June 26

Not to progress is to regress

“The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger” (Job 17:9).
“We beseech you . . . that ye increase more and more” (1 Thess. 4:10).

The Christian cannot cease to grow without danger. To keep any religion at all we must grow in grace.
The Christian who does not grow becomes peevish, fretful and unhappy, like a child that has ceased to grow. Is this not the reason why so many professors of religion have become weak, uneasy and dissatisfied? In nature, when growth ceases, decay and death are at hand. When a child ceases to grow, it starts for the grave. Not to progress is to regress, and regression is destruction.
—J. A. Wood.


“Yesterday was the best day of my life, but today is better.” This is real Christian experience. Anything short of this kind of progression is backsliding.
“A man of genius,” says Gilfillan, “is always a man of limitless growth, with a soul smitten with a passion for growth, and open to every influence that promotes it; who grows always like a tree, by day and by night, in calm and in storm, through opposition and through applause, in difficulty and in despair.”

The oak tree’s boughs once touched the grass
But every year they grew
A little farther from the ground,
And nearer toward the blue.

So live that you each year may be,
While time glides softly by,
A little farther from the earth,
And nearer to the sky.

“Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree” (Gen. 2:9).

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