Week 22 — WEDNESDAY

We look one more day at the possibility of being saved from being babes in Christ. This passage is compelling: “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men… Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the Head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:14-15). “We are to grow up in every way into him … into Christ.” The only way to grow up is to grow up into Him. You cannot by the very nature of things grow up in every way when you commit yourself to a system of thought organized around one man or a group of men and their emphases. They imperfectly comprehend Him Who is the Truth; so they hold truths about the Truth. You must break out from blinkered systems and “with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord” become “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.”

When Jesus Christ is the center of your faith and the center of your quest, then you are upon the Illimitable. Men and their views are exhaustible, but Jesus Christ the Divine is the inexhaustible. The Gospel of Thomas says that Jesus said that the Kingdom “is a movement and a rest.” You move toward Him, and you rest in something transforming and satisfying. Then there is a movement again and a rest—and so on, forever. “We are to grow up in every way into him.” The “in every way” is significant. It is a total growth—not merely spiritually, but mentally, emotionally, socially, and physically. You become “every whit whole” and “whole” after a pattern of the Son of God—the highest pattern of the universe. This is no lopsided growth—so spiritual you are unfit for material relations, or so material you are unfit for spiritual relations—but an all-round growth—in every way. So it is an eternal growth and a symmetrical growth. Nothing is more beautiful than a truly Christian person.

O Unlimited Christ, You are calling me to the Infinite—to partake of Your Everlastingness, to share Your Universality, to enter the Boundless. I come. Take my nothingness and make it into Your Everything—“in every way.” In Your name. Amen.

AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If I am a Christian in “some” ways, may I shift to being a Christian in “every” way.