Leadership Thought: Have You Ever Been Infected with Destination Disease?

Dear Friends,

I hope none of you ever contracts 'destination disease.' It is particularly prevalent among believers. You know you have it when you start coasting through your spiritual life. Your quest for learning and growing slows its pace or worse yet, even stops. Someone describes the symptoms this way: “If you’re green, you’re growing; if you’re ripe, you rot.” Not a good way to end your spiritual life.

William Barkley, in one of his commentaries writes, “We should count it a wasted day when we do not learn something new and when we have not penetrated more deeply into the wisdom and the grace of God.”

Paul recognized the dangers of stagnation sickness that infects us when we miss opportunities for personal growth and development and possess little or no desire to improve and become what we could be.

One writer says when this happens, “We may begin to feel regret, and if we go long enough without growing, we begin to feel like we have had an unused life. And that is not unlike an early death.” 

Paul writes these words to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:15-16: “Be diligent in these matters; Give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely, persevere in them because if you do, (you) will save both yourself and your hearers.”

Another translation expresses it this way: “Take pains with these things, be absorbed in them, so that your progress may be evident to all."

Believer, do you have a spiritual growth plan designed to keep you growing, and if not, why not? Maybe today would be a good day to do a little spiritual ‘self-care.’  You might begin by assessing your bible study and devotional life and evaluate the condition of your prayer time and your service to others.  If there are some changes needed, why not develop your own spiritual growth plan?

It has been said that there is only one place where a believer must never stay; he must never “stay put."

Thinking we have arrived spiritually, and all there is left for us to do  is to go through our own religious motions, while waiting for the rapture to take us home, is one sure way to die an early death, for death always begins where growth ends.

Yours in faith,

Tom

P.S. "The secret or success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up." Albert Schweitzer

Adapted from a previous Leadership Thought