God Did It!

Have you ever done any gardening? Have you every planted a seed and waited for it to grow? Did you ever wonder why it took so long before you saw the little shoot spring from the ground? Do you remember that all of the sudden, you saw growth. The sprout was making progress; it just had a long way to go to push through the soil.

How do you make a seed grow? In a technical way, you can’t do anything to make it grow. You can provide the right kind of soil, the right amount of fertilizer, the right amount of water and sunlight and warmth; but the seed grows because God designed it to grow.

The same is true of us spiritually. The right setting (church), the right preaching, the right fellowship, and so on, are factors to help us grow; but at the root of it all it is God, who works in our heart so that we might grow. Paul said it this way, “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). God causes our spiritual growth. He works in our hearts to cause us to have the desire and to follow through and accomplish what pleases Him.

God does the work of spiritual growth. That is why we depend on Him and not on ourselves. At the same time, each of us is responsible to cooperate with what God is doing. God is working in our lives to cause us to grow spiritually. He initiates, He instructs, and He commands, and we respond to what He is doing. When you do respond, you will grow spiritually; and you can testify with praise and adoration, “God did it!”