Week 1: What Spiritual Growth Is (and Isn't)

Lesson 1 takes apart the scorecard most of us carry into the Christian life — days since the last blowup, chapters read this month, Sundays we wanted to be there — and asks what the New Testament actually measures. Peter closes his second letter with a command to grow, a word for living things that set their own pace, 2 Peter 3:18; Paul says we are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, 2 Corinthians 3:18, in a verb that is passive and never once reports how the process feels. Jesus put the same thing in a parable about a farmer who scatters seed, goes to bed, and does not know how the growing happens. From there the lesson names three things that get mistaken for growth — feeling, information, and the absence of struggle — and lands on Peter's preposition. We grow in grace, on ground that was handed to us rather than earned, and none of us is on trial for the pace.