Several months ago someone in our church gave my wife a beautiful Meyer lemon tree. When she received this gift she was told the plant had certain conditions for growth:
- It needs sunlight
- It needs water, but not too much. They only need water 1-2x a week
- It needs fertilizer
- It needs to be outdoors when it’s warm out and indoors as soon as the temperatures drop (which this winter took until December 29th)
- And then we learned on our own that most importantly, it needs to be kept out of reach of toddlers!! On Halloween my toddler niece and toddler son found the plant and started scooping out handfuls of soil and throwing them across the living room. Very bad for the plant! 🙂
If all these conditions are met, the plant thrives. If some of these conditions are met, the plant survives. If none of these conditions are met, the plant dies.
Now it works the exact same way with our faith. As with the plant, our faith has certain “conditions for growth.” If we’re to grow spiritually we must:
- Read our Bible and pray
- go to church
- serve
- give
- share our faith
- be in a group
These are the conditions for growth (for spiritual growth). If all these conditions are met, our faith thrives. If some of these conditions are met, our faith survives. If none of these conditions are met, our faith dies.
Now here’s the good news – we really don’t have to focus on all six of these conditions separately, for one of these serves as a catalyst for all! If you’ll just place yourself in a group, the other disciplines will happen quite naturally. For example…
- If your group is studying through a certain book of the Bible and you’ll be answering questions based off what you read at group each week, there’s the accountability you need to stay faithful in Bible reading.
- At group you always share your prayer requests with the other group members. This gives you something to be praying about throughout the week. And since you’ll want others to pray for your needs, you’ll be sure to pray for theirs!
- Group also helps you stay faithful in attending church. When you’re in a group you make friends. and when you have friends, you’re not going to want to miss seeing them a single Sunday! So being in a group doesn’t just help you stay faithful with Bible reading and prayer, it also helps you stay faithful with attending the weekly service
You see, being in a group is the catalyst for all the other conditions for growth! So make sure you get in a group! Your next opportunity to sign up for groups is this Sunday January 17, 2016 at 6pm at newdaychurch.cc/groups.