The rapid growth of a fetus in the womb is an inspiring miracle. Four weeks after conception, a human embryo is the size of a poppy seed; three weeks later, the size of a blueberry; two weeks after that, the size of a grape!
After just three more weeks, that fetus has grown to the dimensions of a lime! All the vital organs are in place, many of them functioning. A female fetus already has ovaries containing more than 2 million eggs—the beginnings of the next generation after her!
During the second and third trimesters, the baby’s bones harden, muscle control develops, and he or she can hear you. The baby is developing, relentlessly.
This is an exact type of how God wants you to grow and develop spiritually throughout your life!
“[G]row in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ …” (2 Peter 3:18). Peter ends his second epistle with this charge. This is a requirement of the Christian life, from our spiritual begettal at baptism to our spiritual birth into the Kingdom of God.
To make it to that birth, like the fetus in the mother’s womb, we must always keep growing.
We Are Fetuses
Herbert W. Armstrong described how begettal and fetal development are a perfect type of this spiritual process. Spiritually, you are begotten by God when His Holy Spirit unites with your human spirit. You grow in the womb of the mother, the true Church of God. Your purpose is to be born into God’s eternal Family (e.g. Romans 8:16; Galatians 4:26; 1 John 3:1-2; John 3:6).
“Yes, even as the unborn, but begotten, human baby must grow from its beginning size no larger than a pinpoint, fed on physical food,” he wrote in Just What Do You Mean … Born Again?, “so once we are impregnated by God’s Holy Spirit—His life—we must grow spiritually, fed on the spiritual food of God’s Word, the Bible, and by prayer, and what fellowship is possible with truly begotten brethren in God’s truth.”
In The Missing Dimension in Sex, Mr. Armstrong explained, “As the physical fetus must grow physically large enough to be born, so the begotten Christian must grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ (2 Peter 3:18)—must overcome, must develop in spiritual character during this life, in order to be born into the Kingdom of God!
“And as the physical fetus gradually, one by one, develops the physical organs, features and characteristics, even so the begotten Christian must gradually, continually, develop the spiritual character—love, faith, patience, gentleness, temperance. He must live by and be a doer of the Word of God. He must develop the divine character!”
Are you growing—steadily, continually—on your way to the birth?
The stakes could not be higher. Mr. Armstrong was blunt: “And unless we do continue to grow in spiritual character development, more and more like God, we become like the unborn babe that miscarries—or like an abortion! And such shall never be born of God!” (Just What Do You Mean … Born Again?).
Grow—or die! You must grow all the way to your birth, or you will not be born at all.
A physical fetus in the womb grows naturally. But spiritually, growth is not natural; we must work for every bit of it.
Growth Is Not Automatic
For decades, Anders Ericsson studied how people became experts in various fields—music, sports, math, professional skills. His book Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise, coauthored with Robert Pool, allows us to gain insight into our growth in spiritual expertise.
Most of us assume that experience produces competence—that a doctor or teacher with 20 years of practice must be better than one with five. The research says otherwise.
“[O]nce a person reaches that level of ‘acceptable’ performance … the additional years of ‘practice’ don’t lead to improvement,” Ericsson wrote. “If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who’s been at it for 20 years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who’s been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve” (emphasis added throughout).
Without ongoing effort, growth plateaus—then it declines.
Spiritually, we tend to start strong. Leading up to and just after baptism, you are fresh, urgent, changing dramatically from your old ways and growing rapidly.
But how much are you growing now?
That initial rapid growth naturally slows once we have made those big changes. Over time, if we are not careful, it will plateau. Habits of prayer or study, once maintained with focus and intention, become routine—which, by definition, is something you no longer think about. When we are just going through the motions, we retrogress.
You and I cannot remain static spiritually. Each of us is either growing or regressing.
Why? Because our human nature, influenced by Satan, always pulls us toward complacency (e.g. Ephesians 2:1-3). We must constantly battle to bring our thoughts and attitudes under control so God can continue to give us growth!
It is estimated that 10 to 20 percent of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage—and half or more of successful fertilizations! Spiritually, sadly, the latter figure is accurate. In this Laodicean era of Church history, tragically, the proportion of true Christians who stop growing and abort their own spiritual lives is nearly half. And most of those who survive will make it only after intervention and severe correction from God!
In a physical pregnancy, the first six weeks mark the highest risk of miscarriage. The risk drops after week six, and even further after week 12. About 80 percent of miscarriages occur in the first trimester. Spiritually, that does happen at times—a person may start strong but quickly flame out. This is why God’s Church is so conscientious in baptism counseling: That new spiritual life must have the strongest start possible.
But people who have been in God’s true Church for decades also fall away! Why? At some point, they stopped growing spiritually. When growth stops, death follows.
What It Means to Grow in Grace
What does it mean, exactly, to “grow in grace”? In his Pentecost 1985 sermon, Mr. Armstrong addressed this directly: “Peter said we must grow. … [G]rowing in grace means growing in the character that comes through God’s Spirit. Are you growing in character day by day? Are you growing in the knowledge that God has? In other words, are you a good student? Are you learning? Are you going to be able to teach others? Are you qualifying to be a teacher and to go out and teach others? If not, you are wasting your time! You don’t belong in the Church.”
That’s a strong statement: If we stop growing, we don’t belong here. We must grow to be born into God’s Family, but our ultimate goal is to fulfill our calling, our exalted role in the Kingdom of God. If you are a true Christian in God’s Church, you must be growing toward that calling!
Peter opens his second epistle with the same theme he ends it on: “Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God …” (2 Peter 1:2). The more you gain this precious knowledge, the more grace and peace multiply. He explains that through God’s great and precious promises, we “might be partakers of the divine nature” (verse 4)—we can become like our Father.
Then Peter describes the growth process itself, telling you and me to apply all diligence and effort to add to our faith moral excellence, and to that, knowledge (spiritual insight and understanding), and then self-control, and to that steadfastness, then godliness, then brotherly affection, then God’s love (verses 5-7; see Amplified Bible).
This is real spiritual growth. Using the power of the Holy Spirit, you believe God and walk by faith more and more. You choose to do what is right even when inconvenient. You fill your mind with spiritual knowledge through consistent Bible study and prayer for spiritual understanding. You discipline your thoughts, words and impulses away from distractions or sin. You patiently endure trials and continue in obedience without quitting. You build constant awareness of God’s presence and reflect His character in the details of your life. You give genuine care, encouragement and service to fellow believers. You sacrificially put others first with compassion, even when they are difficult or undeserving.
You grow and grow in these qualities—and more and more, you resemble the image of your Father! Just like a child in the womb grows to resemble his or her parents.
As these qualities increase in you, you become increasingly useful and productive for God’s loving purposes (verse 8).
What happens if you don’t grow? Verse 9 answers: You become blind like the Laodiceans—wretched, miserable, poor and naked without realizing it!
Peter concludes: “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall” (verse 10). You can only build these virtues if you do. Verse 11 makes clear that this is the only way to make it to birth in God’s Kingdom.
What Satan Is After
That spiritual growth process requires “all diligence.” You have to work and fight to grow. And this is especially so because it’s not just gravity or inertia that threatens to slow and then reverse the process.
A being is actively trying to stop your growth—so that you die. Satan wants to do all he can to interrupt your growth process. Physically and spiritually, he pushes for abortion.
The Satan-inspired culture we live in is not merely tolerant of abortion—it is passionate about it. In 2023—the first full calendar year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision that would supposedly suppress abortion—an estimated 1,037,000 abortions occurred in the U.S. formal health-care system, up 11 percent from 2020. A recent poll found that nearly 93 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. Fewer than 8 percent say killing a child is always wrong!
Satan hates human beings, even unborn human beings. He has been a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). This physical and spiritual murderer is after you with the same tenacity—because he knows that once you are born into the Kingdom of God, you will be immortal and fulfilling your role of helping God bring even more spiritual children to the birth! He cannot touch you then. So he is urgent to kill you now, before the birth.
His most effective tool is not some dramatic assault. It is simply getting you to stop growing.
Here is the crucial difference between the physical and spiritual analogy: A baby in the womb is helpless. You are not. Growing spiritually can happen only with your active belief and obedience toward God, and being aborted spiritually can only happen with your consent. Peter says plainly: “[I]f ye do these things, ye shall never fall.” The choice is yours.
The Doer, Not the Hearer
In that 1985 Pentecost sermon, Mr. Armstrong said that most of the Church members didn’t get it. What was “it,” specifically? A lot of what they “didn’t get” was the nature of the spiritual growth God requires.
“You are students,” he said. “How much are you learning, and how much are you developing your life? To grow in grace is to grow in the character of God. That’s not only the knowledge, but it is living that way—to grow in love. That means in how you treat others in your own home. That means in how you treat neighbors and how you treat people. How kind are you? How loving are you? How much do you encourage others and try to help others? How much are you developing the character of God in your own life?”
There are more specifics about the growth God is looking for in us, as Peter listed: exercising the love of God, treating others with kindness, encouraging them as God does. God is measuring these things! It is easy to give ourselves a pass, to assume that because we attend services, keep the Sabbath, pray and study, we must be growing. But Mr. Armstrong wasn’t talking about attendance; he was talking about character.
James 1:21 says we need to “receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (Revised Standard Version). In The Epistle of James, Gerald Flurry comments: “God implants His Word in us for the purpose of growth! As we nurture it, deep roots form and it grows even faster. That is what God wants. He wants growth—change—conversion! He wants us to be different today than we were yesterday. We won’t necessarily have explosive growth, but we should be growing every day! We must not remain static in our lives.”
Stagnation is our natural tendency. And spiritually, it is death.
Albert Einstein put it plainly: “When you cease to learn, you cease to grow. And when you cease to grow, you cease to improve, get better, move forward and just sort of begin to—exist. … Once you stop learning, you start dying.”
Mr. Armstrong was equally direct: “Just knowledge alone isn’t going to do any good. You can hear the Word of God. You can have the knowledge. But not the hearers, but the doers of the law are justified before God. Are you a doer? The only reason you need the knowledge is to learn what to do; and it does you no good until you put it to work and do it!” (ibid).
James 1:22 says when we fail to act, we deceive ourselves. We think we’re growing when we’re actually regressing. (Remember, we are never static.) This is a pernicious danger in the life of a true Christian.
It all comes down to that word do. “If ye do these things, ye shall never fall.” Listening to a sermon about faith or gossip, or reading an article about prayer or Sabbath observance, does nothing to contribute to your spiritual growth. Doing what you hear and study—trusting God in a grievous trial, shutting down a dishy conversation, increasing the detail and passion of your prayers, adding a family Bible study to your Sabbath morning routine—these are the actions that lead to spiritual growth.
Do you really want to grow? Satan pushes us toward indifference—toward Laodicean lukewarmness. God wants us to be zealous and passionate! When you are passionate about something, there is a natural prod toward continual improvement. That zeal motivates you—and as you improve, the zeal itself grows. Growth is exhilarating. Pushing for excellence makes life more worth living.
Grow Up
Growing as a fetus in the womb is a powerful analogy. Here is a different but closely related analogy: “Whom shall he teach knowledge? … them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts” (Isaiah 28:9). Here we are already born, but it is still talking about growth. It pictures how we are fed by our spiritual mother, God’s Church—and it shows that we must grow up and be weaned from Mom.
Why did God’s Church become Laodicean and fall away from God after Mr. Armstrong died? “Because most of the Laodiceans were never ‘weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts,’” Mr. Flurry explained (PhiladelphiaTrumpet, November 1995). They couldn’t see past their spiritual mother to their spiritual Father, and they remained dependent on an institution rather than on God Himself. “God can’t feed them strong meat, because they are still on milk! They refuse to grow up. We must ‘grow in the grace and in knowledge of our Lord’ (2 Peter 3:18). God accepts only mature sons into His Family” (ibid).
Mr. Flurry explained their specific failure as described in Isaiah 28:10-11: “They don’t get deeply into their Bibles and connect precepts and lines. They don’t study deeply to get ‘here a little and there a little,’ so that God’s magnificent truth becomes powerfully clear. If they would do so, then they would become stirred and inspired to mature!”
A related passage is Matthew 24:19. In His Olivet prophecy, in which He says that true Christians will flee to a place of safety, Jesus Christ warned, “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days!” (New King James Version). That is talking about spiritual immaturity. “This verse has the same spiritual meaning as Isaiah 28,” Mr. Flurry explained. “God is warning His own Laodicean, spiritually immature Church. They shall lack the faith to flee when they see the abomination of desolation!”
True spiritual maturity gives you strength to withstand hardships and shocks and hold steady against intense pressure.
Think about these analogies: We are fetuses, newborn babies, nursing infants. God, the Creator of human begettal, gestation, birth and growth, made human life the exact type of spiritual life. Christ tells us to become as little children (Matthew 18:3). Even a weaned child still needs his mother! We receive nourishment from our spiritual mother throughout our lives. If we become self-reliant, we invite trouble. We must grow up—and we must never stop being children. These are not contradictory. The mature son still loves and depends on his mother.
You Can Keep Going
A newcomer to God’s truth and God’s Church is often brimming with enthusiasm. Each of us must work to fuel that zeal and cause it to grow over time. As Mr. Flurry writes: “We who have been in the Church for some years should not be less excited than those individuals! We should progress from first love, to second love, to the third, fourth and so on! That love should be growing right up to the moment we are born into God’s Family! We should be overflowing with excitement to be a part of this awesome plan orchestrated by our heavenly Father” (The Epistles of Peter—A Living Hope).
There is virtually no ceiling to growth. “In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way,” Ericsson wrote. “You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you. … There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement” (op cit).
This is even truer in your spiritual life. There is no limit on the development of godly character, because the character we are growing toward is that of God our Father.
When he wrote Psalm 119, Jeremiah had lived his entire life with God’s Word, studying it, teaching it, suffering for it. In verse 162 he wrote: “I rejoice at thy word, as one that findeth great spoil.” He had the fresh thrill of a man who unexpectedly discovered buried treasure! Not the dull familiarity of someone who has heard it all before. Mr. Flurry comments: “Jeremiah had lived his whole life with the spiritual wealth of God’s Word—yet he grew in his excitement for it. … This should be the emotion we build in our daily Bible study and meditation of God’s Word” (The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara).
This growth need not stop as we age. Much of what we attribute to aging is simply the result of decreasing or stopping our training. The physical performance of older people who continue to regularly train decreases far less than it does in those who don’t train. The research on master athletes is striking: A quarter of marathon runners in their 60s outperform more than half of their competitors between ages 20 and 54. True, you must train differently (with less volume, less intensity and more recovery), but age isn’t the limiting factor it was once thought to be.
Psalm 92:14 promises the same of the faithful: “They still bring forth fruit in old age, they are ever full of sap and green” (rsv).
As we age, we naturally want to sit back and rest, to give in to the forces of aging. God designed us to need to fight harder as we age, to develop another level of character. More than anything, that fight presses us to look to Him more, to rely on His strength rather than our own.
In a sermon delivered Oct. 15, 1981, when he was nearly 90, Mr. Armstrong said: “We have to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. How much are you growing in knowledge? Do you know more now than you did when I spoke here three years ago? Well, I do! I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot since the first of this year. In my 90th year, I’ve learned a lot. How much are you learning every year? Are you growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Are you overcoming the ways that Satan got into you and the way of the world around you? You’ll never get into the Kingdom of God unless you are, brethren. You’re not already there! You’re on trial and we’re coming to the time of final exams right now.”
I’ve learned a lot this year. That is the spirit we need. We must know more and overcome more and grow more!
Right to the Birth
Paul told the Church members in Philippi: “And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; Being filled with the fruits of righteousness …” (Philippians 1:9–11).
More and more means grow and grow!
“Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (verse 6). The word perform means finish. God will keep working in you, helping you keep growing right to the end!
We are the children of our Father, growing in the womb of God’s true Church, being prepared for a birth that will make us immortal sons in the God Family. Every day of prayer and study, every battle against human nature, every lesson absorbed and applied, is building us—gradually, continually, relentlessly—into the person who will be born into God’s Family.
Satan will never quit trying to stop your growth. But he can only succeed if you let him—if you stop growing, stop striving, stop pressing toward the mark.
Keep growing, nonstop, right to the birth!
Deliberate Practice
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s book, Peak, identifies “deliberate practice” as the gold standard for genuine improvement in any field. Some of its components have clear spiritual parallels:
Deliberate practice takes place in a well-developed field with an expert teacher who provides practice activities specifically designed to improve the student’s performance. We have this. God is our expert Teacher, and He gives us ample instruction, precisely suited to help us grow. Our practice activities include daily prayer, Bible study, meditation, occasional fasting and even our daily work, our family life, our fellowship with the brethren, and our service to the congregation. Every aspect of life is a training ground, and we need to be paying attention and prod ourselves to work hard in those areas as God instructs us.
Deliberate practice involves specific, well-defined goals—not vague overall improvement but something concrete enough to measure. God often gives us specific areas to address; we then need to define exactly what growth and success would look like. If you want to eliminate judgmentalism or time-wasting or an addiction to something worldly, track how often you slip up, and day by day, week by week, draw on God’s help to bring that number down to zero. If you want to become more encouraging to others, excited about prophecy, or disciplined in diet, decide what actions will move you in that direction, and carry them out. Attitudes often follow actions.
Deliberate practice requires working outside your comfort zone with near-maximal effort, full attention and conscious action. The student cannot simply practice on autopilot; he must concentrate on the specific goal and actively adjust where necessary. We hear this often: Prayer and study cannot be routine—they must be fervent and focused. Does that describe your daily prayer and study? When you are in fellowship with the brethren, do you give it your full attention, near-maximal effort?
Deliberate practice involves feedback and active modification in response. You must get an accurate picture of yourself, which requires humility; our tendency is to see ourselves too generously. To practice without a teacher, the authors suggest three steps: focus, feedback, fix it. God will provide that feedback through your study, through the ministry, through your spouse, your employer, your friends, through the circumstances of your life. It is up to us to be receptive, to really listen, and then to apply what God shows us.