Just About Everything In Life Is Incremental

“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard…..” Hebrews 2:1

Just about everything in life is incremental. I was born a helpless child and slowly over the years, the full physical capacities of my body grew and matured. Growing into the fullness of adulthood didn’t happen overnight, it took decades. Along the way, I had to learn to cooperate with what was necessary to develop a healthy body and lifestyle 

Just as I was born biologically an infant, so my learning to think began as an infant. Decades of education were needed to grow my understanding and capabilities in order to become a provider and producer. Along the way, I had to learn to take advantage of every opportunity and tool that would be necessary to grow my ability to think and mature. 

My spiritual maturing has been no different. It was incremental. Along the way, I had to learn to discipline my time, my feelings and my commitments, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in growing an infant into an adult. 

The proliferation of information in this day is more than we can actually process. And, the divergence and disagreement in this knowledge availability often overwhelms our ability to continue to grow incrementally, especially spiritually. It wants to delude us into believing that everything can come fast, and without patient stewardship. 

So we either react, retreat, or, hopefully, grab hold of the difficult process of evaluating what we see, hear and study, in order to not be overwhelmed, maybe even confused, or worse, deceived. 

Given this new accessibility to information, invited and uninvited, I think that the admonition of Hebrews 2:1 is important: “we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard…”

1. What we have heard from scripture. For it often stands in contradiction to everything else we hear. 

2. What we hear when we listen to someone preach. Is it from the Bible? Does it accord with our historical understanding of God and His ways. 

3. What will we allow ourselves to hear? Do we put ourselves daily in the position of protecting us from the glut of information.

I have often repeated the challenge to myself. I cannot spend too much time with God through His inspired word. My incremental commitment and growth in this discipline not only matures me spiritually, but also protects me from the potential confusion that surrounds me daily with such an abundance of information, and, people empowered to give me their opinion, whether I want it or not. 

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” Psalms 46:10

Learning to be still is the only sure antidote I know of to a life at peace with God and myself. It stands in stark contradiction to the frenetic life around us and into which the world is constantly wooing us.