How do you hold on to your spiritual progress?
How does it feel when you make spiritual progress in your life? It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? You feel like you’ve finally had a victory over the guilt and sins of the past, or a challenge you’ve been facing, or you just feel like you’re growing spiritually.
But then, sometimes right on the heels of that spiritual progress, you fall back into the old patterns of thinking and acting. One of the things that can help you hold on to this spiritual progress is to share your spiritual victories with someone you trust, someone who’s supportive of you on your journey.
Your spiritual progress
If you’ve been listening to these Freedom Friday episodes over the past several months and been putting the ideas I have shared into practice in your daily life, I would imagine you’ve come a long way and have made a lot of spiritual progress.
I earnestly hope and pray you’ve been finding more and more freedom from the guilt and shame from sins and hurts of the past. On this spiritual journey, it’s so empowering when we begin to feel that freedom from the past and feel like we’re finally making some real spiritual progress in our lives.
But you may have noticed that sometimes even right after a victory or a big step of spiritual progress, you fall back into those old patterns of temptation and sin, guilt and shame.
I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me. Sometimes just when I feel like I’ve made some genuine spiritual progress, I either do or say something I shouldn’t, or I feel guilty all over again for something I did years ago.
Well, don’t be too hard on yourself when this happens.
The question really is, how can we stop this cycle of making spiritual progress and then sinning or feeling guilty all over again?
Share your spiritual progress
Something that’s helped me a whole lot is sharing my spiritual progress each step of the way with someone I trust deeply. In my case, it’s usually my wife. It could be a close friend or family member who understands you and has a spiritual supportive perspective.
Now, don’t just go tell everyone you know. Sometimes it’s really a good idea to wait a little while before you tell everyone or even one person about your spiritual progress.
Have you ever poured concrete or watched someone pour some fresh concrete? You can’t walk on it for hours. It has to set. It has to harden up.
And just so, when you’ve had a spiritual experience in your life, it usually is a good idea to let it set, so to speak, before you tell someone else about it. In fact, my wife and I sometimes say, “I want to talk to you about something, but the concrete’s still a little wet, so I hope we can talk about this later.”
What if you don’t have someone to share your spiritual progress with?
Maybe you don’t feel like you have someone like this in your life that you can share on a very deep level the things that you’re learning spiritually and your experiences. Well, if that’s the case, I encourage you to write down in a journal everything you would say to a trusted friend about your spiritual progress.
Why is this important to share your spiritual progress, whether it’s with a person or in your journal? Well, first of all, it’s a way of being grateful and expressing gratitude for how God has worked in your life.
It helps to establish and solidify in your heart and your mind the spiritual progress you’ve made.
And when you share your spiritual progress with others, it strengthens and encourages them.
The wonderful thing about this is you can ask the person you share with to pray for you, and you can pray for them too.
Keep a journal of your spiritual progress
And when you write these things down in a journal, you have a permanent record you can come back to. I’ve been keeping a journal for many years where I record my spiritual progress and inspiration. I love to go back and see what I wrote in the past. Sometimes I’ll pick up a journal from several years ago and just flip through it to remind myself of some of the things that happened in my life, some of the things that God told me.
A lot of these experiences I’ve completely forgotten about, and I can re-experience that spiritual progress I made at the time and be inspired all over again. And sometimes it’s exactly what I need to deal with whatever challenge I’m facing at the time.
Even if you do have someone you share your spiritual progress with, I encourage you to write it down in a journal as well. You’ll be amazed 5 years from now when you go back and read what you wrote earlier.
Mutual support
When you share your spiritual progress with someone, be sure to make equal space for them to share their spiritual progress with you.
There are times we need to be in solitude on our spiritual journey, just being with God, but there are other times when having someone to share the journey with is really supportive.
It’s not that you’re depending on another person, but you’re walking together in this spiritual journey.
So, as you continue to grow spiritually and make progress and grow closer to God, find someone you can share these things with on a deep level. It will strengthen you. It will encourage you, and it will help the other person as well. That will help solidify the freedom that you have found from the sin and the guilt from the past and you’ll find more and more freedom to be who God made you to be.
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and church mentor. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by learning to think, pray, and love like Jesus. Contact him here.
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