Tyler David talks about the slowness of sanctification. There are seasons where we may feel like we’re not changing or growing. We must seek out maturity to grow.
Here are a few of Tyler’s main points:
Tyler David: God is never done with you. He’s never done with you. So often we like these parts of our lives: “This is just who I am. This is just my personality. I’m just brash. I just tell it like it is. I’m always insecure in rooms of people.” But God is pressing and saying, “No, I want to keep growing you, changing you, and redeeming those personality traits and stories that you have into something that continues to build the church up in love.”
Now let me give a caveat here as an encouragement – this takes time, and often your maturity and your growth is much slower than you’d like. I hate that I still struggle with sins that I struggled with when I was 18. I just hate it. I just want to be done with some of these sins that I think I should be past. You’ve had that feeling where you’re thinking, “I know this sin is irrational. I know this sin is stupid, yet I find myself back at it and repenting of the same thing again and again and again.”
John Piper has a great line of saying he doubts the existence of God most because of the slowness of his sanctification. He struggles with God’s existence most when he sees himself repeating the same sins and errors over and over again and wonders why he isn’t growing faster.
I want to give you this text for encouragement. When Jesus talks about the four soils in Matthew and in Mark, he talks about how the good soil produces an actual crop. Then in Luke’s gospel, Luke adds two words at the end of the good soil that helps us know it’s going to be slow. In Luke 8:15, Jesus says, “As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.” That last line is encouraging for us.
It’s easy to get discouraged when you’re not growing to think, “Something is wrong with me. Something is off.” But Jesus says, “The good soil are those who hold it fast.” You hold fast to the Word of God, even when you struggle, even when you fail.
It says you bear fruit with patience, so there will be seasons where it seems you’re growing a ton. Maybe you’re in one of those right now where you feel like God is changing everything in your life and you’re growing. Everything is up-and-to-the-right right now spiritually, but there are going to come seasons where it goes down. There are going to come seasons where it plateaus and you don’t feel like anything is happening. You’re reading the bible and it’s fine, but you don’t feel like anything is changing at all.
Even in those seasons he’s saying you hold fast to it and you will bear fruit over time with patience. But you have to know, for that to happen, you have to seek out maturity. Maturity is not just going to happen in your life, and you’ve got to know, even as a Christian, your tendency is to want to drift toward immaturity.
