Christians should remember well their spiritual roots

You can never appreciate how far you’ve come in any sense in life without a look back to and acknowledgement of your past.

Each of us has moments when we weren’t Christians, perhaps had a real enmity with Christians, or moments when we held certain illusions about faith we had to later revisit. We do well to remember these moments when we become too sure of ourselves in our Christian walk. How far can we hope to come in the refinement of our walk if we insist it is perfect at each stage of development? Even if we are choosing to compartmentalise parts of our walk and stand on them as perfect, particularly using them as a platform to launch rebuke from, what have we profited from our own mistakes?

Particularly if one is born again from having an enmity with Christians, what does one profit from moving from a place of friction with Christians to having friction with non-Christians? If anything, all that happens is one takes the same attitude before they were a Christian and use it from the opposite perspective. Where is the spiritual growth in that? Just slapping a Christian label on the same attitude doesn’t make it righteous because it is proclaimed in Jesus’ name.

Remembering our humble spiritual roots is important. They should always remind us that no matter how far we’ve come, we have so far to go, and that our righteousness is never so complete that we can refuse to listen to those who disagree with us. Because, as certain as we were that we were once right on things we had to change, we are certain about what we think is right now.

However far we come, we are spiritual children before God. The walk is a continual process of doing away with childish ways, the first of which should be the assumption that we will ever be more than this.