Growing Through Prayer and Scripture

When did you last choose to move closer to God? Not just take in something someone else prepared, but make a deliberate choice to seek Christ for yourself? If that question is hard to answer, it may be showing you where God is inviting you to grow.

In 2007, a landmark study called "Reveal" was conducted among thousands of people in churches affiliated with the Willow Creek Association. Despite enormous investment in programs, ministries, and weekend services, the churches discovered something sobering: church involvement did not necessarily produce spiritual growth. They were attending. They were consuming. But they were not deepening.

People had not learned to take personal responsibility for their own growth in Christ. They had become spiritually passive, comfortable at a beginner level, content to float along without ever pressing further into their faith.

The church, it turned out, could open the door. But it could not walk through it for anyone.

That responsibility belongs to each person individually.

Before diving into the practical, we should look at what the Christian life actually is. Paul writes in Galatians 2:20 that he has been crucified with Christ, that it is no longer he who lives but Christ who lives in him, and that the life he now lives is lived by faith in the Son of God. This is not the language of self-improvement. It is the language of resurrection.

The invitation of the Christian life is not to go from being a bad person to a slightly better one. It is to go from death to life. And if that is what has happened, if you have genuinely come to faith in Christ, then the question every morning ought to be: How do I live this new life more fully today than I did yesterday?

Paul echoes this in Romans 12:1, urging believers to offer themselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, as an act of spiritual worship. The life of faith is not a transaction completed at conversion. It is an ongoing, daily offering.

Colossians 3:1-4 gives us a striking command. Since we have been raised with Christ, we are told to set our hearts on things above, and to set our minds on things above. Not occasionally. Not when life gets hard. But as a fundamental orientation of life.

There is only one focus that deserves our full attention: Christ. He deserves the best of our attention, both our hearts and our minds. And the promise attached to that focus is breathtaking: when Christ appears, we will appear with Him in glory.

But how do we get there? How does a person actually make progress in becoming more like Christ?

Scripture does not hand us a color-coded weekly schedule for spiritual growth. But it does give us rhythms, practices, and habits that, when embraced with genuine commitment, produce real transformation. Two of the most foundational are prayer and meditation on Scripture.

The Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 6:18 about praying in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 adds the simple instruction: pray continually. This is not about formal, rigid prayer routines alone. It is about cultivating an ongoing conversation with God throughout the entire day.

Think of it like a store clerk speaking quietly into a lapel microphone, carrying on a background conversation while still engaging with the world around him. Prayer, at its maturity, begins to look like that: a continuous thread of conversation woven through ordinary moments. A sunrise. A difficult decision. A meal. A moment of fear.

The ACTS model offers a helpful structure for those building or deepening a prayer life: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. These four movements capture the full range of what prayer is meant to be. Notice that confession is not optional. The Lord's Prayer itself includes it prominently. Genuine growth in Christ requires the willingness to come before God honestly, acknowledge what needs to change, and commit to the hard work of repentance by turning around and moving in a different direction.

And then there is stillness. Psalm 46:10 calls us to be still and know that God is God. In the middle of swirling demands and relentless noise, there is a kind of prayer that is simply resting in the awareness of God's presence. Not emptying the mind as Eastern meditation teaches, but resting the mind in the truth of who God is.

The Reveal study identified something the church should never have been surprised by: the single greatest catalyst for spiritual growth is personal engagement with the Bible.

Psalm 119:97-103 captures the posture we are after. The psalmist writes of loving God's law, meditating on it all day long, finding it sweeter than honey. This is not dutiful Bible-reading. This is delight. Joshua was told to keep the law always on his lips and meditate on it day and night, and that discipline was directly connected to his effectiveness as a leader (Joshua 1:8).

Christian meditation is not about emptying the mind. It is about filling the mind by reading a passage, reflecting on it, praying over it, and asking three questions: What does this say about God? What does this say about me? What does this say about God’s work in the world that I can be part of?

The goal is not information. It is transformation. Not biblical literacy alone, but genuine intimacy with God.

The Spirit of God has been given to every believer as the divine power that provides everything needed for a godly life, as 2 Peter 1:3 reminds us. The Spirit is already moving. The invitation is simply to keep in step.

Don’t wait for the perfect time or a perfect plan. Choose one moment this week to turn your attention to God. Pray honestly about what is happening in your life, or spend time with a passage of Scripture and ask how you can respond to it.

Take that next step, and watch Pastor Fred’s full message, “Connection: Prayer and Meditation,” to keep exploring these practices.