“How They Grow”: Part 4

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

The Nature of Spiritual Growth

While there is no growing into holiness, there is, praise the Lord, a blessed growth in it.

Growth In, Not Into, Holiness

The Apostle says, “Grow in grace.” We can grow in the use of it, in the measure of it, and in our love and enjoyment of it. Israel in Canaan serves as examples of all this. At first they scarcely knew what to do with themselves. They were in the land, it was theirs, it had fruit, and herds, and rich stores; but they had at first little or no access to, or benefit from, any of its resources. They were not used to its soil, or climate, or its ways of agriculture. Never had the generation fed on that kind of diet. It was all new to them. They had to learn how to use the blessings into which they had entered.

This is always true of persons entering the Canaan of perfect love. About all we knew at first was that we “were over” Jordan into God’s Promised Land. How new it all seemed! How new even the Bible was! How strange the world around us! We never had gone that way before. Beyond us, stretching away like the hills of Palestine before the Jewish armies, lay our untried years. Their unknown history contained wider ranges of experience and a world of unexpected testing and blessing. We were to learn by victory at our Jericho’s, and defeat at our Ai’s. We were indeed in a big country, and scarcely knew what to do with it. Growth in the knowledge of it, and growth as to how to use and enjoy it, were as yet unsolved problems. In fact “growth in grace and knowledge” were essential to possession.

The figure of crossing over into Canaan also teaches another lesson: namely, every Israelite knew that the entrance into Canaan was something very different from the entrance into the wilderness. It was not nor could it be the same. If any one of them insisted before Joshua that they made both the Red Sea and Jordan crossing at once, he would certainly have been considered very ignorant of geography, if nothing else. It is still so. No man acquainted with spiritual geography is “off” enough to claim the spiritual crossing at justification and sanctification are the same. The waters crossed are not the same. The countries on either side are not the same. The conditions of the people are entirely different. No foe followed at the fords of Jordan. At the Red Sea enemies were on both sides and the country was not theirs. At Jordan no enemies were in sight, and the hills on both sides were home fields of the promised land. The work, condition, and character of the people in the wilderness, and in Canaan, were very separate and distinct from each other. In the first instance, the people were going to Mt. Sinai, to learn. In the second they were going up into their real Canaan to conquer, occupy, and possess it. In the first they fed on the temporary manna; and in the second on “the old corn of the land” (Joshua 5:11,12).

No, no; the two crossings are not and never can be the same. Nor is the climate the same. So evident is this that one hardly need draw a contrast. And yet, even to this day, there are those so blind they cannot, or will not, acknowledge they see it.

Here also we find a complete answer to those who assert that “a soul in the ex­per­i­ence of holiness can’t grow any more, has no further need of the means of grace,⁵ can’t pray the Lord’s prayer,” etc. If Israel had nothing to learn after crossing the Jordan, then there might be some excuse for such statements. If Israel had no need of the use of “means” at Jericho, Ai, and the battle of the kings, then might we stop to consider such objections. But how different is the history of life in the land! Our experience of holiness teaches us that we need the constant use of the means of grace. We need daily acquaintance with the land, and also experimential knowledge of how to live there. Canaan’s fruits are not the same as those which grew in Egypt. Its agriculture is different. Its climate is of a different order. These things are all true spiritually. Advanced knowledge is essential to life in the land. Holiness people who persist in dwelling by the Jericho fords never possess the land. Holiness means continued advance! There is no stand-still place, where there is nothing either to learn or to do; nor is there any spiritual health where no exercise is required. In the life of holiness, loaves of bread do not grow on trees, ready-made; nor the grapes yield their juices without the wine press. Means are as much in vogue in Canaan as in the wilderness. Holiness is no sinecure⁶ calling. Its law is “If any work not, neither let him eat.”⁷ Its very law demands growth in grace, use of means and honest toil. Without these it can never possess the goodly land of God’s inheritance. Holiness is intensely practical, active, rational. It requires reason, wisdom, strength and environment, each to yield their highest service. Its primal law is “grow in grace and knowledge.”⁸

Growth in knowledge implies growth in grace. It is a law of our being and of our order of being that we learn for some purpose. We learn to do, not simply to know. When we learn that which we do not turn into practice, God arranges that it is taken away. Knowledge and practice are twins that always go together, or else come to grief. So evident is this law, that we do not need to elaborate it here. The evident order of God for every soul is, Keep your walk up to the border of your light.

Another law of the soul’s nature and environment is that every legitimate aspiration and desire of the soul has for it an appropriate sphere and orbit. If we have love, there is something to love. If we have desire to learn, there is a field for the exercise of that gift. If there is the power to reverence, there is that to be revered. If there is ability to foresee danger and a desire and power to protect ourselves, then there is something to avoid. Is there endowment to appreciate, admire, enjoy, to go out beyond the bounds of the present, and power for conquest and enlargement? Then all these have their proper fields of operation and advancement.

Applying these laws to the newly converted soul, what do we find? We see power to love, and a God to love. We find need of knowledge, but with it a Bible is put into the hands. We find that person unskilled in the active duties of Christian living, but with a wide school for every­day practice. There are desires for more. There are actual possibilities of falling away and making total shipwreck of the faith.⁹ There are capacities for work, and a field for the same, and a great need of labor. We also find life begun, but that life yet in much feebleness. The outlines of the Divine image seem to be given with years of detail yet unwrought. There are great wants as yet incapable of being translated into expression. Like a babe in natural life, there is a canvas for a character, but the painter has not yet come. No colors are yet laid on. Not nearly all is there that will be, and yet the picture is begun. That canvas will not of itself grow into a face. It has nothing within it to make color out of, though it has a place for color to be put on. So a regenerate soul has the framework of a house, but there is as yet no completed home.

We want now to apply these principles to the subject in hand, that is, holiness. We make these observations:

Hence, the newly converted soul sees plainly its need of holiness, but sees at the same time, lying directly in its pathway, the old snag of carnality. Its hope lies not in growing that old rock out of the channel, but in its cooperation with a power outside of itself which is mighty to save.

(Continued in Part 5)

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