Splashing and Swimming (Friday Devotional)

 

For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

- 2 Peter 1:5-8

Every Wednesday for the last six months, I left the office for an hour in the middle of the morning to take my 4-year-old son Andrew to swimming lessons. Each week I watched as he incrementally progressed, transforming from a boy afraid to put his head underwater to one who can swim 20 yards unassisted, float on his back, and jump in the pool with delight instead of fear.

Pleased with Andrew’s progress, Lindsey and I decided that this semester we’d also enroll our 1-year-old daughter Katherine in lessons so she could get an early jump on learning to swim. This past Wednesday was her first lesson, and it looked understandably different from Andrew’s. The primary purpose of the lesson was simply to get her used to the water—no attempts to dog paddle or float, and certainly no jumping in the pool. All of that will come in time. For day one, it was mostly just a lot of splashing.

Following Christ bears some resemblance to learning to swim. Anyone who professes faith that Jesus is Lord comes out of the baptismal waters ‘splashing’—they are a new creation, and there are a million things to learn about this new life in Christ. Salvation brings with it the promise of eternal life, but it doesn’t transform your entire personality or eliminate your temptations—you remain in the world even as you are now a citizen of heaven.

In order for salvation to become sanctification, for inward change to manifest outwardly—in order to ‘swim’—it takes time, discipleship, and prayer. Growing in Christ isn’t something that just happens, it’s the result of intentionally seeking the Lord and following where he leads. It's something that comes through prayer, the study of God’s Word, the practicing of spiritual disciplines, worshiping with fellow believers, and learning from trusted, mature Christians. And the more you grow in Christ, the more you experience the abundant life he promises.

Everyone’s relationship with Christ starts at square one, but we cannot be content to remain there. The Lord wants us to know him better day by day, to not only trust him but follow him, to be his witnesses in the world. Conversion must not be the end of your faith story, but only the beginning—because splashing is fine, but swimming is better.