new life, the kingdom must grow! If a thing is alive, it grows!
By the same token, if it's not growing, then it's not connected to the kingdom of God.
Growth is a common theme throughout God's Word. It's God's plan that his people and his kingdom should grow! Over the next few weeks we're going to look at some of the ways we need to grow-we need to grow strong, grow fruitful (or productive), grow in faith, and so on.
You'll see this idea of growth often as you read through the Bible:
Gen 9:7 - be fruitful, increase, multiply
Ps 92:12 - flourish, grow
Isa 61:11 - come up, grow, spring up
Hos 14:5-6 - roots, grow
Matt 13:30 - the kingdom is like a field where wheat and weeds grow together
Matt 13:31-32 - the kingdom is like a mustard seed, which grows from very small to very large
Matt 13:33 - the kingdom is like bread dough that expands because of the yeast mixed through it
Eph 4:15-16 - the body of Christ grows and builds itself (also Col 2:19)
Col 1:6 - the Good News of Jesus grows and bears fruit
Not all growth, however, is good growth. You don't want your weight to grow! You don't want growing doubt or fear. You want your debt to shrink, not grow. Uncontrolled cellular growth can become a cancerous tumor. Not all growth is good growth.
So the first kind of growth we want to talk about in this series is healthy growth. God wants us to grow in our spiritual health! He wants us to be spiritually healthy-to be free from the diseases of sin.
Jeremiah, the prophet, complained about no doctor or medicine to heal the sin-sick people (Jer 8:22). Later, though, he prophesied God's words: "I will restore you to health and heal your wounds" (Jer 30:17).
Isaiah also spoke of the sins of the people being healed: "he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities...by his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5).
Jesus also talked about spiritual health: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick," he said. "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Luke 5:31-32).
Sin is a spiritual disease! We hear a lot of talk these days about dysfunctions-dysfunctional families... marriages...behavior...relationships. A "dysfunction," according to the dictionary, is a sickness-when something functions in an unhealthy or sick way.
If healthy function is defined as: "the kind of action or activity proper to a person, thing, or institution; the purpose for which something is designed or exists; role."
God has put us here for a reason. There is a purpose for our being here. If there was nothing for us to do and if God were finished with us, there would be no reason for us to stay. If we've accomplished our assignment here on earth, there would be no need for God to leave us here. Our next stop would be heaven.
But since we're still here, we can safely assume that God is not finished with us yet. He still wants to make something of us; he still wants to do something with us; he still has something for us to complete. He still wants to use us for his purposes.
He wants us functional-not dysfunctional!
To answer God's call, to fulfill your God-given purpose-to function as he designed you-you must be spiritually healthy! You must grow healthy!
How can we grow spiritually healthy? To grow spiritually healthy...
1. Repent of sin! And live a life of repentance. "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Luke 5:31-32)
Sin is like a disease, a cancer, that must be cut out and destroyed.
Jesus calls us to repentance-to stop indulging in destructive behavior!
If the doctor tells you to stop smoking to save your lungs or to stop eating unhealthy foods to save your heart or to stop your intake of polysaturates (or is it polyunsaturated?) to help your cholesterol levels, you know he's interested in your health.
Sin is a spiritually unhealthy lifestyle. It sucks the life out of us. It destroys-and we need to repent of it.
About 600,000 people have heart bypasses each year in America. After their surgery they are told they must change their lifestyle because the heart bypass is a temporary fix. They must change their diet. They must quit smoking and drinking. They must exercise and reduce stress. In essence, the doctors say, "Change or die."
You'd think a near-death experience would make a compelling case for change, but sadly that is not the case. Ninety percent of the heart patients do not change. They remain the same, living the status quo. Study after study indicates that two years after heart surgery, the patients have not altered their behavior. Instead of making changes for life, they choose death.
The majority of the heart patients choose not to change. They act as if they would rather die. And the same thing happens when we do not repent of our sinful lives. [From a 2006 study http://www.preachingtoday.com/illustrations/2008/june/3062308.html ]
Jesus calls us to repent! It's not just about being sorry for what you've done. It's not merely regretting the consequences of your actions. Repentance means to stop the sin you've been doing. It means to replace your old sinful behavior with spiritually healthy behavior!
2. Aim to know Jesus better. We can have "unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants..." (Eph 4:13-14).
Your physical health depends a lot on what you feed yourself. You can eat junk food. You can eat fast food. Or you can eat health food-a nutritious, balanced diet with FDA approved minimum daily requirements for vitamins and minerals.
Your spiritual health also depends on what you feed yourself. What kind of a spiritual diet are you on? There is such a thing as spiritual junk food or spiritual fast food.
Instead of those things, we should devour God's Word. We should live in fellowship with the Lord. We should grow to maturity-the whole measure of the fullness of Christ!
3. Find your place in Christ's body. "...grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work" (Eph 4:15-16).
A healthy body has various systems that all work together-the circulatory system, the nervous system, the digestive system, the skeletal system, and so on. Each organ and each body part has a function-a purpose to perform that will help the entire body.
A healthy church has healthy members who have discovered their place in the body. They discover who God made them to be. They grow in their understanding of their spiritual gifts and abilities-and how God wants them to interact with others in the body.
When you're connected with other healthy believers, you will grow more spiritually healthy than when you're not connected! Small groups, relationships, community.
A couple of years ago (2008), the Orthodox Church in Russia made plans to reopen a 200-year-old church that had not been used for a decade. That's when they discovered the building had disappeared-it was completely gone. Vanished!
After investigating, they found that villagers from a nearby town had dismantled the building brick by brick, selling each one to a businessman for a ruble (about 4 cents). The church did not come down because of a wrecking ball or a bulldozer. Instead it disappeared as each brick was chiseled out one by one.
In the same way, churches-built of "living stones"-don't generally fall because of one big problem but because individuals one by one choose to pull out and become uninvolved: Stay home and watch a TV preacher. Worship God from your fishing boat or your deer stand. Read the Bible and pray, but don't mess with the organized church. Do your own spiritual thing. Each decision means one less living stone. http://www.preachingtoday.com/search/?query=Eph+4%3A15-16&searcharea=illustrations&type=scripture&x=43&y=14&start=21
If you want to be spiritually healthy, you need to find and fulfill your place in the church-in the body of Christ!
In a few weeks we're having a special leaders and ministries retreat involving everyone who is serious about growing as believers and growing this church body. It's called enVision-it's designed to help us all come together to discover God's plan for our church's growing ministry.
My prayer is that it will help more people plug in to the call and purpose that God has for them to grow and mature as believers. To grow healthy and strong in the Lord. To see us fulfill the reason that God has put us here.