I will never forget reading a book by Dr. Denis Waitley called Seeds of Greatness where he writes, “The average person dies with millions of unused brain cells.” About that time, I also read that most people use about 400 words in more than 80% of their everyday conversations. That is 400 words out of about 450,000 words in the English dictionary. If we learnt 10 new words every day for one year we could become among the most learned and well-spoken individuals in the world. Motivated by this fact, I set as a goal for the following year that I would learn one new word every day and bought a book that was designed to help me achieve this goal.

So important is this subject, growing to our maximum potential that I have been encouraged to write a second article on the subject GROW ON…..don’t just go on.
Follow link to Part 1:   GROW ON……..don’t just go on.(1) | Rod Denton

And I am writing to people who have yet to realise that they have been :-

1. Created to grow
   “For we are God’s handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Ephesians 2:10
   Our potential is God’s gift to us; what we do with our potential is our gift to God. If I was told at a younger age what God had planned for me to do in my lifetime, I would have found it hard to believe. Most people I have known tend to underestimate the potential that God has placed in them. That may be why Paul said that God “is able to do immeasurably more than ALL WE ASK OR IMAGINE, according to His power that is at work in us.” Ephesians 2:10 My question to you is, “Do you believe it?”
2. Created to grow for a lifetime
   Henry Ford, the inventor of the Ford Motor car said, “Anyone who stops learning (growing) is old, whether at 20 or at 80.” Tupac Shakur said, “Death is not the greatest loss of life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we are still alive.”
   I remember the time when I made it a priority to meet regularly with the great Christian leader J. Oswald Sanders, and at the age of 89 he told me he was rising at 5.00am each morning to spend time in study and to write his latest book. He knew only too well that he was created to grow for a lifetime. He reminded me of Caleb who said to Joshua, “So here I am today, eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now, as I was then. Now give me this hill country that the Lord promised me that day. You yourself heard then that the Anakites were there, and their cities were large and fortified, but the Lord helping me, I will drive them out just as he said.”                 Joshua 14:10-12
   As it happened, Caleb did take the city of Hebron, “because he followed the Lord, the God of Israel wholeheartedly.”
   And you and I can follow in the footsteps of Caleb and prove that we have been created to grow for a lifetime, if we follow the Lord our God wholeheartedly.
3. Created to grow for a lifetime in a wholistic way
   Jesus modelled such a life for us in that He “grew (and never stopped growing) in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” Luke 2:52 Our lifetime of growth needs to occur in a balanced way where we never focus on one area of growth to the detriment of another area of growth, such as that which can cause our relationship with God or our family to suffer because of a blind spot in our lives. It has been sad to read of well-known Christian leaders who have sacrificed their families because of their passion to change the world. The daughter of a man who built an amazing worldwide Christian ministry sadly wrote that, “ ‘No’ was not a word that was in my dad’s vocabulary because somehow he felt saying ‘No’ was letting God down.”
   As a consequence, his family and marriage life suffered greatly.

TELL TALE SIGNS OF A PLATEAUED LIFE

One of the problems of a person in such situations who has ceased to grow is that they can often fail to realise it or won’t readily admit it. There are consequences that will ultimately reveal that a person, particularly one in leadership, has stopped growing. In fact, when leaders stop growing, they stop leading because leaders can only take people as far as they have gone.
People have stopped growing when :

1. they start talking more about the past and less about the future. They focus on the good old days which quite often were not as good as a person makes them out to be.
2. they talk more about the experiences of other people than they do about their own experiences, usually because they have little of substance to talk about.
3. they regard change as an enemy to be resisted and feared rather than a contributing factor that leads to the pathway of growth.
4. they become a liability in an organisation because they see their role as guarding the status quo that has become an end in itself. They are heard to often quote, “We have never done it this way before.”
5. they stop learning and discovering new things. They become locked in their thinking and become self-styled critics of those who are growing and leading. This is one of the problems that Jesus had with the religious leaders of His day.
6. they no longer talk about a personal up to date relationship with God but focus on an impersonal God and what He has done on past occasions.

As can be seen, there are serious consequences when a person decides not to grow on, but to just go on in life. Such a person can become a “growth hazard” not only to themselves, but to the people around them in the world in which they live.

TWO TELL TALE SIGNS OF A LIFE THAT IS GROWING ON

1. A PASSION TO GROW

The first step to being a growing person is to be a passionate person. A passionate person is a fire lighter. A passionate person with a few skills will outperform a passive person with many skills.
Lessons I have learned from observing passionate, growing people are that they will:

• dream dreams that others have never considered.
• be prepared to attempt things that others have never attempted.
• seek out mentors that others would never dream of contacting.
• attend learning experiences that others would not make the effort to attend.
• seek out feedback that others would prefer to avoid
• pay a price to grow that others would not be prepared to pay.
• endure opposition that others would not be willing to endure.
• consider possible what others think is impossible.
• burn on when others are burning out.
• press on when others surrender to the conditions around them.
• meet people that others would find inconvenient to meet.
• grow to heights that others have never attempted.
• establish standards of excellence that others would consider unnecessary.
• trust God to do above and beyond what others consider impossible.

2. A TEACHABLE SPIRIT

A person who has a passion to grow will also have a teachable spirit which is evidenced by an attitude of humility. People with a teachable spirit will discover that the more they know, the more they don’t know.
Jesus’ greatest problems came from people who didn’t have a teachable spirit. Henry Blackaby wrote,
“Religious people with the most knowledge are sometimes the ones least responsive to God’s word. Knowledge can easily lead to pride, and pride impedes us from seeking God. How do you know if you are a ‘Pharisee’? When you do not have a teachable spirit. Don’t allow the limited knowledge you now have to blind you to the great truths God still wants to reveal to you.”

When we have a teachable spirit, God can use any experience, good or bad, to grow us. There is always something to learn if we are teachable. I remember listening to a message from John Maxwell called 10 Lessons I Have Learnt from a Heart Attack. He had a teachable spirit and never wanted to go through such a life-threatening experience again.

Lessons he had learned included:

• Being a good steward of his body. He said that he was arrogant about his health and that just because he felt good, he thought he was healthy.
• You can never tell people you love, that you love them enough.
• Learning to place his family first.
• Focusing on what he had and not on what he had lost. A person full of self-pity cannot help someone else.

Having a teachable spirit will mean above all things that you will become a great listener. While we are talking, we are not learning. When we listen, we learn. An important lesson that I have learned is to prepare myself for any meeting I will have by mentally noting important questions I can ask the person I will be meeting.
Henry Blackaby adds a further dimension regarding a teachable spirit. He wrote,
“If you are sensitive to what God is doing around you, He will clearly speak to you through His activity. The disciples discovered much about God’s power by witnessing Jesus calming a raging storm with a command. Seeing Jesus dine with a notorious sinner, Zacchaeus, taught them a poignant message about God’s love for sinners. Watching Jesus hang upon the cross communicated a compelling message of what God was willing to do to free people from sin. To those with spiritual discernment (a teachable spirit), God’s activity is a significant revelation about His heart and will. If you want to hear God’s voice, look around you to see what God is doing.”

One of the greatest acts of humility that came from a teachable spirit I have witnessed was in a meeting with the chaplain to the staff at Fuller Seminary, Doctor Robert Munger. I was studying at Fuller Seminary, and I became aware of Doctor Munger’s presence on campus. I respected him as a great Christian leader for many years in America and went to his office one day to ask if I could meet him every two weeks at a lunchtime to learn from him. He willingly agreed and commented that no one had ever asked such a question. Our meetings were rich times of learning for me as I would come to each meeting with my prepared questions. 

One day, to my greatest surprise, Doctor Munger asked me if I would pray for him that he might know a greater presence of the Holy Spirit in his life. I felt quite inadequate for the task, but finally agreed to pray for him. But what followed surprised me even more. This gracious senior Christian statesman got out of his chair and knelt on the floor before me, and bowing his head, waited for me to pray for him. I also got down on my knees and in a moment of deep reverence, laid hands on him and prayed for him. The Holy Spirit came, and in that moment, we were lost in wonder, love and praise in an unforgettable experience. I then asked him to pray for me.

I was with a man whose hunger to Grow On….and not just go on, was reflected by his passion to grow and his teachable spirit in his senior years. And in that moment, I learnt one of the greatest growth lessons I had ever experienced, as it was modelled to me by Doctor Munger. My informal times with Doctor Munger rivalled the best classes I took in my two years at Fuller Seminary.
And know that as you Grow On, that God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work in us. To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout ALL generations for ever and ever.” Ephesians 3:20-21