3 Signs You're Thriving Spiritually

And the very good news about what happens when your growth is stunted.

You may have grown up in a religious atmosphere that considered activity and rituals to be the primary marker of spiritual maturity, where those who were most active and involved in their church attendance and volunteerism were seen as the most spiritual.

Perhaps you saw as most mature those who kept the most rules and avoided vices and visible sins - who didn’t cuss, drink, smoke, chew, or run around with those who do… er… did.

Plenty of us also had the impression that knowledge was the marker of maturity. Those who knew the most about the Bible were the closest to God.

If so, you probably feel guilt and shame about not knowing enough, not doing enough, and breaking rules you don’t even believe in keeping anymore.

There has to be a better way to assess how you’re doing spiritually than going through a performance checklist.

When I coach a leader through spiritual burnout, I like to offer a different kind of assessment. Instead of measuring spiritual growth by the number of services attended or Bible verses memorized, I suggest asking three introspective questions and then giving time to listen for the Spirit’s confirmation contemplatively.

The answers to these questions are more felt than spoken. They are simply:

Question #1: Are you moving toward God by praying regularly, believing that your prayers mean something?

Spiritual progress is certainly contingent upon spending time relating to God in prayer. And prayer takes on plenty of different forms, but as Richard Foster says in his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home:

Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.

The first and greatest sign of spiritual thriving is a dynamic, active relationship with God, and the most basic way to fan the flame of that relationship is through prayer.

But it isn’t just that you’re doing the praying and saying the words. It’s that you choose to exercise the faith that your words actually mean something to God.

Question #2: Are you moving toward people and forming deeper connections? Or are you isolating yourself?

While solitude is certainly a worthy spiritual discipline, we should, in general, open our lives to others by intentionally forming deeper connections.

You were formed for fellowship with other people. Relationships are nourishment for the soul. Terrance Real says in his book, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (one of my favorite books on the subject of marriage):

Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.

Spiritually maturing people are moving toward others. Spiritually stagnating people are moving away from vital relationships in isolation.

Question #3: Are you able to experience joy and peace within yourself in spite of your circumstances?

This is not at all to minimize the reality of any pain or suffering you may be enduring in the present season of your life. It’s not a question of being able to feel the warm fuzzies while ignoring pain, loss, or grief.

This, instead, is a question of whether you’re living at peace with who you are more and more with each passing day.

It could be that you grew up in a religious atmosphere that shunned any talk of self-love or self-acceptance. It’s taken me years to unwire some of the toxic theology that led me to self-rejection. One voice that has helped me tremendously is that of the late Henri Nouwen. One of my favorite quotes comes from his book Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life:

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us God’s beloved. Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

If you ask these questions and they lead you to the conclusion that your spiritual growth is indeed stunted, here’s the very good news…

The Father awaits you. He longs for you to long for him. He washes away our sins, sees past all of our shortcomings, and welcomes us home with grand celebration when we return to his presence once again.

Thriving spiritually is less about doing and more about being.

It’s not about running through a checklist. It’s about running into the waiting arms of God once again.

As you finish reading this final line, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and lie asoak in the goodness of God’s love. That’s where the thriving begins.