I always felt so bad for my kids when they would wander into our room, complaining about how much their legs hurt while they tried to sleep. Growing pains are hard. But once they heard they were growing pains, that made the pain a bit easier. Kids like the idea of growth, and while it doesn’t decrease the pain, knowing it had a greater purpose for a better end made it seem more manageable.

Scripture often uses the notion of physical growth from childhood into adolescence and then adulthood as the framework within which we should consider spiritual growth. This is why we talk about Christian growth as maturation, or why Paul can use imagery like starting with milk and then moving onto solid food.

The problem, however, is that we still experience growing pains in the growth of grace. Like puberty, we are often surrounded by people experiencing the same things without anyone actually talking about it. For instance, Christians have always noticed that young believers are often filled with passion and excitement beyond their maturity. This excitement is not mature, but it is good. It is good because it is by grace, but we often confuse it as an experience of God’s acceptance and not simply a sign of God’s gracious kindness. In other words, we think this pleasure and passion are signals that God is pleased with us, rather than the fact that God, in his steadfast love and mercy, lavishes upon his children for the sake of his name.

When this happens, we subconsciously begin to equate the feeling of excitement with God’s pleasure. These things are bound together in our spiritual infancy, but as we grow, they have to be pulled apart. Maturity always requires us to untether things we have melded into one.

So as we grow, and our excitement wanes, we have to learn that this too is a gift from the Lord. This gift is to show us what is in our hearts (Deut. 8:2) so that we can come to him in the truth and learn to truly rely upon him in all things. Instead, many Christians interpret the experience of losing excitement differently. Many grow bored, tired or just feel consumed by the pace of their Christian service, and instead of coming to God, they assume that their lack of excitement is a sign of God’s disappointment. Too often, folks turn to themselves and strategies of growth that only ultimately lead them away from God rather than to him.

There are many things we turn to when we experience our excitement waning. Some believe that they need to become more passionate, when that is really a strategy of the flesh. Others seek to become better, more devoted and more engaged, not realizing that they are doing exactly what Paul warned the Galatians about, beginning with the Spirit but trying to perfect themselves in the flesh (Gal. 3:3).

Today, perhaps more than in recent memory, people turn to spiritual disciplines, having read a book or listened to a podcast that was supposedly on spiritual formation. These folks, feeling consumed already, begin to think that this is the missing piece they have been looking for. Having been sold a vision of spiritual formation with a clear path of growth, they throw themselves into formation and trust that this will finally recover what has been lost.

Unfortunately, it is often this focus on spiritual disciplines that is simply a recovery of the error of the Colossians, who Paul warns have developed a “self-made religion” with the “appearance of wisdom” that is based on “asceticism of the body” (spiritual discipline) but no ability to deal with the flesh (Col. 2:23). This formation has “let go of Christ,” and is not, therefore, the kind of formation that knows the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19).

I focus on this topic today because I worry that this last temptation is going to hit the church like a tidal wave. The current interest in spiritual disciplines, I worry, will simply result in another agenda to “fix my life,” and won’t actually be about losing one’s life to find it in Christ. It will confuse the nature of the Christian life and will end up being another form of self-made religion that is an attempt to perfect ourselves with the flesh.

But also, I write about this today because this week [week of February 1] is the release week for When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near.

The reason we called this book When God Seems Distant is because we wanted to name for folks what is really going on when we struggle with our faith. We wanted people to see the temptation to avoid God or to manage him rather than being with him. We wanted to show how easy it is to allow the growth pains of faith to lead us to ourselves and our own self-help strategies of the flesh.

We are often, unfortunately, naive to the ways that the flesh can manipulate and undermine our life with God. We too often assume that as long as we have good intentions, then that must mean our spiritual practices are pure. But this isn’t the case.

One of the reasons many of us feel so consumed these days is that we have bought into consumeristic assumptions about our Christian lives. Instead of laying aside that whole program — recognizing that it is a failure to embrace the ways and the economy of Jesus — we just swap out the various products we are using.

When we were first discussing title options for this book, one title we kept coming back to, but didn’t end up using, was Spiritual Formation Beyond Willpower. That really does get to the core message of this book. We ended up going with When God Seems Distant because we wanted to name a common, confusing experience in the Christian life that would awaken folks to the questions we all struggle with.

But the invitation of this book is that there is a path of spiritual formation that isn’t based on “getting your act together” but is still a call to bear your cross and follow. As Willard often noted, “grace is opposed to earning, not effort.”

But not all effort is the same. We have to talk about a developmental spirituality so we can come to understand the nature of Christian maturation. In doing so, we cannot simply talk about spiritual disciplines. We have to talk about Christian transformation by grace that is always the transformation in love and for love.

What John Coe and I are articulating through Where Prayer Becomes Real and When God Seems Distant is a vision of spiritual formation that rests on the truth of the gospel and the reality that the growth we are called to is the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19).

I hope that these books can minister to you, but also, help to model what it means to shepherd souls to their Lord in the truth of their life. Also, for those of you looking for a Lent reading to prepare your hearts for Easter, we put together a daily reading plan through When God Seems Distant that you can download here.

This post and more can be found on Kyle Strobel’s Substack.