Spiritual growth almost never feels like what we think it will. We expect it to feel like mountaintops, like eye-opening clarity; like fire in prayer, like tears in worship and a growing sense of momentum. But, for the people in the Bible who were growing the most significantly, they didn’t not experience any of that. Joseph grew in prison. Job grew on an ash heap, scraping his sores with broken pottery. Paul grew in chains in a Roman cell, in the dark, near the end of his life.

The disciples grew in the moments that Jesus was arrested; in confusion and fear, and the total collapse of everything they thought understood. None of them would describe what was happening to them as growth. They would have described it as survival. The seasons that feel like spiritual stagnation are sometimes the seasons of the deepest spiritual formation.

Spiritual growth in the Bible is almost never described as a feeling. It is described as a formation. The apostle Paul writes in Romans 5:3-4 that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Notice what is not in that list–feelings, spiritual highs or emotional momentum. The chain runs from suffering to endurance to character, and none of those are emotional experiences.

The writer in Hebrews says in chapter 5 that spiritual maturity belongs to those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Trained. Past tense of a long process. The kind of training that happens in repetition and discipline, not in a single moment of felt experience. This is the framework.