God has gone ahead of you. And he’ll be using everything that you experience this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
In this podcast, we answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, today we’re going to zero in for the second week on knowledge. Now, last week we talked about factual knowledge, the kind of knowledge that’s gained from reading the Bible and from reading good Christian books and from listening to podcasts like this, hearing a good sermon, factual knowledge, it’s vital for sanctification. And so spiritually mature men and women have a very thorough, deep knowledge of the Bible. But there’s a kind of learning that comes not from reading books, but from living in God’s world that we call experiential knowledge. And amazingly, as important as scriptural knowledge is, and it’s the foundation of the salvation of our souls, because faith comes by hearing God’s word, experiential learning comes first just in life.
scriptural knowledge is… the foundation of the salvation of our souls, because faith comes by hearing God’s word, experiential learning comes first just in life.
We are not born into this world lingual. We don’t speak language. We come in inarticulate. We have certain instincts that God’s wired in that enable us to survive, to eat and to sleep and to cry. And then we begin to live. And as we live, we start to accumulate by living in God’s world, experiences that shape us and mold us. And they also provide the basis for language. Little by little, our mothers teach us our mother tongue, fathers are involved too. And we learn words for things we’ve already known, for experiences, for facial expressions, for things that we have experienced. We then get labels for them. We get names just like Adam naming the animal, saw the animal and then named it.
And so, it is with us. We learn by experience first. Then once we are able to speak, and then we learn to read. And we get more mature in our minds and we’re studying scripture, there’s this big circle that’s going on in the Christian life between factual and experiential, factual and experiential. Bible intake, living in God’s world. Bible intake, living in God’s world. And we believe that once that’s happening and you’re maturing, you’re born again, you’re living a Christian life, the Bible trumps all your experiences. It interprets them, it gives labels to them, it talks about them. But without experience, Bible’s language itself would mean nothing. We wouldn’t understand it. We would not be able to comprehend even a simple command like be completely humble and gentle, be patient bearing with one another in love. That’s Ephesians 4.
And so, all of those concepts, humble, gentle, patient, bearing with each other, love, all those are just words that sum up experiences we’ve had. We think about perhaps when we were little as children in our parents’ home. And maybe you skinned your knee, and your mother loved you gently and cared for you and cleaned out your wound and put a band-aid on and kissed you and sent you off. Well, you just had an experience with gentleness. You didn’t know the word, but you’ve learned it. And then you learn the word gentle, and then you start to connect the dots and it’s like, “All right, that’s what I need to be. I need to be gentle with other Christians.” And so experiential knowledge is vital.
every single day, God sets out experiences for you. He sets out things for you to walk in, daily life to live.
Now, God has given us this perfect word, scripture, but he’s also given us the universe, the physical universe. John Calvin, the great theologian in the 16th century, called the universe, creation, the earth and the sky and the sun, the moon, the stars, he called it the theater of God’s glory. Isn’t that a great expression? The theater of God’s glory. So, God’s putting his glory on display. But everyday life unfolding of human history, human interactions really is somewhat like a university of Christian development and experience. So, every single day, God sets out experiences for you. He sets out things for you to walk in, daily life to live. You have experiences with other people. You have experiences with animals and inanimate objects. And things that happen, what we come to call in theology, providential occurrences, that just happen. And God orchestrates those things and shapes them and uses them to build you up in sanctification, uses them to build you up in the image of Christ.
I think the vital nature of everyday human experience, how important it is for our salvation is proven by this one statement, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And we’ve seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). And so, they watched Jesus eat. They watched Jesus interact with people. They watched Jesus sleep. They watched him pray. They watched him deal with hostility, with hostile opposition. They watched him deal with brokenhearted sinners. And they learned, and they learned, and they learned. The apostles were chosen to be with him, and that they should go out and preach. And so, the being with Jesus is a form of experiential learning.
Now in our Christian lives now Jesus is up in heaven. We can’t be with him, but the Holy Spirit ministers the presence of Christ and orchestrates experiences by which we learn and grow. And so, what we’re saying here today in this podcast is that a spiritually mature man or woman has a rich array of spiritual experiences that they’ve had that have shaped them and mold them, molded them, and have matured them into the image of Christ. And so, we read scripture, and we learn by experience. Both of those things go together.
Now, the Bible itself gives examples of people learning by experience. There are some things you can’t read about it in a book. God didn’t will that we read about it in a book. We read the account in the book. We see clear examples of learning by experience.
Let’s take the example of Moses interceding for Joshua and the Jewish army as they were fighting the Amalekites. The story’s told in Exodus 17. I don’t know if you remember that, but how he, Moses, went up and interceded for the Jewish army and he lifted his arms up to heaven. And then after a time, his arms got tired, and they lowered down. And as that happened, the army, the Jewish army, started to lose the battle. But whenever his arms were lifted up, they would evidently be winning the battle. So that’s a feedback loop of experience in which Moses was learning to pray without ceasing. And they ended up propping his arms up with stones so that his arms would never lower down. And so, there’s this aspect of continual prayer, the need to not just pray a little but to continually pray. He learned it by experience. God didn’t say it ahead of time. He just learned by watching the warfare.
Or think even just about the experience of Israel in the desert, how they walked through the desert and their shoes did not wear out. And he fed them with manna and with water from the rock and needed all of these things to humble them, he says. And to teach them that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. So, they had the experiences of being humbled in the desert, being caused to hunger, and then being fed. They also had the experience of following the pillar. When they had built the tabernacle, the pillar of cloud or fire, depending on whether it was day or night, would hover over the tent of meeting. And when it would lift up and move, then they would move. And when it would stop, then they would stop. And they learned to follow God wherever he led.
So, when it comes to eating, you don’t live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. In other words, just like you feed on bread to fill your stomach, you feed on God’s word just to live. And so, there’s that lesson that they learned. The Israelites were humbled by them. They were taught to be very God-centered. That God led them, and they followed. That God fed them, and they ate. God gave them water, and they drank. And God is everything. And they had to learn that.
Or think about the lessons that Paul talks about on Christian contentment. He said, “I’ve learned the secret of being content, whether well-fed or hungry, living in plenty or in want, I can do everything through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:12-13). So Christian contentment, which is a peaceful abiding trust in God in any and every situation or circumstance, you can’t read that in a book. You have to live through those circumstances. Paul lived through being well-fed. He lived through being hungry. He lived through being celebrated and honored as a great apostle. And he lived through being hated and rejected and arrested and beaten. And he learned how to be content in any and every situation, how to do all things through Christ who strengthened him.
So, there’s lots of examples of this. The thing that’s so exciting about the Christian life is to think of the intentionality in all of this, that God is orchestrating today. This is Sanctification Monday, so maybe you’re listening to this at the beginning of your week. And so, you’ve got a Monday to look forward to. And then the rest of the week, if God wills that you live, that you then are going to walk through a bunch of circumstances that God is going to go ahead of you and orchestrate to shape you and to prepare you and to mature you. And so, as we do that, as we go through these things, we learn from God’s universe. We look around and see what happens to others. We see people that are bad examples, and we’re warned not to follow their bad examples. We see other people that are really good examples and they’re leaders, both men and women that are godly. And they move out and they do powerful things.
We see people that give us opportunities to serve, and we join them. We go on mission trips. We get involved in some kind of active ministry. And because we’ve stepped out and we’ve done those things, we’re actually swimming in a sea of new experiences. We’re interacting with some people we weren’t interacting with before. We’re having some experiences we didn’t have before. We’re having to answer some deeper questions about poverty and wealth and about their circumstances that we didn’t have to deal with before. But when we see them in their faces, and we eat with them in their homes, and we see what’s going on with their kids, it shapes us. It affects us, it molds us.
We see also in the life of the church how we’re called on to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. We learn how to walk through life’s experiences together in a church. And the more you’ve been through that, sometimes your own suffering enables you to minister better in the future, so that Paul says that in 2 Corinthians 1:4, “So that the comfort we have received we’re able then to use to comfort others with the exact same comfort we’ve received from God.”
Sometimes God brings people through cancer. And they get on the other side, they’re cancer-free, but it was a very tough time. They lost all their hair, they were nauseated. They had to go through very tough therapies, but they got through it. And now they’re able to speak a word of hope both to non-Christian cancer patients and to Christian cancer patients and to speak from experience that God was faithful and brought me through that.
we yearn for God to shape us and mold us through rich, powerful Christian experiences.
So again, that’s just learning by experience. And so, what we’re saying today as we look at Sanctification Monday is that we yearn for God to shape us and mold us through rich, powerful Christian experiences. If you’re a new Christian, you’re just beginning that process. You’re just beginning to, as the scripture says, walk with the Lord. And that’s experiential language. You’re just beginning to live everyday life with the indwelling Holy Spirit. You’re going to find out God’s going to bring you through rich, happy, successful experiences and you’re going to thank God for those things. And he’s going to bring you through the value of the shadow of death. He’s going to bring you through sorrow and tribulation and difficulty, and you’re going to learn from that. You’re going to see God faithful in all of those circumstances, and he’s orchestrating that so that you can grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ.
Another thing that we have to talk about is some of the more difficult aspects of the Christian life. First, discipline for sin. Sometimes God will bring us through very painful circumstances because we’ve sinned. It says in Hebrews 12 that we should not lose heart when he disciplines us or make light of it. But we should realize that God disciplines every son and every daughter that he receives. And so, when God sees a certain sin pattern in your life, he’s not going to just necessarily tell you about it in a book or you hear about it in a sermon. He may do that. And sometimes if you hear about it and you’re brought to quick conviction and you deal with that sin pattern in your life, God doesn’t need to discipline you. But sometimes he has to get your attention.
And so, what is discipline for sin but an experience you go through. Could be a sickness that might come on you, could be that you lose your job, could be that one of your children gets sick. It could be some other difficult, bitter, painful trial. And God means for it to hurt because if it were pleasing to the flesh, if it were comfortable, it wouldn’t be a discipline. So, he brings you through a chastisement, and it’s painful. And he means for you to hurt and to repent. And to attack the sin and not do it again. And he really does mean for you to remember that experience.
What good would it be if you had amnesia a week later and did not remember either the sin or God’s discipline for it? He does mean for us to remember both the sin and the painful discipline so that we will be sanctified, that we will hate that sin and put it to death.
And I would well imagine that David’s dealing with lust and sexual temptation was very different after the multi-level patterns of discipline God brought in his life after a sin with that Bathsheba. If you were to come up to David on his deathbed and say, “David, of all the things in your life, your walk with the Lord, if you could change one thing, what would it be?” I don’t doubt for a moment he would say, “I would not have sinned with Bathsheba. I hate that sin. I wish I had not done it. It brought so much grief to my family and to myself and to my nation.” And so, he learned. He learned from that suffering and from that bitter experience.
Let’s talk also about suffering. Sometimes suffering comes in, and that’s the hardest form of sanctification there is. God does his greatest work in our lives by suffering. As a matter of fact, one scholar and godly Christian leader said, “God never uses a man or a woman greatly until he hurts him deeply.” And so just in church history, you look the number of times that God has to really break somebody and do something difficult in their lives and bring them through a very hard, humbling situation.
And so, it is with us. We’re going to go through suffering. We’re going to go through difficulties. It’s not necessarily even as I just said, a discipline for sin. It might be just because we’re in this world and we suffer. And as you go through that, the deepening of our faith in Christ, we should count it pure joy James says, whenever you face trials of many kinds. Because “You know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. And perseverance must finish its work so that you’ll be mature,” that’s sanctified, Christ-like. “Mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:3-4).
What James is saying there is, without afflictions, without sorrows and suffering, you will not grow to Christian maturity. And so, we have to go through those sufferings. Don’t dread them. We don’t seek them out. God will bring them to us in his wisdom. Sometimes, as I said, as a direct response to sin, but sometimes just to sanctify us in general. And again, it might be through a situation with our spouse, maybe a medical situation, something with our kids, something with our finances, but we go through suffering, and God uses it to sanctify us.
Well, there’s much more we could say about this issue of learning by experience. I would never have, can’t even imagine having the wisdom to be able to handle orchestrating circumstances in someone’s life. But God is infinitely wise, and he knows exactly what to do in your life. So, as you go through this week, as you grow in the grace and the knowledge of Christ, I urge you to look for those experiences, to walk in them, to be excited about them, to know that even if it’s painful, God is using it to mature you.
So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you. And he’ll be using everything that you experience this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
In this podcast, we answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, today we’re going to zero in for the second week on knowledge. Now, last week we talked about factual knowledge, the kind of knowledge that’s gained from reading the Bible and from reading good Christian books and from listening to podcasts like this, hearing a good sermon, factual knowledge, it’s vital for sanctification. And so spiritually mature men and women have a very thorough, deep knowledge of the Bible. But there’s a kind of learning that comes not from reading books, but from living in God’s world that we call experiential knowledge. And amazingly, as important as scriptural knowledge is, and it’s the foundation of the salvation of our souls, because faith comes by hearing God’s word, experiential learning comes first just in life.
scriptural knowledge is… the foundation of the salvation of our souls, because faith comes by hearing God’s word, experiential learning comes first just in life.
We are not born into this world lingual. We don’t speak language. We come in inarticulate. We have certain instincts that God’s wired in that enable us to survive, to eat and to sleep and to cry. And then we begin to live. And as we live, we start to accumulate by living in God’s world, experiences that shape us and mold us. And they also provide the basis for language. Little by little, our mothers teach us our mother tongue, fathers are involved too. And we learn words for things we’ve already known, for experiences, for facial expressions, for things that we have experienced. We then get labels for them. We get names just like Adam naming the animal, saw the animal and then named it.
And so, it is with us. We learn by experience first. Then once we are able to speak, and then we learn to read. And we get more mature in our minds and we’re studying scripture, there’s this big circle that’s going on in the Christian life between factual and experiential, factual and experiential. Bible intake, living in God’s world. Bible intake, living in God’s world. And we believe that once that’s happening and you’re maturing, you’re born again, you’re living a Christian life, the Bible trumps all your experiences. It interprets them, it gives labels to them, it talks about them. But without experience, Bible’s language itself would mean nothing. We wouldn’t understand it. We would not be able to comprehend even a simple command like be completely humble and gentle, be patient bearing with one another in love. That’s Ephesians 4.
And so, all of those concepts, humble, gentle, patient, bearing with each other, love, all those are just words that sum up experiences we’ve had. We think about perhaps when we were little as children in our parents’ home. And maybe you skinned your knee, and your mother loved you gently and cared for you and cleaned out your wound and put a band-aid on and kissed you and sent you off. Well, you just had an experience with gentleness. You didn’t know the word, but you’ve learned it. And then you learn the word gentle, and then you start to connect the dots and it’s like, “All right, that’s what I need to be. I need to be gentle with other Christians.” And so experiential knowledge is vital.
every single day, God sets out experiences for you. He sets out things for you to walk in, daily life to live.
Now, God has given us this perfect word, scripture, but he’s also given us the universe, the physical universe. John Calvin, the great theologian in the 16th century, called the universe, creation, the earth and the sky and the sun, the moon, the stars, he called it the theater of God’s glory. Isn’t that a great expression? The theater of God’s glory. So, God’s putting his glory on display. But everyday life unfolding of human history, human interactions really is somewhat like a university of Christian development and experience. So, every single day, God sets out experiences for you. He sets out things for you to walk in, daily life to live. You have experiences with other people. You have experiences with animals and inanimate objects. And things that happen, what we come to call in theology, providential occurrences, that just happen. And God orchestrates those things and shapes them and uses them to build you up in sanctification, uses them to build you up in the image of Christ.
I think the vital nature of everyday human experience, how important it is for our salvation is proven by this one statement, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And we’ve seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). And so, they watched Jesus eat. They watched Jesus interact with people. They watched Jesus sleep. They watched him pray. They watched him deal with hostility, with hostile opposition. They watched him deal with brokenhearted sinners. And they learned, and they learned, and they learned. The apostles were chosen to be with him, and that they should go out and preach. And so, the being with Jesus is a form of experiential learning.
Now in our Christian lives now Jesus is up in heaven. We can’t be with him, but the Holy Spirit ministers the presence of Christ and orchestrates experiences by which we learn and grow. And so, what we’re saying here today in this podcast is that a spiritually mature man or woman has a rich array of spiritual experiences that they’ve had that have shaped them and mold them, molded them, and have matured them into the image of Christ. And so, we read scripture, and we learn by experience. Both of those things go together.
Now, the Bible itself gives examples of people learning by experience. There are some things you can’t read about it in a book. God didn’t will that we read about it in a book. We read the account in the book. We see clear examples of learning by experience.
Let’s take the example of Moses interceding for Joshua and the Jewish army as they were fighting the Amalekites. The story’s told in Exodus 17. I don’t know if you remember that, but how he, Moses, went up and interceded for the Jewish army and he lifted his arms up to heaven. And then after a time, his arms got tired, and they lowered down. And as that happened, the army, the Jewish army, started to lose the battle. But whenever his arms were lifted up, they would evidently be winning the battle. So that’s a feedback loop of experience in which Moses was learning to pray without ceasing. And they ended up propping his arms up with stones so that his arms would never lower down. And so, there’s this aspect of continual prayer, the need to not just pray a little but to continually pray. He learned it by experience. God didn’t say it ahead of time. He just learned by watching the warfare.
Or think even just about the experience of Israel in the desert, how they walked through the desert and their shoes did not wear out. And he fed them with manna and with water from the rock and needed all of these things to humble them, he says. And to teach them that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. So, they had the experiences of being humbled in the desert, being caused to hunger, and then being fed. They also had the experience of following the pillar. When they had built the tabernacle, the pillar of cloud or fire, depending on whether it was day or night, would hover over the tent of meeting. And when it would lift up and move, then they would move. And when it would stop, then they would stop. And they learned to follow God wherever he led.
So, when it comes to eating, you don’t live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. In other words, just like you feed on bread to fill your stomach, you feed on God’s word just to live. And so, there’s that lesson that they learned. The Israelites were humbled by them. They were taught to be very God-centered. That God led them, and they followed. That God fed them, and they ate. God gave them water, and they drank. And God is everything. And they had to learn that.
Or think about the lessons that Paul talks about on Christian contentment. He said, “I’ve learned the secret of being content, whether well-fed or hungry, living in plenty or in want, I can do everything through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:12-13). So Christian contentment, which is a peaceful abiding trust in God in any and every situation or circumstance, you can’t read that in a book. You have to live through those circumstances. Paul lived through being well-fed. He lived through being hungry. He lived through being celebrated and honored as a great apostle. And he lived through being hated and rejected and arrested and beaten. And he learned how to be content in any and every situation, how to do all things through Christ who strengthened him.
So, there’s lots of examples of this. The thing that’s so exciting about the Christian life is to think of the intentionality in all of this, that God is orchestrating today. This is Sanctification Monday, so maybe you’re listening to this at the beginning of your week. And so, you’ve got a Monday to look forward to. And then the rest of the week, if God wills that you live, that you then are going to walk through a bunch of circumstances that God is going to go ahead of you and orchestrate to shape you and to prepare you and to mature you. And so, as we do that, as we go through these things, we learn from God’s universe. We look around and see what happens to others. We see people that are bad examples, and we’re warned not to follow their bad examples. We see other people that are really good examples and they’re leaders, both men and women that are godly. And they move out and they do powerful things.
We see people that give us opportunities to serve, and we join them. We go on mission trips. We get involved in some kind of active ministry. And because we’ve stepped out and we’ve done those things, we’re actually swimming in a sea of new experiences. We’re interacting with some people we weren’t interacting with before. We’re having some experiences we didn’t have before. We’re having to answer some deeper questions about poverty and wealth and about their circumstances that we didn’t have to deal with before. But when we see them in their faces, and we eat with them in their homes, and we see what’s going on with their kids, it shapes us. It affects us, it molds us.
We see also in the life of the church how we’re called on to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. We learn how to walk through life’s experiences together in a church. And the more you’ve been through that, sometimes your own suffering enables you to minister better in the future, so that Paul says that in 2 Corinthians 1:4, “So that the comfort we have received we’re able then to use to comfort others with the exact same comfort we’ve received from God.”
Sometimes God brings people through cancer. And they get on the other side, they’re cancer-free, but it was a very tough time. They lost all their hair, they were nauseated. They had to go through very tough therapies, but they got through it. And now they’re able to speak a word of hope both to non-Christian cancer patients and to Christian cancer patients and to speak from experience that God was faithful and brought me through that.
we yearn for God to shape us and mold us through rich, powerful Christian experiences.
So again, that’s just learning by experience. And so, what we’re saying today as we look at Sanctification Monday is that we yearn for God to shape us and mold us through rich, powerful Christian experiences. If you’re a new Christian, you’re just beginning that process. You’re just beginning to, as the scripture says, walk with the Lord. And that’s experiential language. You’re just beginning to live everyday life with the indwelling Holy Spirit. You’re going to find out God’s going to bring you through rich, happy, successful experiences and you’re going to thank God for those things. And he’s going to bring you through the value of the shadow of death. He’s going to bring you through sorrow and tribulation and difficulty, and you’re going to learn from that. You’re going to see God faithful in all of those circumstances, and he’s orchestrating that so that you can grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ.
Another thing that we have to talk about is some of the more difficult aspects of the Christian life. First, discipline for sin. Sometimes God will bring us through very painful circumstances because we’ve sinned. It says in Hebrews 12 that we should not lose heart when he disciplines us or make light of it. But we should realize that God disciplines every son and every daughter that he receives. And so, when God sees a certain sin pattern in your life, he’s not going to just necessarily tell you about it in a book or you hear about it in a sermon. He may do that. And sometimes if you hear about it and you’re brought to quick conviction and you deal with that sin pattern in your life, God doesn’t need to discipline you. But sometimes he has to get your attention.
And so, what is discipline for sin but an experience you go through. Could be a sickness that might come on you, could be that you lose your job, could be that one of your children gets sick. It could be some other difficult, bitter, painful trial. And God means for it to hurt because if it were pleasing to the flesh, if it were comfortable, it wouldn’t be a discipline. So, he brings you through a chastisement, and it’s painful. And he means for you to hurt and to repent. And to attack the sin and not do it again. And he really does mean for you to remember that experience.
What good would it be if you had amnesia a week later and did not remember either the sin or God’s discipline for it? He does mean for us to remember both the sin and the painful discipline so that we will be sanctified, that we will hate that sin and put it to death.
And I would well imagine that David’s dealing with lust and sexual temptation was very different after the multi-level patterns of discipline God brought in his life after a sin with that Bathsheba. If you were to come up to David on his deathbed and say, “David, of all the things in your life, your walk with the Lord, if you could change one thing, what would it be?” I don’t doubt for a moment he would say, “I would not have sinned with Bathsheba. I hate that sin. I wish I had not done it. It brought so much grief to my family and to myself and to my nation.” And so, he learned. He learned from that suffering and from that bitter experience.
Let’s talk also about suffering. Sometimes suffering comes in, and that’s the hardest form of sanctification there is. God does his greatest work in our lives by suffering. As a matter of fact, one scholar and godly Christian leader said, “God never uses a man or a woman greatly until he hurts him deeply.” And so just in church history, you look the number of times that God has to really break somebody and do something difficult in their lives and bring them through a very hard, humbling situation.
And so, it is with us. We’re going to go through suffering. We’re going to go through difficulties. It’s not necessarily even as I just said, a discipline for sin. It might be just because we’re in this world and we suffer. And as you go through that, the deepening of our faith in Christ, we should count it pure joy James says, whenever you face trials of many kinds. Because “You know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. And perseverance must finish its work so that you’ll be mature,” that’s sanctified, Christ-like. “Mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:3-4).
What James is saying there is, without afflictions, without sorrows and suffering, you will not grow to Christian maturity. And so, we have to go through those sufferings. Don’t dread them. We don’t seek them out. God will bring them to us in his wisdom. Sometimes, as I said, as a direct response to sin, but sometimes just to sanctify us in general. And again, it might be through a situation with our spouse, maybe a medical situation, something with our kids, something with our finances, but we go through suffering, and God uses it to sanctify us.
Well, there’s much more we could say about this issue of learning by experience. I would never have, can’t even imagine having the wisdom to be able to handle orchestrating circumstances in someone’s life. But God is infinitely wise, and he knows exactly what to do in your life. So, as you go through this week, as you grow in the grace and the knowledge of Christ, I urge you to look for those experiences, to walk in them, to be excited about them, to know that even if it’s painful, God is using it to mature you.
So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you. And he’ll be using everything that you experience this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
