What does it mean to be spiritual?  No one can be spiritual or biblical without first experiencing new birth.  New birth is life, life that is freely given to all who believe in the Lord Jesus as their personal savior.  Spirituality is growing in relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is simply Christian maturity; however, like in the natural, no one is born mature.  It is a process that one must go through to become a grown up. The same is also true with spirituality.  

A new Christian cannot be called spiritual simply because he or she has not had sufficient time to grow in knowledge and experience.  A new Christian can be spirit control, but the area of spiritual control will be expanding in the process of Christian growth.  A young Christian has not yet been confronted in many areas to try his or her faith in their life.  

When he/she is first saved, they may not even know that there is such a person as a weaker brother.  Although he may be not be unwilling to curve his liberties for the sake of that brother, he has not yet faced a real challenge. He may say that he has, but he has not faced having to actually not do something that he really wants to do.  He does not have to refrain because it is a sin to do whatever it is, but he needs to refrain because it may cause someone else to become weaker in faith or do something that will ruin their life. 

A Christian of longer standing may not be spiritual either;  not because he has had insufficient time, but because over the years of his or her Christian life, he or she has not allowed the Holy Spirit to control them.  The difference here is that the new Christian may lack the time required for spiritual growth, but the believer that has been saved for years may be deficient in his or her submission.  Without continually submitting to the Holy Spirit a Christian cannot mature. They will remain immature.

A Christian can backslide in certain areas of his life without losing all of the progress that he has made while being saved. The flesh may control his actions during a period of backsliding, but when he comes back to the Lord, he does not necessarily have to start the process of growth all over again.  This principle does not apply in every area of our life. There are some aspects of living that, when they have been violated, may never fully be redeemed.  

There are stages of growth within the area of maturity.  The Bible says that we grow from faith to faith and also from strength to strength.  Are you spiritual or just saved?  To make progress in your faith walk you must grow in submitting to the powerfully teaching and leading Holy Spirit.

Have you had a time in your life when you were waiting on the Lord and you decided that you could take matters in your own hands to speed things up a little bit?  After doing this you saw that, instead of making things better, you made things worse.  Now, you regret the fact that you didn't wait on the Lord.  I think that all of us, if we spoke truthfully, would have to admit that we have been guilty of the same thing.  Think about it...how many times have you opened up your mouth and said things that you regretted later?  Perhaps, you reacted to a circumstance before you really had enough time to think it through.  Maybe you got so angry at somebody that you actually verbalized your anger and hurt that other person.  Later on, you realized that the person really wasn't saying what you thought they were saying.  The Bible tells us, in the book of James, to be "swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (James 1:19). Good fruit is rarely produced in moments of anger.  

The fact of the matter is that we all need patience.  Patience is the fruit that is produced by the Spirit of God.  As we go through our trials and our mess ups it is something that we have great need of.  I don't know that there is any better story in the Bible that demonstrates the tragedy that impatience brings to a person's life than the story of Peter in the garden of Gethsemane the night that Jesus was taken.  You can read about it in John 18 and Luke 22:49-50.  Peter, through his impatience, was the first one to tell Jesus that he would never leave him; that others might, but that he would not leave him.  When the solders came into the garden, Jesus asked them, "Whom seek ye?"  When they said Jesus of Nazareth Jesus, by saying "I am he,"  found the solders and the temple police knocked to the ground by His words.  The power that was released hit them so hard and fast that they were on their backs before they knew what had happened.  While these soldiers were still flat on their backs, Peter decided to take matters into his own hands.  Maybe he thought that it was an opportunity to show courage, but what he did was wrong.  It is the perfect picture of someone being impatient and acting before thinking a thing through.  So, you need to think before you move.  He pulled out his sword and swings for the head of the high priest servant.  He missed the head, but he didn't miss entirely.  He cut off the servant's ear.  This last action of Peter put him in great jeopardy.  Had it not been for Jesus, Peter's actions would have landed him in jail or worse.

As we said earlier, the cuckleberry can completely take over a field planted for harvest.  We know that in the parable in Matthew 13 where Jesus talked about the sower and the seed that these seeds fell in four different locations.  Only one out of the four actually produced a harvest.  Even in the one productive field, there were three levels of harvest that were produced.  

How do I have a hundredfold harvest?  In Genesis 26:12, Isaac received a hundredfold return in the same year he planted.  A hundredfold return speaks of maximum yield.  How does that happen?  Well, the first thing that we have to take into consideration is that Isaac heard from God.  He, like a lot of others, was about to make a big mistake in going down into Egypt, had God not stopped him.  After stopping him from going down into Egypt, God commanded him to plant in a certain place.  God determines the location that growth will take place. It is He who will bring the increase though one plants and one waters.  It is He that causes increase to come forth.

Receiving a hundredfold harvest requires that the Christian hears from God first and is then obedient to what God is saying.  It is impossible to receive a hundredfold if your field (your mind) is covered with weed (your problems).  The ground has to be cultivated.  The difference in the parable that Jesus told and the harvest was because of the soil, it's cultivation.  The soil is your heart.  A lot of us, and I believe that even this farmer, did not take time to cultivate the soil and rid it permanently of these weeds.  

Taking more time in soil preparation will produce big dividends down the road.  We have to take time in preparing our hearts to do the will of God.  A lot of us get in a hurry and we do not take the necessary time to prepare ourself.  I learned a long time ago that God is big on preparation.  God took 80 years to prepare Moses for a 40 year ministry.  Notice that the time of preparation was twice as long as the time of ministry.  Jesus waited 30 years to minister for 3 1/2.  We are short on preparation and long on ministry.  We want to take a short period of time to minister for a lifetime.  We get in a hurry and this is where we fail.  Preparing your mind and preparing yourself to do the will of God is where you must start if you desire to stop repeating the same pattern of failure in your life.  

Preparation can be difficult because it feels like you are not doing anything productive.  You will also find yourself in a state of obscurity, hidden, going unnoticed, unrecognized, undetected.  But that is what preparation is for you.  It is a part of the process.  God will never thrust anyone out into their place of destiny unless they have taken the time to prepare their mind.  The waiting game is the most difficult part of preparation.  There is some suffering in preparation.  Moses had to flee for his life.  David, too, during preparation, faced the wilderness tending his father's sheep.  He had to be faithful at it.  In Luke 16:12, the word tells us that if you haven't been faithful in another man's who will give you of your own.  We want our own without proving our level of faithfulness in that which belongs to someone else.  You will never get yours until you help somebody else get theirs. 

 I know of a girl who was very talented and God led her to our church.  It was very obvious to me that she had leadership potential, but I could never get her to trust me with what she had.  She kept talking about "my ministry"..."I'm going to do this when I get my ministry". This went on for months.  Finally, as she was talking with me and talking about "my ministry" I stopped and corrected her by saying: "You don't have a ministry".   "Everything that you have is God's".  I don't think that she ever got the concept.  Not much longer she felt led to leave our church and eventually started her own church thinking that she was going to reap a hundredfold return.  She later found out that she had never really cultivated the ground.  So, "her ministry" never produced.  The pesky weeds came up and choked the seed and she began Gagging for Air.  After a year or two she lost hope and gave up. Why did this happen? The answer can be summed up in four words:  The Lack of Preparation.

About a year ago, I did a piece about a field that I saw that was covered with the cuckleberry plant.  I was amazed because I had not seen a field of briars since I was a kid.  I saw that in the off season the farmer who owned the field plowed them under and treated the land.  Here it is a year later, and the field is covered once again with the same problem.  

This cuckleberry plant can become a major problem for crops that are planted in a field because they spring up at the same time that the crop would spring up.  Like Jesus said, in Matthew 13, thorns will choke the seed and limit the harvest.  I noticed that the crop that the farmer had planted near me did not produce a bountiful harvest.  I am convinced that that is primarily because of this pesky cuckleberry plant that keeps reappearing in his field.  

As I meditated on this, it became very clear to me that a lot of our problems in our lives are like that even though we hear the Word of God.  We promise ourselves that we are going to change only to find that after a period of time that the same problem that we thought that we got rid of reappears and begins to choke us again.  A lot of Christians will get so frustrated with this that they will give in to the problem, but there is hope.  That hope is always in Jesus.  He has to be the one to clear our lives of these pesky issues.  Until then, the problems will keep reoccurring and they will continue to do so to the point of frustrating and cause us to become unproductive; unfruitful. It is hard to deal with the same problem over and over again.  

I have talked with many people who have expressed how difficult it is to put forth effort to change only to find that they have to deal with the same problem year after year.  It can become debilitating and depressing, causing you to throw up your hands and say, 'What is the use?'.   If you are one of the ones who are gagging for air because of the continuing issues in your life know of a certainty that there is hope that you can rid yourself with God's help of these issues and move on to your next level of destiny.

You may be wondering how to break through this barrier.  See my next blog for some suggestions on how to Learn How To Breathe Again.