"That you might walk worthy of the Lord to all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God" (Colossians 1:10).
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Colosse saying "Since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord, and growing in the knowledge of God" (Colossians 1:10). There is an interesting phrase here "worthy of the Lord", which means the Apostle was not encouraging the Colossian brethren to live a life pleasing to the Lord in order to be saved, no, they were already saved, but so that they could grow in the knowledge of God and bear fruit. When I was a kid, I really loved basketball and the basketball playground in my neighborhood was my home, that is where I spent most of my childhood. I first held and shot a basketball in the third grade and fell in love with the game and gave myself to it. I would play basketball all day on Saturdays, even when it was snowing. I wanted so much to play basketball and I was preoccupied with how tall I was and whether I was growing. I even heard from a friend that if you stretched every night that you could grow and I tried that! I was constantly measuring myself to see if I was growing. I would stand against the doors and walls of my house and my brother with a ruler will make a pencil mark, and then if you do that every three, six and nine months you could see that you are growing. I was happy to grow but my mother was not happy because there were pencil marks all over the house in that little apartment.
Well, the Bible talks about growth and tells us this is the way we please God. When we are born again and become Christians, we become a living spiritual being, and just like a plant or a tree or a baby, we can grow. Something is wrong when a child or a plant or a tree does not grow. In other words, there is a new life principle within every Christian so that progress is made, not by doing things or climbing mountains or locking yourself away for two hours thinking that that will undo six months of unhealthy living, but God makes things grow as the Bible tells us. Maturity in a believer is merely their growing in the way that God wants them to grow. Immature Christians are Christians who have been born again but they never grow. They may be twelve years in the Lord but they are acting like they are six months because they are never growing. The way to please the Lord is to grow and to bear fruit. God does not want you to do anything on your own, that is why He sent Jesus Christ and this is the reason Jesus sent the Holy Spirit. God knows how pitifully weak I am, so that He sent His spirit into me so that by the law of growth, I can bear fruit and that is what pleases Him. As we see in 2nd Peter 3:18 which says "But grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ" Do what? Grow in the grace!
Grace does not just come into your life, you can grow in that grace. You can grow in that knowledge of Jesus Christ. Peter says again in 1st Peter 2:2, "Crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation". Have you ever seen countries that are starving from famine? Do you ever see the babies with the hair colour they get and the bloated stomachs? They have not been fed. Are they alive? Yes. Are they humans? Yes. Are they healthy? No. That is the way Christians can be. As new born babies, crave pure spiritual milk so that you may grow in your salvation. I wonder how old some of us are in the Lord. I am not talking about how long you have been serving the Lord. I am talking about what kind of growth process has been going on in our lives, because through growth there is the bearing of fruit. We are like plants that have to be watered, we have to be fed.
The Bible tells us as a command that we are to grow. We are to grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. In most churches this is not a concept that is discussed. Talk to most Pastors and ask how their church is doing and they will not even address the question of whether their members are growing, but to God that is the only thing that matters. They will talk about how many people are coming to the church, how they pay the bills, what kind of meetings they've been having, how good their music is, how well their choir sings, how the choir has won a Grammy and so on and so forth, but that has nothing to do about the thing that God is interested in which is, is every member growing or are they stagnant and suffering from spiritual malnutrition.
God has put a mechanism of life in us, and now He just wants that life to develop and produce fruits and the fruits will bring glory to His name. God has done this in a way that He will get all the glory. Anytime a Christian or Preacher are strutting and saying "Look at what we have done!", then something is wrong, because when God is producing the fruit, who can you give the glory but God? It is God who put the life in us. It is God who develops that life and the fruits come from God. The Bible tells us that we are like plants. In Hosea 14:5-6, God says, "I will be like a dew to Israel, he will blossom like a lily, like a Cedar of Lebanon, he will send down his root, his young shoots will grow, his splendour will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon". Notice the language here, God says "I will be like a dew to Israel", that means God's people can blossom. They can send down roots. God says their young shoots which have potential will grow and produce fruit. From young shoots will come something beautiful. When you look at a beautiful tree or a plant, you know that the secret of that plant is that life is flowing through it. Rain comes down, the roots get nutrients from the soil and the tree grows. That is a natural process, and God says I have for my people a supernatural process, I want them to grow.
Is it not one of the saddest things that some people who have been saved for twenty years have not changed an iota in the last fifteen years? Their growth was for the first few years and then they hit a level and stopped growing. That is the problem; it is not that the folks are not Christians, it is just that they are not growing and if they do not grow, they will not produce fruit. So this growth is very important when God likens us to a plant. When you ask people how they are doing, some people would say "I am a baptist", "I go to Church", "I am a pentecostal", but the question is are we growing. God has put it already in us and all we got to do is let it grow. Scriptures has a lot to say about growth and it talks about when you are eighty eight years old like my mother. It says, "The righteous will flourish like a palm tree. They will grow like a cedar of Lebanon. They will still bear fruit in old age. They will stay fresh and green" Psalm 92:12. It is very rare to see an older person who is a Christian staying fresh and green. Most people when they get old, even when they are Christians, unfortunately get dry. However, God says even in their old age they can still bear fruit. There is no retirement plan with Jesus. God says right until the day you die if you will just walk with Me and let me work in you, you will be bearing fruit. Biologically, at a certain age people start to run down, but with Jesus you will never have to run down. You never have to get old, snarly, crusty and dry, you can stay fresh and green through your whole life. Do you want to keep growing as long as you are still living? Brother Stouman who preached into his 90s used to bless me a lot because He was fresh and green. I went to preach at the seventh baptist convention in Salt Lake city and he asked me to send him the tape. He got the tape and I called him a few weeks later and he said, "brother, Jesus is doing some new things in me. I want to be a man of God", and he was Ninety two! He was fresh and green. He might have died and his bones were creeky, but his spirit was fresh, growing, desiring more of Jesus and seeking to know the Bible better. When you hit a plateau and you think "I know this, I know that", you cannot grow. I have been around people all my life who knew the moving of the Spirit and know so many things yet they knew nothing. But do you know the people who really ? Such people do not think they know anything, they want to grow. A sign of being fresh and green is that you want to grow.
Now, if you don't grow, there is a consequence because when God puts life in somebody, He is grieved when they don't yield the fruit He was waiting for from this growth. In Hosea 9:16, God says "Ephraim is blighted, their root is withered, they yield no fruit". God says, "I have done everything that my people needed and they are not yielding fruit. I delivered them, I put them in the land, blessed them, but what do I get from it? They yield no fruit."Maybe some of you are like that. God comes to you and He is looking for fruit. He has put His life in you. He has protected you. He has watered you. He has blessed you. He has picked you up a thousand times when you had fallen and now He is saying "Where is the fruit?" Does He not deserve fruit out of our lives after all He has done? This is why Paul says you got to walk worthy of the Lord pleasing Him in every way. That means you can walk unworthy of the Lord. It means Christians can walk in a way that displeases God. Obviously Paul would not have prayed that you walk worthy of the Lord if everyone automatically walked worthy. After all God has done, are you going to hurt Him and disgrace Him? Hence Apostle Paul says because of what God has done walk worthy now because you are a Christian. Do not walk unworthily. Do not live in junk. do not live in dirt! Do not be involved in things that nailed Jesus to the cross, that's what he is saying to us. The Bible tells us this is what Christ is about; our bearing fruit. In John 15:8, Jesus says, "This is my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit showing yourselves to be my disciples" How do you show that you are a disciple? It is bearing fruit. What does bearing fruit do? It brings glory to the Father.
(This is the first part of a message preached by Pastor Jim Cymbala, Brooklyn Tabernacle. New York. United States of America. Please keep a date with me on this column next week for the concluding part of this message. God bless you)
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