In Us: Spiritual Growth

Bottom line: If you’re looking for someone to lower the bar for your life, don’t go to Jesus. He sees you as you can become by His Spirit living in You. God’s glorious plan for you is that you be “conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Rom. 8:29). At First Covenant, we embrace a pattern of apprenticeship to Jesus that leads upward through growing in:

•	God’s Love For Us: Learning to realize and return God’s love.
•	God’s Love In Us: A pattern of spiritual life that cultivates the indwelling Spirit’s desire to conform us to Jesus
•	God’s Love Through Us: Learning the joys of having a mission, a witness and a vision for the world

God’s Love in Us: Cross Training
As to cultivating God’s love “in us,” we find two kinds of “cross training” central to our growth. Believers are challenged to...

•	Pick up the cross and follow Jesus
•	Pursue mutually reinforcing spiritual disciplines. (What athletes call “cross training.”)


»	We become more and more like Jesus as we increasingly cooperate with God as He changes us from the inside out by conforming our character, emotions, and will to His. Conforming our character, emotions, and wills to His.
»	We become more like Jesus as we renew our minds with God's Word. Reading, hearing, studying, memorizing, meditating upon, and applying the Bible to our lives.
»	We become more like Jesus as we increasingly do the sort of things Jesus did. Living compassionately, simply, and by Jesus' principles of the Kingdom of God. It means putting the life of faith into practice.
»	We become more and more like Jesus as we partner with other be livers to intentionally help each other grow. To this end we encourage all to be in small groups and the advisability of relationships of spiritual apprenticing.