We’re accustomed to getting things quickly: fast food, text messages, next-day delivery. If we’re not careful, we can carry this expectation into our spiritual lives, especially when helping someone else grow spiritually. However, the Bible calls us to be patient disciplers, expecting spiritual growth to take time.
Patiently Work towards Growth
Your LDS friend professes faith in Christ. Great! Now what? Do you expect them to get baptized, evangelize their family, kill seven sins, and bear the Spirit’s fruit the next day? Within a week? A month? Hopefully not. Radical spiritual growth rarely happens quickly. It happens slowly. It’s real, and it’s radical, but it takes time.
It’s been said that discipleship functions more like a crock pot than a microwave. I think it’s more like gardening. Discipleship is like saying, “I want a salad.” So you plant tomato, lettuce, and carrot seeds, water them, wait for them to grow, and harvest them so you can finally eat your salad.
Or you could think of a tangled ball of threads that represents your friend’s thinking. For them to grow, the threads have to be untangled, sorted, and woven into a tapestry. They have to unlearn the lies they’ve believed, renew their minds, and then be transformed into Christlikeness by the truth. You can’t do that by rushing in with scissors and tape. You loosen one thread at a time, untie knots, straighten things out, and finally weave it into a masterpiece.
That’s a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time. But that’s how discipleship works.
Patiently Love the Person
What fuels such patient work? Love. It’s no mistake that Paul lists patience as love’s first activity (1 Cor. 13:4). If we love our friend and want what’s best for them, we’ll patiently work with them to help them grow, no matter how slow.
We’ll be kind when there are setbacks. We won’t envy others whose friends seem to grow faster. We won’t boast about our own spiritual maturity. We won’t rudely insist that they do everything our way, and we won’t grow irritable when they ask the same questions a million times. We won’t record their wrongs, but we will rejoice when we see the tiniest growth. We’ll put up with their faults. We’ll always believe the best about them and have hope that God will complete his good work in them. We’ll endure through the long, hard work of discipleship (1 Cor. 13:4-7).
This means our focus must be on the person, not a program. Books and classes are great tools for discipleship, but reading a book or completing a course doesn’t necessarily make someone a mature Christian. When your friend reads the book or goes through the class on spiritual growth, but they don’t grow as much as you’d hoped, don’t give up. Patiently love the person, and keep working.
Patiently Reflect God’s Patience
The only reason we can patiently love others is because God has patiently loved us (1 John 4:7-21). If you find yourself growing irritable and impatient with your friend over a lack of spiritual progress, remember how patient God is with you.
How many times have you disobeyed God, even after salvation? What sin do you continually struggle with? How often do you forget to thank God for his blessings? Are you perfectly Christlike or complete in your understanding of biblical truth, even though you’ve been saved for so long?
And yet, through all of that, God never gives up on you. He never separates you from his love. He never rolls his eyes or scoffs at your imperfect knowledge and faltering steps. In perfect love, he rebukes, corrects, teaches, encourages, and trains you. He rejoices over each step you take towards Christlikeness. He patiently works to complete the good work he began in you.
This is the patient love and work of God that we must reflect in our discipleship. It’s not easy. It’s not quick. But God designed it to work this way, and when it yields the fruit of Christlikeness, it will taste that much sweeter because of the patient work we’ve put into it.