Healthy Things Grow by Hunter Bethea

Last summer, the musician Ben Rector released a single, “Wreck.” The premise of the song was that the person he was singing to had wrecked his world “in a beautiful way.”

It was through this song that I was introduced to a phrase I hadn’t heard before, but isn’t original to Rector: “Healthy things grow and growing things change.” As a pastor and lifelong disciple of Jesus, when I heard those lyrics, I couldn’t help but think that it was an apt description for what our journey with Christ should look like.

I’ve come across many people who talk primarily about their relationship with God in the past tense. “God changed my life two decades ago… I met Jesus when I was 8 years old… God saved me.” Granted, maybe that’s just the beginning of the story of how God has continued to change, meet, and save them. Too often, though, I’ve noticed that it’s not the beginning of the story, but rather the full story. God did something in their past and that was that.

But that’s not the whole of God’s hope for our lives. Rather, God wants to invite us into a healthy, changing relationship with Him. I think God would say about our relationship with Him: “Healthy things grow and growing things change.”

The Journey of Discipleship: Embracing Continuous Spiritual Growth

Look at the story of Nicodemus. When we first meet him (John 3), he’s coming to Jesus in the cover of darkness, seemingly afraid of public opinion if he was caught with this so-called Messiah. He’s guarded and questioning, wanting his inquiries answered before he gives this Jesus a chance. The next time we see him (John 7), he’s passively standing against the chief priests and Pharisees, asking a question to try to protect Jesus. The final time we see him in Scripture (John 19), Nicodemus is publicly ministering to the body of the God-man that his colleagues had just killed.

In just a few short years, Nicodemus’s relationship goes through drastic change as he seemingly becomes more comfortable with Jesus and with himself as a follower of Jesus. It’s a path we should all follow: a healthy relationship with Jesus that both grows and changes.

The problem: change is hard. In my several leadership classes in seminary, a primary theme in each and every one of these classes was, quite simply, change is hard. People are resistant to change. So willfully choosing to enter into a healthy relationship with Jesus that grows and—in growing—changes, takes a lot of courage.

But that’s the life God has called us to. We particularly affirm that the life of discipleship is an invitation from God to change. We believe that God reaches out to us wherever we are (prevenient grace), changes us from being under the power of sin to under the power of God (justifying grace), and invites us to a life of God changing our “heart from all sin to all holiness.” Too often, we can buy into the false notion that change is something God does once in our lives: from sinner to saved. But God came to transform the whole of our lives. While the change from guilty to justified is an immediate change in our lives, many of the changes God wants to do in our lives are progressive. I believe that one of the core marks of discipleship is an ability to look back and see all the change God has made in your life over the course of time.

So how are you doing with this? Are you simply content with the change God did in your life years, or even decades, ago that changed you from being under the power of sin to being under the power of God?

My question for you is: Are you hungry for more? God doesn’t just offer us freedom from the power of sin. He offers us the complete freedom that comes with holiness.

How to Cultivate a Deeper Hunger for God’s Transforming Work

Hear me clearly: This invitation to a healthy relationship with God that grows and changes isn’t an invitation to do more for the sake of doing more. It’s not an invitation or a command to read more Scripture, do a devotional, pray longer, and go to church more frequently. Those may be by-products, but it’s not the invitation. The invitation is to a stronger desire and hunger for what God wants to do in your life.

How do we cultivate such a hunger or desire? I wonder if it’s much like cultivating our own physical hunger and desires.

I love cookies. I’d say that any given moment, I have a marginal desire for a cookie. But when I walk into the kitchen and see and smell cookies being baked, I hunger for—even crave—a cookie. The twelve minutes a cookie sits in the oven are the longest twelve minutes of my life. The two and a half minutes for them to cool are even longer.

What if God invites us to get into the kitchen of what He’s doing?

When you get into the kitchen where God is changing lives, I’m guessing you hunger—even crave—for that same work in your life.

How do we go to get into the kitchen of God changing lives? Let’s start with the man (or woman) in the mirror: How is God already at work in your life? Maybe you resonated with the people I mentioned earlier, those folks that only talk about God’s work in their lives in the past tense. Pause and ask the Holy Spirit: “How are you at work in my life? How do you want to be at work in my life where I might be resistant?”

My hope and prayer for you is that the Holy Spirit will begin to reveal the ways that He’s already been working in your life. With that revelation comes an invitation to join Him in that work, to double-down on the transforming change He’s doing.

But you may also be confronted with the reality that the Holy Spirit has been trying to grow you—change you—in ways you’ve been resistant to. You may have become comfortable with where you’re at with God and with how you’ve been living out your faith. When you look at your life, you may realize that you haven’t lived by the mantra: “Healthy things grow and growing things change.”

Often, I think we start to experience the Holy Spirit’s growth and change in our lives when we’re in community with others. It is often through others that God shows us the goodness of the growth and change that He can do in someone’s life and impart the courage for us to allow Him to grow us.

We can be in community with others in several places, but the most accessible and available is the local church. In church, we (hopefully) see God doing the most changing of lives that we can encounter.

Unfortunately, though, many of our churches often become much like us: ambivalent and protective against growth and change. We need such churches to allow God’s guiding growth and resulting change. I’ve come to believe that healthy churches grow and growing churches change.

Growth in a church doesn’t just look like growth in numbers. Growth begins when we make disciples of Jesus instead of mere members of our church. This growth may then be expressed in any number of ways: designating the church budget to be spent less within the walls of the church and more outside the walls of the church; serving the first-time guest of the church more than the member of the church; welcoming people that look nothing like those in the pews on Sunday. The opportunities for how growth changes our churches for the better are as numerous and as unique as our churches themselves.

These are good, healthy changes. Not easy changes, mind you. Good and healthy changes are rarely easy changes. But God doesn’t invite us to easy changes. He invites us to a healthy relationship with Him. A relationship that grows. A relationship that changes. Are you in that kind of relationship with Him?