By Nathan Jordan
What some might call “essentials” others might call “fundamentals,” but the idea in either case is that there are some key or basic things that make up a sort of foundation for whatever it is that we are talking about. In this case, we are talking about the Christian life, or, the life of the person who is a follower of Jesus. You could call this a sort of “get back to the basics” conversation. Seeing as that will be the nature of this discussion, I can’t help but to at least mention Vince Lombardi.
Vince Lombardi was a famous football coach for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s who said some memorable things about hard work and progress towards a goal. He said things like, “There is no substitute for work,” and “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit,” and “Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off of the goal.” My personal favorite is, “Once you have established the goals you want and the price you’re willing to pay, you can ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure, and the temporary failures.”
Vince Lombardi is helpful as an example when you want to talk about the fundamentals of any endeavor. He is, for many, the first name that comes to mind when one says anything about “getting back tot he basics.” This is because of how he approached training camp with his football teams before each regular season. Vince Lombardi famously began his team’s training camp in 1961 by holding up a football to his players and stating plainly, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” Just months earlier the Green Bay Packers had come within minutes of winning the NFL Championship, squandering the lead late in the fourth quarter to the Philadelphia Eagles.
Lombardi was convinced that they needed to start from the ground up and to re-learn the fundamentals of the game—to get “back to the basics.” So, he taught them basic blocking, tackling, and every other facet of the game from the ground up that season, and every year thereafter. At the end of that first season of getting back to the basics, they beat the New York Giants 37–0 for the championship! If that wasn’t testimony enough of the success of his approach, Vince Lombardi won a total of 5 NFL Championships in 7 years! In addition to this, he never coached a team with a losing record.
You may not be into football, though. For those who are musicians, could you approach your craft without the basic building blocks of melody and harmony, of key signatures and chord progressions, or without time signatures? How could anyone ever stay together?
What about someone in sales who never got to “the close,” who never offered the sale and just waited silently for the customer to commit? What about an office manager who didn’t believe in filing systems or any form of organization? What if they tried to manage the whole office without ever even using a calendar? Could you imagine a supervisor of employees who didn’t stop to notice that different employees respond to different motivations, or a teacher who didn’t realize that there are different learning styles for their students?
James Clear, authtor of the amazing book Atomic Habits, said this on his blog about Lombardi’s focus on the fundamentals: “It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one critical event or one ‘big break’ while simultaneously forgetting about the hidden power that small choices, daily habits, and repeated actions can have on our lives.”
But how does this apply to our Christianity? What exactly would be the basic fundamentals of our HEALTH or GROWTH as a Christian?
There must be some sort of fundamental “basics” to the Christian life, right? There must be a “football” that we can point followers of Jesus to in order to begin the discussion or to facilitate the process of spiritual growth. Our dilemma, as I see it, is identifying those basics and how the average Christian can begin immediately to lay hold of them in order to get going on the journey.
Over countless conversations, and over years of study, the question of spiritual maturing has challenged me to find a usable picture of what a follower of Jesus might look like if they are simply “in good shape,” so to speak. Some say that this is defining “discipleship,” since we are all disciples of Jesus called to make disciples (see Matt 28:18–20). I think that defining a “disciple,” or “disciplemaker,” is for another conversation. I say this because I believe that conversation has to do with some elements of behavior, some aspects of intention and motivations, and I think that things like that begin to move outside of what we are talking about here. I’ll get to that discussion down the road, so keep an eye out for it.
For now, though, we need to figure out the basics of the Christian faith that are beneficial for every follower of Jesus, generally. If there are some Christians who seem to be healthy and some who don’t, or if there are some who seem to be maturing while others seem to be either stagnant (or worse, moving in the wrong direction)—well, what is the difference?
I didn’t want to only measure spiritual maturity as an upper limit of some data set about Bible knowledge or a test of how extensively one is involved in volunteering at church or in community service. There are plenty of examples of people who know the Bible really well but who hold some heretical beliefs or seem more like dangers to the church than assets. There are also plenty of stories, unfortunately, about people (even staff members of churches) who are very busy with the activities of modern religion, but who also have terrible problems with the condition of their hearts or of their motives. But how does one begin to move things like heart attitudes and motives in the right direction?
I know that we are all sinners moving along toward maturity and that no one is perfect. We will not reach perfection, any of us, until we are finally in the eternal state with Jesus, in the new heavens and the new earth. That final state is our glorification, when we are finally like Christ in ongoing sinlessness and enjoying face-to-face fellowship with him. In the meantime we are all in the midst of the journey of sanctification.
Sanctification is the process of being made holy or set apart for God. Sanctification is the Christian word for the process of being conformed more and more into the image of Christ while we are still living in a world which is beset by sin and error on all sides. Sanctification, as a term, has to do with being “set apart,” a concept usually expressed by the word hagios (ἅγιος) or hagiazo (ἁγιάζω), which means “holy” (as a quality or as in “a holy person, a saint”) or “to make holy, to set apart.” The entire idea of a follower of Jesus being healthy and growing is about what it means to be moving along in the process of being made holy. God said repeatedly in the Old Testament, “Be holy, as I am holy” (Lev 11:44–45, 19:2; 20:7; cf 1 Pet 1:16). For a follower of Jesus to become more like Jesus they have to have some sort of a forward movement or direction on the journey of sanctification, and that movement needs to be happening in a healthy, stable, and beneficial way.
One of the things I was trying to avoid was a debate about measuring the state of someone’s eternal destiny based upon their current behavior. I think methods that measure someone’s status of spiritual maturity based on external moral appearance are unhelpful. Therefore, to keep from either juding someone’s status of salvation or from basing maturity on behavior, I started to talk about a “Healthy, Growing Christian Life.” This expression, to me, emphasizes that none of us reaches perfection in this life, but that there is a difference between Christians who are healthy compared to those who are not healthy, or between those who are growing and those who are not growing (whether they are standing still or even moving backwards away from maturity).
This may not be the best term for what I am trying to talk about, but it is the one I have settled on. I think most Christians know that there is a different between those believers who are healthy and making progress towards maturity, and those who are not. We know that some are, in a manner of speaking, in an unhealthy state—they are not maturing beyond their initial infant status in the faith (e.g., 1 Cor 3:1–2; Heb 6:1–2; 1 Pet 2:2–3; 2 Pet 3:18).
Understand, though, that this is not about measuring spiritual maturity or about defining stages or levels of growth. Such things may be helpful, but they are always very subjective. What we are talking about here is not as much about the meaning or process of spiritual growth, so to speak, as it is about how one can, themselves, try to put in the right ingredients to be able to grow in their spiritual life.
How does one put themselves in a position where growth or health are even possible? I think there are some essential ingredients that one can “mix into” their life in order to do just that. Thus, the title I have chosen is: “3 Essential Ingredients of a Healthy, Growing Christian Life.”
Please note, though, that Christian growth is related to, but not the same as, salvation. You can be a Christian without being healthy and growing. As far as salvation is concerned, under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, a person realizes their depravity and guilt in the sight of God. Then by grace through faith in Jesus Christ they confess their sins in repentance and are immediately redeemed into relationship with God.
That is what we call salvation, and it is based on the finished work of Jesus, God’s Son, who lived a perfect life and was crucified as an atoning sacrifice on our behalf. He was raised bodily from the dead on the third day, and after appearing to his disciples, he ascended into heaven where he intercedes at the right hand of God the Father until he returns to judge the living and the dead. I have preached on this and written about this, and I’d be happy to give a detailed discussion to this upon request or to point anyone towards resources with biblical support for this explanation of salvation (thus I’ll not do so here at this time).
It is also important to remember that salvation is an accomplishment of God’s sovereignty which cannot be undone or overturned by any principle or power, human or otherwise. Thus the one who truly believes is fully and totally saved and cannot be lost from the grip of God’s love in Jesus Christ (Rom 8:37–39).
Following the reality of placing your faith in Jesus Christ and becoming a “Christian,” we come to the call of God upon our lives that we should grow in maturity as followers of Jesus (1 Cor 3:1–2; 1 Pet 2:2–3). The reason for the discussion of these 3 Essential Ingredients is to figure out how to get to this health and growth. How can we position ourselves for this growth to take place? What can we do in order to participate in the spiritual growth which God desires to work in our lives by means of the Holy Spirit?
There is a pathway toward living a healthy, growing Christian life. I intend to demonstrate that there are three things that the believer can make a part of their life that are necessary for spiritual growth. In other words, while there may be other things that can contribute to spiritual growth, these three particular elements can not be substituted for by any other means. Other things may help, but these things are indispensable. Without one of these three, the Christian cannot really grow or have a spiritual life that can be considered to be healthy.
This, then, is why we need to think about Three Essential Ingredients for a Healthy, Growing Christian Life. It is because we need some basic ingredients that are essential to the recipe of a follower of Jesus who is growing in a healthy way. If we can figure out what a healthy follower of Jesus looks like, and if we can determine what is necessary for growth, then we will be on the right track to identifying these ingredients. That will be the topic of our next post.
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