The Danger of Arriving
Why the feeling of spiritual completion is one of the most reliable signs that something has gone wrong
Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment before the day takes over.
When did you last genuinely pursue spiritual growth in the way someone pursues something they have not yet reached?
Not maintained an existing level. Not protected a position already achieved. Pursued. In the active, forward-moving, distance-to-cover sense of the word. The sense in which Paul used it when he wrote: “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me” (Philippians 3:12, NKJV). Paul, who had met Christ on the road to Damascus in a blinding encounter, who had received the gospel by direct revelation, who had endured more in service of the kingdom than most believers could imagine, was still pressing on. Still treating the distance ahead as real and the present position as insufficient.
There is a spiritual condition that feels like maturity and functions like stagnation. It arrives when a person settles into a settled sense of their own standing before God, when the active, forward pressure of genuine spiritual pursuit has been replaced by the management of a position already claimed. The urgency ebbs. The watchfulness relaxes. The earnest endeavor to press toward higher attainments, which requires actually believing higher attainments are both possible and necessary, is quietly exchanged for the comfortable assumption that the current level is adequate.
The Laodicean church in Revelation 3 is the most sobering portrait of this condition in all of Scripture. What made them dangerous was not what they were doing wrong. It was what they thought they were doing right. “Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’” (Revelation 3:17, NKJV). They had arrived at a satisfied assessment of their own spiritual condition. And Jesus looked at that assessment and said it was the most blind, naked, wretched, miserable, and poor condition they could be in. The arrival itself was the problem. Not their theology. Not their morality. Their satisfied stagnation.
The motives for watchfulness, for prayer, for earnest spiritual endeavor, are inseparable from the genuine awareness that there is ground still to cover. The person who believes they have covered the ground does not feel the need to keep moving. And the person who has stopped moving has also stopped growing, which in a living system means the other process has begun.
The writer of Hebrews captures the danger with remarkable directness: “Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14, NKJV). Pursue. Present tense. Active. Not rest in the holiness achieved. Not maintain the position reached. Pursue. The word assumes a direction and a distance, which means the person being addressed has not yet arrived and the arrival is not yet in view. The sanctification of the believer is a direction to be pursued, continuously, for as long as the person is on this side of heaven.
Peter says to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18, NKJV). Growing is what living things do. A living thing that is not growing is, by the biology of the situation, a living thing that is declining. There is no stable plateau in the spiritual life. There is forward motion or there is the beginning of something else. And the person who has arrived at a satisfied spiritual position has made the forward motion feel unnecessary, which is precisely when the other process begins quietly and without announcement.
The full propriety of the settled assurance of salvation belongs, in its ultimate expression, to the moment of arrival into the presence of God. Between here and there, the appropriate posture is not self-congratulation on how far one has come, but earnest engagement with how far there still is to go. The runner does not celebrate at mile ten of a twenty-six mile race as though the finish line has been crossed. The celebration belongs to the finish. The running belongs to everything before it.
The person who holds both of these together, who rests in the genuine assurance of what Christ has provided while pressing forward in genuine pursuit of what the journey still requires, is not in tension. They are in the posture that Paul himself occupied throughout his most productive years of ministry, and that produced, at the end of them, the retrospective of a man who finished rather than stalled. The assurance and the pursuit are not enemies of each other. They are the two conditions that together produce a life the finish line is designed to receive.
What would you pursue in your spiritual life if you genuinely believed the distance ahead was real and that the current position was not yet the destination?
Focus Verse: “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.” — Philippians 3:12 (NKJV)
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