A Bad Temper
One guy said that he lost his temper
with his wife and said something he regretted. In actuality, he didn’t
lose it; he found it. But maybe he needed to lose it. Anger is almost
always a pride issue when we lose our temper. Righteous indignation is
not what I’m talking about here because when we see a child abused,
children aborted, or rioting and looting, getting angry is a natural
feeling. What I mean by losing our temper is when someone cuts in front
of us in traffic or in line and suddenly we unleash the middle finger or
profanity-laced words come flying out of our mouth. The thing is, you
can’t ever take words back. It takes 10 times the amount of time to
clean up the damage by one single outburst. James wrote that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God,” and so we should “put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness”
(James 1:20-21). A bad temper can destroy your spiritual growth because
you’re always doing damage control by trying to apologize time and
again, and it really does destroy your Christian testimony and kill your
spiritual growth.
Failing to Assemble Yourselves in Worship
I knew a couple that had problems coming
to church. Their attendance was very sporadic. They would be gone about
two out of every five Sundays, and then it got to be three out of every
four. Over time they stopped coming to church altogether. The man
started drinking and became hooked on pornography. His wife was on the
verge of leaving him, and that was when he contacted me for some
counseling. What he and his wife were doing was “forsaking the assembling of [themselves] together, as is the manner of some”
(Heb 10:25), and they missed the encouragement of one another in the
church (Heb 10:26). Not being within the Body of Christ, they missed out
on worshiping God and the joy that brings. They missed out on the
fellowship of the saints, and they missed out on being fed the Word of
God on a regular basis. They were literally starving to death from a
lack of the Bread of Life. This really stunted their spiritual growth,
and it about caused them to divorce.
Absence of Prayer and Bible Reading
One of my old seminary professors wisely
said that prayer is the pulse of the believer’s spiritual temperature.
If there’s a slowing or decreasing pulse in prayer, then there is
spiritual decay, and the fellowship between them and God is affected.
Add to that a lack of regular Bible reading and you have a recipe for
killing your spiritual growth. I have counseled so many people who are
struggling with their faith. They begin to doubt their salvation, and
then they stop reading the Bible altogether. It is a self-replicating
cycle. They pray less; they read less. The less they pray and read, the
more they get into the habit of doing neither. Reading the Bible will
lessen your doubts. Not reading the Bible will increase your doubts. The
exact same thing goes for prayer.
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