I meet many people frustrated with their spiritual life. Often I find they are measuring the wrong things. They tend to measure their day-to-day activities, rather than their progress over time. My intent with this post is to encourage you to measure outputs, not inputs when evaluating your spiritual life.
If you measure only inputs of your spiritual growth…such as…
- How many times you read your Bible
- How many minutes a day you pray
- How many people you invite to church
You’ll often feel like a failure in your spiritual life.
If you measure the outputs of your spiritual growth…such as…
- Are you becoming more patient?
- Are you learning to love people that are hard to love?
- Do you desire to be more like Christ today than you once desired?
You can discern if you are really growing spiritually.
It is much harder to put numbers on intangibles, but deep down you will usually know the answer. When I try to measure the inputs of my faith, I grow disappointed, because it seems I can never do enough. When I measure the outputs, the results of my faith, I can truly determine if I am growing to be more like Christ. (Thankfully, I can see huge progress over the course of my life.)
Discipline helps develop spiritual fruit, and I believe in practicing private disciplines that help grow your faith (inputs), but the discipline is not the goal, the fruit is the goal (outputs). Jesus didn’t say His followers would be known by the number of disciplines they can keep. Jesus said we would be known by our fruit.
What would you add to the list…what input do you tend to measure to judge if you are growing spiritually? More importantly, how are you doing over the course of time?
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Wrongfully, I have a tendency to measure my 'growth' by how few times I've been angry over the past week. James 1:19-20 has challenged me greatly but if I'm not walking and thinking in the power of the HS, I tend to 'work' my way to God's approval and not live in light of His total forgiveness and completed work on the cross. Gal 2:21 and Col 2:13-14.
Excellent thoughts. Thanks for sharing!
I judge my spiritual advancement by how much of love I am able to share with others unconditionally, how much of my ego, my anger ,my greed i have been able to shed from inside myself.Thanks.
Good measurement. Thanks
Great post Ron. I saved this in my email cache till I had time to read it all. I think we need to measure our spiritual journey not on how many times in a month we read our Bibles and pray, but how we are doing at exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit and living out Matthew 5-7.
Thank you for putting it out there so we could chew on it for awhile.
Blessings,
Dave
Thanks Dave. Good reference on the Matthew 5-7!
Great post Ron, I know I have been known to measure my Spiritual Growth by how much others say, "How Spiritual I Am." However I have realized that it is easy to mislead others when they don't walk in the way of your life, and only look through a window of it. Over the past couple of years I have come to know that my growth is not based on others perception but by what fruit is evident in my life. Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks George. You are right. It's easy to fool others…except those maybe that have to live with us!
I guess sometimes I measure how I’m doing spiritally by the good that others speak of me.
That's a good one!
I've been thinking a little about this recently.
Adding to the top list, how many times you masturbate is a typical one for guys… it is important but we use it to measure our spiritual growth, which is bad.
Thanks for this post Ron
Well, at least you laid it out there! Thanks for your honesty, because yes, that would be typical one for guys to struggle with, rather than looking at the heart and overall growth. Thanks man for being real!