Assessing Your Progress

Our mission statement ends with these words: ". . . and fostering spiritual growth."  Those words are not just a little tag, added on at the end of the statement as if they were an afterthought.  No, on the contrary, spiritual growth is at the heart of what we do here.  God calls us - each and every single one of us - to grow in the ways of Jesus Christ.  We do not enter this life with all the Christian virtues fully developed in our lives.  We each have to take responsibility for managing our life in such a way so that we actually grow in the Christian virtues.  We should be able to look back at our lives and think to ourselves, "Yes, I've grown in my walk with Jesus Christ.  I've grown in some significant ways."

But how do we measure that?  We can't measure spiritual growth the way we can measure growth in our bodies.  There's no blood test that can be done in a lab to measure the degree to which we have grown spiritually from one year to the next.  We can't go in for an annual physical for an objective assessment of our spiritual vitals.  The kind of growth that God is trying to promote in us through Jesus Christ is difficult to measure.  It is subjective.

But that should not deter us from trying to measure our spiritual progress in some way.  We need some kind of measuring tool, some kind of yardstick to use to see how well we're doing.  One such yardstick could be the nine characteristics Paul describes as "the fruit of the Spirit" in Galatians 5:22-23:

• love
• joy
• peace
• patience
• kindness
• generosity
• faithfulness
• gentleness
• self-control

Another yardstick might be the "seven heavenly virtues" that were first identified by the Christian writer Aurelius Prudentius around the year 400 AD:

• chastity
• temperance
• charity
• diligence
• patience
• kindness
• humility

One way to go about assessing your spiritual growth might be to look at your life in light of these two lists of virtues.  How are you doing in each one of those areas?  How would your spouse, partner, best friend, supervisor, co-worker, employee, colleague, or acquaintance say you do in each one of those areas?  It would be worth asking some people who know you well to offer their own assessment.  You could even take this a step further and ask yourself - or ask people you trust - how well you were doing in each one of those areas five years ago, and compare that to how you are doing now.  Hopefully, there's been some significant progress!  There should be progress, if we're taking the faith seriously.  We should be able to look back on our lives and say, "I'm a genuinely better person than I used to be" - and other people who know us well should be able to say the same thing about us as well.  If we're thinking that we've made improvements, but other people who know us well disagree, then we better listen to them and realize that we're deceiving ourselves!

Another way to go about this would be to look at the opposite extremes: the characteristics and behaviors that we would do well to try to grow out of.  Both of the two lists of virtues that I mentioned above have corresponding lists of vices.  In contrast to the "fruit of the Spirit," Paul identifies the "works of the flesh" (Galatians 5:19-21):

• fornication
• impurity
• licentiousness
• idolatry
• sorcery
• enmities
• strife
• jealousy
• anger
• quarrels
• dissensions
• factions
• envy
•  drunkenness
• carousing
• and things like these

And in contrast to the "seven heavenly virtues" in Christian tradition, there are also the "seven deadly sins":

• lust
• gluttony
• greed
• sloth
• wrath
• envy
• pride

So you could take these two lists of vices and honestly ask yourself: which of these vices are still a part of my daily existence here on this earth?  Then, praying to God for strength and courage, set about trying to work systematically on diminishing the role that each of those vices plays in your life.  Ideally, we should all be growing away from those vices, and growing into the virtues.

This work isn't accomplished overnight.  Usually, it requires months or years of hard, disciplined work to reach a point where you have pretty successfully eliminated a vice from your list.  Usually, it requires months or years of work to really develop a virtue that you're trying to develop.

What matters most is the effort.  Too many people in our world go through life never really attempting to improve their character.  Too many people never work to really address their own weaknesses or to build strength where there hadn't been strength before.  Too many people just accept "what is" and never try to live into "what might be."  Too many people never really try to grow.

But it is possible.  It very certainly is possible.  The greatest Christians that have ever lived - and the ones who have had the most lasting positive impact on the world around them - are those who have worked hard to eliminate their vices, build their virtues, and develop their Christian character.  That's a task that we would all do well to work on, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year.  As we age, we (and the people who know us well) can look back at our lives and honestly say - with thanksgiving in our hearts - "Wow, look at how much I've grown."

Peace and blessings,

Bill