"NO!"?

I heard someone say this and it really made sense to me...

"When you tell God 'no,' that is the moment you stop growing."

The point he was making was that God wants us to grow in our love and devotion to Him, but most Christians get to a place where they are comfortable with where they are in their relationship with God. They decide they know enough or have done enough or have given enough and they refuse to go forward. God calls them forward, but they say 'no.'

I have seen this happen. There are lots of Christians that stop or never really start to share their faith or study God's Word and pray or give financially to the church. Because of their disobedience, there is no growth. Their lives go into neutral spiritually and they slowly begin to turn cold to the things of God. The transformation is slow. It's not as though they hit the breaks. The issue is they don't hit the gas and the result is a lack of power in their lives.

Over weeks and months and years of this, they soon come to a stop. They don't even realize it because they are still there physically present in a lot of ways. They still look like regular Christians, but the fact is they are fruitless. They tell themselves they are ok and that it's normal to miss worship and avoid Bible study, prayer, service in the church, financial giving, and sharing Christ with lost people.

We must be careful to obey and see to it that we are growing and producing fruit in order to inherit all the Lord has for us.

Colossians 1:10–12 And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.