Articles
Practice Makes Progress
One of life’s greatest frustrations is the unwritten natural law which states, “It is easier to lose progress than to gain it.” This truth is evident in almost every area of life. We can spend 90 days losing weight, but it takes only 90 hours (it seems) to gain it back. We can spend 5 years mastering our golf swing, but 5 days off cripples our tempo (you golfers know exactly what I mean). We can take 6 years of Spanish in high school and college, yet without regular practice our vocabulary becomes limited to “si, mas empanadas, por favor.” Even at a young age on the playground, we learn the powerful life lesson that it is far more difficult to climb the ladder than to slide down the slide. Is it any surprise that the same principle is true in spiritual matters?
In Mark 4:21f, Jesus instructs His disciples to make sure not to hide God’s Word, but to take it out and listen to it often. “For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him” (Mark 4:25). Have you ever found that if you spend a couple days away from God’s Word, it feels like you’ve lost at least a week’s worth of knowledge? It’s easy for “even what we have to be taken away from us.” It’s easy to lose progress spiritually when we neglect God and His Word. We lose even more when we start following our own path. “Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward” (Jer. 7:24, emphasis mine).
Let us not be discouraged by this phenomenon, but rather motivated to keep abiding in God’s Word by reading it and living it. Understanding that it is far easier to lose progress than to gain it will help us stop rationalizing our lukewarm devotion with platitudes like “I’ll just read double tomorrow to make up for it” (which can begin a terrible snowball of procrastination) or “I’ll just say an extra long prayer tomorrow” (it’s hard to pray to God twice as long when there is a day’s worth of spiritual distance between us). When the apostle Peter listed the Christian virtues we should aim for, he prefaced them with the phrase, “applying all diligence” (2 Pet. 1:5). After he listed the virtues, he said, “if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful...” (1:8a, emphasis mine). God expects these qualities to be increasing in our lives. How can we make sure they never decrease? Peter concludes, “...be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you, for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble” (1:10b, emphasis mine). Only diligent, daily practice makes progress.
