Encouraging Spiritual Growth
Today’s devotional
A thoughtful question about faith may reveal more than a quick correct answer. A student might be wondering about prayer, suffering, or what it means to trust God. Encouraging spiritual growth includes making room for that wondering without rushing to turn it into evidence that the learner is either succeeding or failing.
Second Peter closes with an invitation to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. John’s Gospel speaks of remaining in Christ as branches draw life from a vine. Both images place growth within relationship. The life we hope to see is received through grace and lived through continuing attention, trust, and love.
In a Christian educational setting, Scripture, prayer, worship, and thoughtful conversation can offer meaningful opportunities for that relationship to be explored. The educator’s task includes guiding these practices honestly and appropriately. We can invite participation while respecting what a learner is ready to articulate and recognizing the limits of our access to another person’s inner life.
Questions deserve care. You may need to say that you do not know, study a passage in its context, or involve a pastor or family in a conversation that requires further support. Faithfulness includes resisting easy answers to painful experiences. Christ’s compassion can shape the space in which understanding develops.
Offer one unhurried opportunity to attend to God today. Read a short passage carefully, allow silence, and invite a question or response. Let the invitation remain an invitation. You can cultivate conditions for growth while trusting that God’s work in a person is larger than what you can observe or arrange.
Adapted from Original devotion 40: Encouraging Spiritual Growth in Nurturing Hearts & Minds by Dr. R. C. Titus.
Read the Scripture
Open each passage and read slowly. Notice what these words reveal about God and the life before you.
2 Peter 3:14-18 · WEBU
14Therefore, beloved, seeing that you look for these things, be diligent to be found in peace, without defect and blameless in his sight.
15Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you,
16as also in all of his letters, speaking in them of these things. In those, there are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
17You therefore, beloved, knowing these things beforehand, beware, lest being carried away with the error of the wicked, you fall from your own steadfastness.
18But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and forever. Amen.
John 15:4-9 · WEBU
4Remain in me, and I in you. As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in me.
5I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
6If a man doesn’t remain in me, he is thrown out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.
7If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, you will ask whatever you desire, and it will be done for you.
8“In this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; and so you will be my disciples.
9Even as the Father has loved me, I also have loved you. Remain in my love.
Pause and respond
For reflection
What would help students explore faith honestly without feeling pressure to display a particular response?
A practice for today
Read a short Scripture passage in context and offer quiet time to consider it. Invite questions or reflections through more than one format, allowing learners appropriate freedom in what they share.
A prayer
Jesus, keep us close to the grace that gives life. Help me guide spiritual practices with honesty, patience, and respect. Give students room for sincere questions, and teach me to trust your work beyond what I can observe, while offering faithful care within my role. Amen.
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