Tag Archives: spiritual maturity

July 15, 2024 · 9:15 am

Are You Longing to Know Christ’s Secret to a Joyful Walk?

If we listen to His “still small voice,” we may hear Him share a secret that few ever hear. It is a challenge to our present belief system. Our joy issues from His joy, which rejoices at the truth.

Right now, as we speak through these earthly bodies, we have another body. Yes, another body. It is a body that is celestial in nature. It is, in the pure sense of the word, extraterrestrial, for it is outside the scope of the earth. In fact, mortal eyes have not seen it, nor has its reality even entered into the hearts of mortals. What has not entered into our thinking? “The things that God has prepared for them that love Him (I Cor. 2: 9).

And what are those “things” that God has already provided for us? They are our heavenly bodies. And as we gaze into the mirror at our earthly bodies and lament their descent into mortality’s final sad scene, we cannot help but groan under the burden of our bodies’ betrayal of us. And we yearn for our other body to come and clothed us with immortality.

This present mortal state in which we live is the perfect environment, however, to nurture the Spirit within us. As we overcome in battle the devil’s onslaught, the Spirit within us grows with every victory. As we vanquish our enemy, who is designed by our Creator to dispense just the right amount of resistance each day, we grow according to the loving hand of our Master. Knowing about our heavenly immortal body is our ace in the hole and gives us great confidence that He has our backs. It is His ball game; He will win. He has already won in heaven, and now we are a part of the witness here on earth.

Our Victory Is Believing the Unseen

Our victories begin in believing that we have His Spirit within us, that He is guiding us, and that He loves us and wants us to grow to be like Him. He is our treasure that we now have in these weak, fragile earthly bodies. Our bodies seem to be hurdling back into earth. It seems that they want to return to the soil. Our bodies are not us, for they careen in an opposite direction than what our hearts would dictate. Our earthly bodies want to dissipate, but we want to live vibrantly in love and harmony.

Our “outward man” may be perishing, but our “inward man” is being renewed each day. Compared to the glorious future that He desires to shower upon us, our current afflictions pale in importance. Our afflictions are “the sufferings of this present time,” the sufferings we must endure that we may reign with Him (II Tim. 2: 12; II Cor. 4: 16-17).

We must not look at our mortal bodies thinking that this is all there is. There is no hope in seeing our flesh wrinkle and get old, our muscles failing of the strength of youth. Looking at our earthly bodies and pondering their demise is not faith. For faith is being assured of “things not seen,” not things which we do see.

We should not see those “things” in the mirror that stare back at us. We should rather look at “the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporary; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (4: 18). When we walk in the Spirit, we behold as in a mirror the glory of Yahweh, and we are changed thereby “into that same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit…” (II Cor. 3: 18). We will not experience this by looking at our earthly body, but by looking at those things that are not seen.

So, what are these things? These things are bodies, for it is bodies that the Spirit through Paul has been talking about all throughout the whole letter.

“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Most have interpreted that to mean that we are going to heaven. It actually says, however, that we have another house in heaven waiting for us. We have another body, a celestial one, a glorified one prepared for us by our Creator (II Cor. 5: 1-4).

Our earthly bodies that we see are temporary dwelling places for the Spirit of God to grow in. They are important and indispensable, but disposable. He made them that way, of course. And as the painful treachery of our bodies increases, “we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.” Our burden is not to be “unclothed,” as in a lightening of our load, but rather “clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”

Thus, the Spirit speaks of our heavenly body as clothing. As we ponder the word “clothing,” we see where He has promised the over comers clothing called “white raiment.” We see a picture of this in the transfiguration of the Son of God when “his face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light.” We see a picture of us after being clothed with our heavenly body. We look to that time when we “are changed into the same image from glory to glory.”

Faith is being assured that we have this heavenly body prepared for us, even though we cannot see the evidence of it right now with mortal eyes. This is the secret that His still, small voice is conveying to us (Rev. 3:4-5; Mt. 17: 2; II Cor. 3:18; Heb. 11: l).

[This is Chapter 16 of my latest book, The Additions to the Faith. To order your free copy with free shipping, email your name, address and title of the book to wayneman5@hotmail.com If this chapter has helped you, please help me get this to more people by you hitting the like button, commenting, and subscribing. Thank you.]

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November 28, 2023 · 1:13 pm

Enduring the Dark Night of the Soul

(from Journal entry, 10-3-22)

At our weakest moment, God will allow Satan to present a panorama of memories and recollections of our sordid past sins, weaknesses, and spiritual failures. This is our passage through the valley of the dark night of the soul.

It issues from many sources. Betrayals and the pain that may linger from them may come. Or our thoughts may take a journey once again into the night’s memories of yesteryear’s shortcomings.

In this weakened state, spiritual trouble comes with our thoughts about how destitute of love we were. We begin to see our selfish naked egos, stained with pride, justifying our use of others, of those who our Savior died for. It is as if we are peering into the screen of a time machine, a mirror that reflects just how we really were. We peer into the fruitless past, and that same panic of being lost in the maze of life, grips us as we look back and long and lament our adolescent idiocy and our selfish egoism.

We must fearlessly look at the images and believe that they are mere relics of our past life. Remember how Christ was tempted? Satan offered up full control of his kingdom to Christ if He would play ball with him. Christ resisted all the temptations. Now Christ in us resists them as well.

Christ with great mercy has promised that He would “never leave us nor forsake us.” Especially when Satan thrusts in our face our sins and faults of yesteryear. He is the “accuser of the brethren.” But it is the great mercy of our King that reigns supreme. He has our backs. He allows us to think these fleeting thoughts to show us more clearly the magnificent deliverance from sin that He has wrought in our lives. For that is what it was—not is! We remember that we are His, bought with His blood. And He leads us through this moonless trek, this suffocating remembrance of what we once were.

Through this experience, however, we learn that we have been forgiven much. Therefore, we will love much, which fulfills His purpose of reproducing Himself (Agape love) in us. Christ said, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little” (Luke 7:47 NKJV). These trials whereof we speak shows us that we have been forgiven much. A painful trudge down the “valley of the shadow of death” during our “dark night of the soul” shows us that. Those of us who see the reality of our shameful pasts and receive His forgiveness will love much. Those who do not see that they have been forgiven all that much—they will love only a little. “Her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.”

Finally, Satan tries to use these memories to condemn us, but God uses them to show us a clearer picture of just how evil our old nature was. Through this trial, we see more clearly just how much we have been forgiven—how much selfish ungodliness we have been delivered from.

For in the end, only those who see and realize how much sin they have been forgiven will love much. Only those will bear much fruit, thus becoming more like Christ and His apostles. That is His goal and purpose: our maturity, which fulfills His purpose of multiplying Agape Love, which is Him.

The “dark night of the soul” experience is part of His plan to fulfill His purpose: to reproduce Agape love in us, thus reproducing Himself till Love be “all in all” (I Cor. 15:28). His plan is to keep on perfecting until all that is left is Love.     [Would you share your “dark night of the soul” in the comments section? The testimonies of the Father’s sons and daughters are so important. “Likes” are nice and appreciated, but a comment fashioned by the Spirit with words from the heart—that is what moves us. That is what edifies and helps us mature. That we may grow “unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:12-13). For it is the “power that works in us” (Eph. 3:20). Your comments will be read all over the globe. Reach out and share your story?]      Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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February 2, 2013 · 7:47 pm

Adding Patience–Enduring All Things

We are admonished by the apostle Peter to “add to our faith” certain divine attributes, calling this procedure, “partaking of the divine nature.”  Yes, right now, we are to do this.  When would he expect us to add these things–after we die?  No, “now is the acceptable time.”  Now is the only time.  Whatever we humans are going to do in our fragile fleeting existence on this planet, we better do it now.

And some of us have been called to “partake of the divine nature.”  “Something (or Someone)” is pulling us, leading us, and yes, even commanding us to seek a higher path.  And so we seek that better way.  And some of us begin to see that that better way is Christ, for He is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14: 6).

And some of us now are seeing that we are to become like Him.  That is right.  For we are told by the apostles to “let this mind be in you that was in Christ” (Phil. 2: 5).  And, “Let us go on unto perfection” (Heb. 6: 1).  In fact, the Savior Himself commands us to “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5: 48).  “Perfect” here is from the Greek word meaning “full spiritual maturity.”

Our perfection, our maturity in the Spirit, is the main reason that the scriptures of truth have been preserved for us.  “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God…that the man of God may be complete (perfect), thoroughly equipped for every good work” (II Tim. 3: 16-17 NKJV).

So how do we arrive at perfection (completeness)?

Our completed growth in Christ is brought about by adding to our faith the attributes of the divine nature that Peter admonishes us to do.

Compared to instant messaging and world wide telecommunications and instant mashed potatoes, the steps toward full spiritual growth and ultimately maturity in Christ take a long time.  “Instantly” is not in God’s vocabulary.  That is one of the main paradoxes in this modern age.  Everything happens in the blink of an eye, except the growth of God’s Spirit in a human being.

We are given but a short space of time here on earth.  Our time on the planet is short lived.  The older we get the faster our allotted time runs out.  And most fritter their precious moments away on ludicrous pursuits.  But those that Christ has chosen will redeem the time, “that they may be made perfect in one (John 15: 16; 17: 23).

Spurred on by the Spirit, they will study, dig, and search out the truth as to what this life is all about.  And when they find out that life is Him, His plan and purpose, and His ballgame, then they will commit themselves to Him–though it take a lifetime.  They will endure any hardships along the way.  That’s the way the elect are built; it’s in their spiritual DNA.  They will endure all things.

And their studies will lead them to that attribute of the divine nature called in the English language “patience.”  But in the Greek (G5281), the word means “endurance, steadfastness, constancy…a patient enduring; sustaining; perseverance” [1].

This word is from the verb (G5278) “to endure.”  I Corinthians 13 lists the attributes of  agape love, God’s nature that is to be matured in us.  It “endures all things” (v. 7).

What things?  We are admonished to “endure to the end” and be saved (Matt. 10: 22; 24: 13).  Trials and tribulation will be endured by the elect.  Christ describes the treachery of the world at the time of the end of this age.  “Brother shall betray brother to death and the father the son.”  Children will betray their parents unto death.  And ones He has chosen to become fully matured in His image–they  will be “hated of all men for My name’s sake–but he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved” (Mark 13: 13).  This is the patience/endurance that Peter is telling us we need to add to our faith.

Because this patience, this endurance, this perseverance that we must maintain speaks of a time of trials and tribulations, and persecutions and betrayals.  As God begins to squeeze the evildoers, they will lash out at the righteous.  We have to know that this is coming.

“Tribulation Worketh Patience”

“Tribulation worketh patience.”  Or, tribulation brings about patience.  Or, more clearly put, trials and tribulations are the very thing that fashions endurance, which is definitely a big part of God’s nature.  Without trials, patience/endurance will not be formed in us.  And without this endurance factor in our spiritual lives, we will not fulfill our calling as His sons and daughters.  For the law of harvest reads, Each seed bears its own kind.

After we are “illuminated” by the light of God’s truth, He has the adversary, the devil, present trials and persecutions to us, to which we will endure “a great fight of afflictions” (Heb. 10: 32).

In fact, Peter warns us about these afflictions.  “Think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you” (I Pet. 4: 12).  It is not a strange thing at all, but part of the plan of God for our perfection.  It is in the script.  Already conceived by Him and written down.  After all, Christ is “the Author and Finisher of our faith.”  And all the additions to that faith (Heb. 12: 2).  Yes, and in that same verse, it tells how Christ “for the joy set before Him, endured the cross.”  As our example, He has endured all the sufferings before us.

These “fiery trials” that will try us will come, and we must endure it, for we are “partakers of Christ’s sufferings” (I Pet. 4: 13).  These sufferings are those trials we endure for His sake.  These are “also the afflictions Christians must undergo in behalf of the same cause for which Christ patiently endured” (Thayer’s Lexicon).

So we see that “patience” is much bigger and much more profound as we discover its meaning in the inspired scriptures of truth.  We now see that it is an attribute of God’s presence, and we should seek to understand it according to God’s thought of what it truly is.

Patience is enduring the sufferings needed to bring God’s plan to full fruition.  Enduring at all costs in the face of hardships–God did that first.  It is His “divine nature” we are to add, after all.  He did it first.  He endured the insolence of one of His created angelic beings to provide the sufferings for us all.  He endured the old nature, especially of His chosen people Israel (12 tribes), witnessed in the Old Testament.  He endured the shame of their sins and whoredoms.

And now He asks us, the little flock, who He knows will answer the call, for He has chosen us–He asks us to add this part of His wonderful divine nature–patience, endurance.

Us enduring, enduring, enduring the sufferings entailed in these finite earthly decaying mortal bodies.  As one of their own poets said, enduring “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

We now have been called into the “fellowship of His sufferings,” taking part of the same things He endured (Phil. 3: 10).

Agape love endures all things.  Like putting up with the evil men in control of this world system–that’s part of enduring the sufferings.  Wanting to do something immediately to banish the evil and injustice from this earth, and knowing that we now must wait on Yahweh–who will do this–but in His own time, according to His timetable.  That’s part of the sufferings.

Enduring.  Continuing undaunted in our pilgrimage to the City of Immortality.  Unwavering.  Stedfast.  Unswayed by the temptations to tarry here or take respite there.

Enduring by faith, entrusting our whole earthly existence on the seemingly impossible assumption and belief that somewhere an invisible Creator has life all mapped and charted for all of us.

And that He has sent us out on this dangerous dark sea, as we trust this invisible Spirit as our Captain to guide our hands on the rudder and sails, believing that He will somehow lead us through the angry storms and deposit us in a warm protected harbor where a wave is a mere warm froth lapping at our toes.

And so we wait.  And endure all things, trusting the Captain by trusting His word, which is the blueprint, the Plan and Purpose.

Kenneth Wayne Hancock

1.  Thayer’s Lexicon (http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G5281&t=KJV).

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