The Shared Experience of Growing Up Evangelical but Spiritually Underdeveloped

How to Grow Spiritually

I grew up in a warm, Bible-believing, evangelical church. The people there were great, the Bible was lifted up, and the Scriptures were preached. In many ways, I look back with great fondness and thanksgiving for my evangelical upbringing, but I did sometimes wonder, What exactly does growth in the Christian life look like? And sometimes it felt like there was a lot of emphasis placed on something called a quiet time, but there wasn’t a lot of fleshing out of what that concept entailed. I knew it had something to do with the Bible. I knew prayer was a part of it, but there wasn’t a lot of elaboration.

And so sometimes that left me looking for a little bit more in terms of what do I actually do? How does one grow as a Christian? And as I’ve pursued various ministries, I’ve met more and more Christians who have had a similar experience.

They, too, love the Lord and they want to grow, but they feel a little bit under-equipped and have questions about what that actually looks like. And so part of the reason that I wanted to write this book was to put some flesh on those bones and to draw upon a group of Christian men and women who I think really got this right.

In the book we’re looking to folks from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the Reformation and the post-Reformation, we’re looking especially to the English Puritans, who J. I. Packer called “spiritual giants” because they really saw deeply into the nature of the Christian life and Christian growth.

I think a lot of what those authors commend to us when they talk about the Christian life is essentially what my pastors were talking about when they commended a quiet time. But I think they give us marvelous resources and talk about what it actually looks like to read and meditate on God’s Word, to pray that back to him, to really commune with the Triune God, and to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Matthew Bingham is the author of A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation.

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