30 Days to Growing in Your Faith

Enrich Your Life in 15 Minutes a Day

Max Anders

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310116868
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLER 30 DAYS TO UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE.

Deepen your faith, strengthen your relationship with God, and enrich your life with this practical guide for spiritual growth.

In 30 Days to Growing in Your Faith, Max Anders uses a repetition and response methodology to outline a helpful framework for Christian living. To make a complex topic easier to grasp, this book is divided into three sections that reflect the basics of spiritual growth:

• KNOW: feed your mind with the truth
• BE: integrate your life with the lives of other solid Christians
• DO: get up each day and try your best to do what is true and right

Within each of these sections, Max outlines the most important things you need to know, using simple explanations and workbook-style learning to drive biblical truth into the hearts and minds of those who seek it. Themes like these will be addressed:

• Eternal perspective and purpose
• Desired attitudes, values, and behavior
• Responsibilities as followers of Christ

Insightful, engaging, and easy-to-use, 30 Days to Growing in Your Faith balances classic Christian teaching with innovative applications for today, giving you a solid foundation for a lifetime of growing in your faith. If you've been wondering how to engage with God's Word in your daily life, this is a must-read.

As a complete Christian, you need to:

• Know what you need to know

• Become what you need to be

• Do what you need to do

PART 1

KNOW

You can’t believe something until you know it.

CHAPTER 1

THE KEY TO HAPPINESS

You were created by God, for God, and you will only be truly happy as a Christian who is growing in God.

CENTRAL PASSAGE: Matthew 22:37 ESV—“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

1. It is okay for a Christian to want to be happy.

It is okay for a Christian to want to be h________.

The desire to be happy is the highest desire of the human heart. It is as Blaise Pascal wrote:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.¹

However, Christians may feel vaguely guilty about wanting to be happy. We may think our highest desire ought to be something loftier, more self-sacrificing, more “spiritual.” However, C. S. Lewis suggests:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion . . . is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.²

Hmmm. This opens up possibilities we may not have considered. Perhaps it might be okay with God for us to want to be happy . . . perhaps God might have actually even created us with this longing for happiness.

2. We naturally doubt that God alone is enough for our happiness.

We naturally d_____ that God alone is enough for our happiness.

A problem arises when we don’t quite believe that God alone is our source of true happiness. None of mankind has believed it naturally, ever since Adam and Eve.

Living in the Garden of Eden, in paradise, Satan slithered up to Eve and began a conversation that changed the course of history:

And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’ ” The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate. (Genesis 3:1–6, emphasis mine)

Eve saw, she desired, she took. Adam, her husband, followed suit.

Satan deceived Eve into doubting God’s sufficiently benevolent intentions toward her, and convinced her that in order to be happy she had to take things into her own hands.

It turned out badly.

That is the strategy Satan has used with every one of us since then, because it works so well. We see, we desire, we take.

We, like our first parents, conclude that, in order to be happy, we can take what we want from what God offers us. However, if there are things God’s will does not offer us that we think we need for complete happiness and fulfillment, we seek to get those things for ourselves. It turns out badly for us, too.

As believers, it is not that we don’t want God. We do. And we want the things he offers us, most notably eternal life. But we also want other things (financial security, good health, respect from others, adequate recreation, friends, good circumstances, an absence of frustration, etc.), and, if the will of God does not give them to us, we are inclined to go outside his will to try to get them for ourselves.

Pascal wrote eloquently of this tendency:

There was once in man a true happiness of which now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present[.] But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.³

3. We must seek our happiness in God.

We must seek our happiness in G____.

God has created us with deep desires because he wants to use them to draw us to himself, the only one who can fulfill those deep desires. Many of the Psalms carry this theme:

1. “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (37:4 ESV).

2. “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God” (42:1).

3. “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (119:103 NIV).

4. “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (16:11 ESV).

What deep longings these Psalms express . . . but look to God for their fulfillment. Our desire for happiness and fulfillment is natural and good. The thing we must learn is where to look for these. Real, lasting happiness and fulfillment cannot be found in the things of this world, but only in God.

And think about it: what in this world, by itself, has made you happy for long? A new car, a new home, a new job, a new spouse, a new ________________ (fill in the blank)?

Did it keep you happy? Of course not. If we are thinking clearly . . . if we are thinking to the end of the road (death and the afterlife) . . . only God can make and keep his children happy. That’s the way we’re wired.

Everything God asks of us, he does so to give something good to us, or to keep some harm from us. Therefore, the shortest distance between us and the life we long for is total obedience to Christ.

However, we often resist God’s commands because we imagine that they keep us from complete happiness rather than give us complete happiness. We think that if we give ourselves in total obedience to God, he will make us a pauper missionary and send us to some forsaken part of the globe to waste our lives in third-world futility.

Of course, that’s a lie from the pit of hell. But it can be very effective. And while that might not be your specific fear, just substitute your worst fear for “missionary” and “forsaken part of the globe,” and “third-world futility,” and that’s your fear.

We fear that bondage to God will make us miserable (in spite of the scriptural evidences to the contrary), and that we need to be free to follow our hearts.

Just the opposite is true, however. John Piper, in his book Desiring God, asserts that the chief end of man is not “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,” as the Westminster Confession states. Rather, he contends that the chief end of man is “to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”⁴

He outlines a philosophy of Christian pleasure:

1. The longing to be happy is a universal experience, and it is good—not sinful. In fact, it is a reflection of how God has created us...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Three Reasons to Read This Book
• How Do You Live the Christian Life?
• Part 1: Know
• Part 2: Be
• Part 3: Do
• The Christian Life In a Thousand Words
• How to Have a Profitable Spiritual Focus Time
• Notes