It is not a question of either growing or not growing, and there an end;
but if you will look at the context you will see that the exhortation of
my text comes in in a very significant connection. 'Behold! beware, lest
being led away ... ye fall from your own steadfastness.' 'But grow in
grace.' That is to say, the only preventive of falling away from
steadfastness is continual progress. The alternative of advance is
retrogression. There is no standing still upon the inclined plane. If
you are not going up, gravity begins to act, and down you go. There must
either be continual advance or there will be certain decay and
corruption. As soon as growth ceases in this physiology _disintegration_
commences. Just as the graces exercised are strengthened, so the graces
unexercised decay. The slothful servant wraps his talent in a napkin,
and buries it in the ground. He may try to persuade his Master and
himself with 'There Thou hast that is Thine'; but He will not take up
what you buried. Rust and verdigris will have done their work upon the
coin; the inscription will be obliterated and the image will be marred.
You cannot bury your Christian grace in indolence without diminishing
it. It will be like a bit of ice wrapped in a cloth and left in the sun,
it will all have gone into water when you come to take it out. And the
truth that you do _not_ live by, whose relations and large harmonies and
controlling power are not being increasingly realised in your lives;
that truth is becoming less and less real, more and more shadowy, and
ghostlike to you. Truth which is not growing is becoming fossilised.
'The things most surely believed' are often the things which have least
power. Unquestioned truth too often lies 'bedridden in the dormitory of
the soul side by side with exploded error.' The sure way to reduce your
knowledge of Jesus Christ to that inert condition is to neglect
increasing it and applying it to your daily life. There are men, in all
churches, and there are some whole communions whose creeds are the most
orthodox, and also utterly useless, and as near as possible
nonentities, simply because the creed is accepted and shelved. If your
belief is to be of any use to you, or to be held by you in the face of
temptations to abandon it, you must keep it fresh, and oxygenated, so to
say, by continual fresh apprehension of it and closer application of it
to conduct. As soon as the stream stands, it stagnates; and the very
manna from God will breed worms and stink. And Christian truth
unpractised by those who hold it, corrupts itself and corrupts them.
So Peter tells us that the alternative is growth or apostasy. This decay
may be most real and unsuspected. There are many, many professing
Christians all ignorant that, like the Jewish giant of old, their
strength is gone from them, and the Spirit of God departed. My brother,
I beseech you, rouse yourself from your contented slothfulness. Do not
be satisfied with merely having come within the Temple. Count nothing as
won whilst anything remains to be won. There is a whole ocean of
boundless grace and truth rolling shoreless there before you. Do not
content yourselves with picking up a few shells on the beach, but launch
out into the deep, and learn to know more and more of the grace and
truth and beauty of your Saviour and your God.
But remember dead things do not grow. You cannot grow unless you are
alive, and you are not alive unless you have Jesus Christ.
Have you given yourselves to Him? have you taken Him as yours? given
yourselves to Him as His servants, subjects, soldiers? taken Him for
yours as your Saviour, Sacrifice, Pattern, Inspirer, Friend? If you
have, then you have life which will grow if you keep it in union with
Him. Joined to Him, men are like a 'tree that is planted by the rivers
of water,' which spreads its foliage and bears its fruit, and year after
year flings a wider shadow upon the grass, and lifts a sturdier bole to
the heavens. Separated from Him they are like the chaff, which has
neither root nor life, and which cannot grow.
Which, my friend, are you?