When You Can't See Growth

It will be objected that Christians are sometimes at a standstill, and sometimes they seem to go backward. Some, because they cannot see themselves growing, think they are not growing at all. That is only ignorance: we know that the earth rotates, though we do not see it moving, and we know things grow, though we do not see them growing. So, if we do not perceive our growth from grace to grace, it does not mean we are not growing.
But let's say indeed that Christians decay in their first love or in some grace. It is that they may grow in some other grace. God sees that they need to grow in the root. So he abases them with some infirmity, and then they spring out in full force again. As after a hard winter comes a glorious spring, so after a setback, grace breaks out more gloriously. God shows his powerful rule in our weakness; God's children never hate their corruption more than when they have been overcome by it. Then they know that there is some hidden corruption that they did not discern before and that they had better take notice of. It is profitable for God's children to fall sometimes. Otherwise they would never be as good as they are. They would not wash for the sake of a few spots, but when they see they are foul indeed, they go to wash. But this is a mystery; God wills to have it this way for good ends.
The chief thing in conversion is the desire, the turning of the stream of the will. So when some Christians find their will and their desire good, but their endeavour to fall short of their purposes, they say, ‘Surely I have no good, because I do not have what I want to have’—as if they should have heaven upon earth. But we must grow from glory to glory and thank God for that beginning. God looks not to the measure as much as to truth, though it might be ever so little. Let us be comforted in this.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
Glorious Freedom, pp. 158-60 [172-73]
Banner of Truth has granted permission for the use of this material.