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Two Essential thing for Christian Growth
by A.J. Wilson

Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever. 1 Peter 1:22:23 (emphasis mine)

I once saw on the news a report on growing strawberries; it was about a farmer in Georgia during a prolonged drought.  The farmer remarked that his harvest would not be as large or as sweet due to the lack of rain.  He explained that at its simplest strawberries need two things to grow, water and sunlight.  The sunlight would cause the photosynthesis to produce the plant’s food to grow, and the water gave it the characteristic sweetness.  This made me begin to think of the essential ingredients to make Christians grow.

We too have two essential ingredients to produce growing and healthy Christians; the Word and the Spirit.  If either element is emphasized too much, sin can creep into the church.  If there is an over-emphasis of the spirit, then Christians will become immature and tossed to and fro with the whims of Satan.  Spirit-saturated believers are often very willing to do things for the Lord, but are very easy to deter or lose focus. (Heb 5:12-14, 1 Pet 2:2)  However an over-emphasis on the Word creates dry, apathetic religion.  Rituals and doctrines can become dominating and prevent believers from advancing Christ outside the church building. (Math 16:5-12, 23:13-33) We must always guard ourselves from reaching either extreme. 

Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees for their extreme attention to rituals and study, and Paul encouraging Timothy and Titus to not neglect the Word but to study and preach it, could seem contradictory.  Yet the audiences were different, one was to the dry, hypocritical, apathetic Jews, and the other was for “baby” Gentiles.  The Gentile believers and the Pharisees are one way that God tries to show us the folly of going too far.  Their different admonishments were to pull them away from the extremes and into a healthy balance with God.  Take a look at what the Bible says describes, so that you can put up defenses to avoid going too far.

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