Crockpot Spirituality

When my daughter was three years old, she asked me if she could do something. “You’ll have to wait until your get bigger,” I told her. She paused for a moment, looked me in the eye and said, “Tomorrow I will be bigger.”
Many people have the same mindset when it comes to their spiritual growth. They think they can microwave it. They think they can instantly grow to spiritual maturity if they just find the right key. But here is the truth: Spiritual growth does not happen in day. It happens daily over an entire lifetime. It’s a process. It takes time.
Did you know that it takes God more then 60 years to make an oak tree? It takes him six months to make a mushroom. What do you want to be, a mushroom or an oak tree?
We may be in a hurry to mature spiritually. But God isn’t. He is working from and for eternity. Miles Stanford in his book Principles of Spiritual Growth, tells us that many great men and women of God did not become that way over night. It took time. In fact, he says:
We might consider some familiar names of believers whom God obviously brought to maturity and used for his glory….The average for these was 15 years after they entered their life work before they began to know the Lord Jesus as their life and ceased trying to work for him and began to allow Him to be their all and all and do his work through them.”
“Tomorrow I will be bigger,” said my three-year-old. Do you have that quick fix, fast food mentality? If so, I want to encourage you to remember that God doesn’t microwave our spiritual growth; he crock pots us. Be patient with the process!
Photo: Pastor  Steve Larson Community  Celebration Church Kasson