This is the continuous of the post I wrote on defining what spiritual growth is. There I explained that spiritual growth is not the growth of spiritual knowledge or the growth of spiritual gifts, rather it is the growth of the spiritual life in us. In that post I mentioned that life is grown on the land (Christ) in the presence of the sun/light (Christ). And what I want to do in this post is to expatiate on that and explain further how this spiritual life can be grown in us. So life is grown by abiding in the land. Everything needed for life to grow is in the land, and as long as you abide in the land life would continue to grow in you. Christ is the land and the source of this spiritual life. The more we abide in him, the more this life would grow in us. This Christ is a person, he lives in you, and you need to be awakened to him, because you cannot abide in him if you are not awakened to him.

Concerning this most people would tell you go read your bible and abide in the word, but we must go deeper than that. We are not a spiritually blind people, we have the ability to see Christ in us, to be awakened to this living person inside of us. I have a course on the “Indwelling Christ/Oneness With God’s Nature”, there I teach Christians to be awakened to this person (Christ) in them, to be able to discern him, abide in him and live by him. Once you are able to do that you will realize that life is growing in you, it is gradually taking over, with it clutches tightening upon you and it laws predominating and governing you. Just like that you are changing. You then realize that certain areas where you were once vulnerable to death, the law of death no long works on you, you realize you can no longer respond to death in these areas. You are now governed by a new law, and you can’t resist this law as it takes hold of you and bend you to his (Christ) will.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” (Rom 8:2).

Another thing we must learn about growing the life is how to use the light (the revelation of Christ) to cause life to grow within us. It is one thing to have revelation, and it is a whole different thing to learn how to use this light to produce life in your members. First, you must pursue light (the revelation of Christ), and as you get it you must learn to come under that light and abide in it, then the life in you would begin to grow. You come under and abide in the light by fixing your eyes on this revelation of Christ. Developing concentration is one of the most difficult things, humans are easily distracted—it’s the law of death, the death in man makes it difficult for him to focus on important and virtuous things. Man is easily distracted and made to walk down the path of self-destruction. So keeping your eyes fixed on the light involves battling the death in you—that tendency to get distracted and indulge yourself in less important things. But if you can succeed in this, it would cause life to grow in you.

Let say you are face with the temptation to commit a sin, and death is just pulling you into this sin. You must keep your eyes fixed on the revelation that you are dead to sin, in Christ you don’t know how to commit sin, you have lost that ability— you don’t even know how to respond to sin, it is alien to you. If you've truly gotten this revelation and you can fix your eyes on it during this time of temptation, you would just realize that death is losing its grip on you, the urge to do it is fading away—life is replacing death, yes life is growing in your members. And the more you succeed in doing this whenever that temptation comes, the more life takes over that area of your life, until that place is completely filled with life and you can no longer yield to that temptation. In fact, you realize you don’t struggle like before whenever the temptation comes, your default has changed from yielding to death in that area to yielding to life, and whether consciously or unconsciously, you are now living above that sin.

I must also state that if you lack that revelation of being dead to sin and you try to fix your eyes on it, you will undergo great difficult. The deeper the revelation you have of this truth the easier it would become to have victory when you fix yours eyes on it. If this truth is only an idea in your head, then I am sorry you would undergo difficulty. But if you have gotten so deep in the revelation of this truth, that whenever you think about the truth that you are dead to sin in Christ, it sparks something in you, you become overwhelmed with this feeling of brokenness, this feeling of handicap and emptiness, then it would become easier to resist death and cause life to grow. This is why pursuing revelation is important, it is not enough to have head knowledge, a mere idea in your head. You must go deep enough to the extent that it sparks something in you whenever you think about it.

The final thing that I would mention about growing the life in you is that life must be allowed to flow and be shared otherwise its growth would be stunted. Let me illustrate it to you in the natural. If the plant refuses animals from eating its fruits and leafs then these animals would not excrete and produce manure that makes the land more fertile so that plant and draw more life from it. So you can see the circle and the flow of life. The plant shares its leafs and fruits with the animals so that they can eat, digest and excrete, hereby fertilizing the soil, making it richer so that the plant would then use to produce life. Spiritual life is life a river, it must be allowed to flow from one person to another, and if you stop the flow of that life in you then your spiritual growth would be stunted. So to grow the life in you, you must seek for an avenue that allows life to be released from the inside of you towards others. This is why every believer needs the ecclesia.

The ecclesia is a meeting where believers gather together to share life among each other, allowing life to flow from one person to another, hereby causing the life in each individual to grow exponentially. This would then lead to the full maturity of the whole body. We must understand that each member of the body is a unique flavor of Christ, and when you share the life you have with a member of the body, the moment it gets into that member, the life becomes infused with that unique flavor that the member represents. Then this member pass out this richer life to another member who would then infuse it with his our flavor, passing it again to another member. As it continues to go round this life is getting richer and richer with different flavors, and then it returns back to you so rich and edifying, causing you to grow so beautifully in the riches of Christ.

Another wonderful thing about sharing the life is that the more life you share, the more it would flow from the source (Christ) into you. In scripture we learn of a river of living waters, flowing out of the throne of God. This river flows into us, and as we release this living water, more would flow from the source. When you have a word of knowledge and you walk up to the person, open your mouth and start speaking. As you speak a word becomes a sentence, and then a sentence becomes a whole chapter. Before you know it you have told the person the whole story of his life. And all of these started by just releasing that single word that you had, that word that made no sense to you, you only opened your mouth out of obedience. The same goes with teaching and sharing the word.

When you receive a rhema as you study scripture, sometimes you realize that as you are sharing that rhema with someone more begins to come. The more you share the more you receive from the Spirit. I have discovered that I learn more when I am writing or teaching, and many also have shared the same experience. The life is like a river, the more you let it out, the more life you receive. And imagine how much blessings it would be if you have a community where you come together to share life. You share things you learned while reading the Bible, things you received while fellowshipping with the Spirit, experiences you have in your private time with God or in your relationship with Him generally. When you gather together to share these things you will begin to get more and more from God and from that fellowship with the believers, as a result you are becoming fuller and fuller with the life.

The lack of ecclesia in the body of Christ today is one of the major cause of the immaturity and the stunted growth of the body of Christ. We have a long way to grow, and the way we are practicing Christianity is not helping at all. Anyway, the Lord is in control, He has determined to have a mature group of believers emerge to demonstrate His fullness and glory. The question is, do you desperately want to be one of those? Do you want to grow to the extent that the fullness and glory of God is manifested through you, causing your life to become the manifestation of heaven on earth?