I am touched and grateful to see the hard work and generous offers made to those suffering both physically and spiritually. Lives at Medora are being changed. Lives in our church family are being touched. God will honor the work and effort of all. Thank you for your consistent follow up.
Thanks to God that Stephanie Spurgeon’s liver count is improving and thank you for your constant prayers. Remember Judy Gilbert today. Hospice meet with her mother Mildred this week and informed them that the time is soon. Encourage Judy when you see her.
Yesterday, I wrote about how we were all in the business of helping each other grow spiritually and that the single most important thing that we can do is follow up or as one preacher put it, ‘show up’. When you came to faith and the church, hopefully someone took the time to care for you and nurture you along. If not, you know how critical it can be for a new Christian or member.
In a special way, follow-up for the new believer is as challenging and rewarding as being a physical parent.
Good follow-up includes meeting a new Christian’s many needs, and helping him learn to meet his needs on his own. A new Christian needs personal, individual attention. Your example in living for Christ will set the pace for the new believer you are encouraging.
Your goal for the new believer is Christ like maturity that bears up under the strain of everyday life. Good follow-up will cost you something in time and prayer.
Parents watch in amazement as their sons and daughters grow. Babies turn into children and children into adults as the intricate processes of maturity unfold. Follow-up—that is, being a spiritual parent—is like this too. It is watching in fascination uses you to help a believer who is young in his faith to grow.
Perhaps you are a parent with two or more children. If so you have learned that in certain respects all children are alike. As babies your children all needed their diapers changed, and they all needed milk. They slept a lot, and as they grew they learned to exercise and play. After seeing this with your first child you did not have to discover it again with your second. You weren’t surprised in the least when the second one wet his diapers or cried when he was hungry.
Does this mean you found a pattern for raising children that you have used identically with each child? Of course not. Your children do have common, basic needs which you have met in more or less the same way for each one. But each child is also unique. Each has required personal, individual attention from you. Any child must have this in order to properly mature.
So it is in spiritual follow-up. There are basic things every new believer in Christ needs. You don’t have to worry about whether he should read the Bible. You don’t have to determine whether he needs the support and acceptance of other believers, or whether he should pray. To really mature he needs all of these, no matter who he is.
But he will also have distinctly individual needs that must be met in distinctive ways.
— adapted from the Discipleship Journal