As of this month, I will have spent an entire year in the book of Matthew with my Tuesday Bible study group. I have loved digging deep and going slowly through Matthew’s gospel. A whole year drinking down the life and ministry of the Savior while He walked the earth. The more I look at Jesus, the more I love Him. The more I look at Jesus, the more I see and loathe my besetting sins. The more I look at Jesus, the less attractive are the world’s comforts.
We will finish Matthew this month, and I’m a bit sad to leave the pages where I’ve camped out most mornings for the past twelve months. Little by little, I’ve changed. Oh, it’s barely visible to the naked eye. I can barely see it. The growth has been slow, and not something I can detect if I just measure the previous week or month. All I can see in the fray of the last month is a blundering daily fight to look at Jesus more and at myself less.
But when I take a big step back and look at the whole year, I can see how the Lord has faithfully used His Word to slough off the rough edges of sin in my life. There has been a small triumph in one area of sin that’s threatened to swallow me whole in the past. When I take one big year-long step back, I can see how God has whittled my desires to look more like His than like mine. I can see how He has given me a hunger that prefers what satisfies more than the fleeting comforts of earth. The things that used to satisfy—the television shows, the endless streams of entertainment, the lazy scrolling—those things have lost a bit of shine since last March. I cringe more at the things I used to laugh at. I hurt more when I read Jesus’s words to the religious people of His day for I know I would wear their robes well. I see a bit more clearly that following Jesus costs both everything and nothing, and that makes complete sense in the kingdom.
These are small, incremental steps of growth, but they’re there. I love Paul’s language: one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18). Degrees of changes, not monumental growth spurts that we can see in the midst of them. The Christian life cannot be measured only in mountaintop elevations or valley-deep desperations. Though we leap from sufferings to triumphs from time to time, most of the Christian life is lived in the mundane, day-to-day plodding between the two extremes. But the plodding is precious for that is where God cultivates perseverance from our hearts. There’s nothing glamorous or newsworthy about picking up your Bible on Monday morning and jotting down the things you learned from Matthew 24. But there’s a miracle happening on the mundane Mondays of regular Bible reading and prayer. You can’t see it in real time. You can’t even see it next week, probably not next month. But next year, you’ll look back at every ordinary day you woke up and turned your face to Jesus and you’ll know that you love Him more because He wooed you with His words and His presence. You rolled out of bed knowing He’d meet you in His Word. You gave your lunch hour to Him because He promised never to leave or forsake you. You met with Him before turning out the light at night because His words never return void. No, they don’t. They’re at work in you, even when you can’t see it. And you’ll say with Martin Luther, “I did nothing; the Word did everything.”
Look at Jesus every day, Christian. God will faithfully complete the work He began in us when He saved us, and He will do it through the teaching of His Word, the nearness of His Spirit, and the fellowship of His church. You won’t always see it when you want to, but next year you will. Ten years from now you will. Your roots in the faith will be deeper and your fruit will be more obvious to others because you’ll look more like Jesus than you did last year. That’s the measure of a year of walking with Jesus every day. Slow, beautiful, ordinary, glorious growth.
Though we leap from sufferings to triumphs from time to time, most of the Christian life is lived in the mundane, day-to-day plodding between the two extremes. Click To TweetPhoto by William Warby on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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