Aged eighteen I weighted about twelve stone and my waist was thirty inches around. I remember going to the local strong man gym, where Bill Pittuck used to train and probably still does. If you’ve ever been interested in the strongman competitions you’ll know his name. Bill was Britain’s strongest man a few times. He was best known for how good he was at the atlas balls. I remember turning up to the gym to meet with Bill so that he could train me to be a strongman. On arrival I saw his friends lifting more weight than I had ever seen before, and started to feel a little nervous. I asked Bill what my first task was and he said: “Go and eat until you’ve put on some weight and then come back”. A few years on and I was lifting some quite heavy weights.
One of the keys to being able to lift more is to break, or rip, your muscles. As they repair your muscle grows in the gaps of the rip, and so your muscle gets bigger. As I’ve been reading my Bible recently I’ve come to find that there is a biblical principle at play when things are broken. For example, when Jesus breaks the bread during the feeding of the five thousand, he essentially takes one family’s food for the day and multiplies it to feed five thousand families. Again, Jesus once said that after a seed of wheat dies it produces growth and multiplication. Still another example of this in practice is in Luke 9 when Jesus breaks up his crowd of disciples to send them out to multiply the Kingdom’s presence in the area.
The spiritual principle here is that breaks and death have a habit of causing growth.
I’ve been meditating on this principle and I’d like to share with you what I’m thinking. For some this will be a word in season, and for others it’s a spiritual principle that is for a later date. I hope you’re blessed either way.
Let the old you die
Let your bad attitude die. There are things in our lives that we need to let die if we are going to grow spiritually, but one way that we can multiply the speed of our growth in Jesus is to have an attitude transplant. If I asked you where you made your last big spend – was it on growing in faith or on something worldly – what would you say? If I asked you when the last time you spent an hour in prayer was, and then to draw comparison asked when the last time you played Xbox for an hour was, what would your answers be? How about the last time you thought about your promotion at work compared to the last time you thought about your promotion to Heaven? Is Heaven even something you think about?
If you want to multiply the speed of your growth in Jesus you need to start making some substitutions: remove anxiety and replace it with faith; fear for love; gossip for testimony; world for Heaven; hate for grace; law for relationship; pessimism for optimism; negativity for positivity; tears for joy; drama for peace. It’s not until we make Christ our number one priority that our faith really starts to take shape. Too many so called Christians spend their whole lives just trying to make it to Heaven safely, when Jesus has an amazing adventure for them right now.
Split your Church and plant out
Church growth and Church multiplication are two totally different things. Leader in Church often have their eyes fixed on growth. When they are not growing numerically, they start talking about growth in spirituality and maturity. The majority of the time we make excuses for why we think we’re doing a poor job, specially if the Pastor down the road seems to be having a busy season. It’s all part of our brokenness really. I’ve come to realise that in practice if we plant more Churches we multiply our attendance instead of just growing slightly. One thing that I’ve realised recently is that because we have three venues in our city, each one will go through seasons of growth, numerically and in maturity, at different times. It’s amazing because it’s like we never stop growing as a Church on the whole, and it’s exciting because we can see people growing in depth too. The key to multiplication then is to break up your medium size Church to create space for growth and multiplication in two or more Churches. After all, people aren’t stupid and if they feel like they are just a number, or a bum on a seat, for their Pastor to count they’ll soon become disenfranchised. Whereas if we split the Church we create space to grow more teams, and release more of God’s people into their God-given ministries too. We essentially multiply Church, teams and the amount of gifts that we have at our side.
Break the chains of your fore-fathers
Don’t let the sins of old hold your life captive. Break spiritual chains that are holding you down. In theology we often talk about how sin is passed down from father to son, and in some circles we talk about generational curses. In Ezekiel God told the people of Israel that they will no longer say that the sins of their father has been visited on them because generational sin has come to an end. We are all held responsible for our own sin, but we are not held responsible for our fore-fathers’. However, it could be the case that you are living in the shadow of some generational curses caused by sin, or by other means. I sometimes like to call them generational attitudes. For example, generational unemployment is a very real issue. A household with a personality disorder present will often lead to children with personality disorders. The truth is that these chains can be broken. If your family has a history of generational unemployment, the way to break the chain isn’t to find a sickness that means that you can claim incapacity benefit, the key to breaking the chain is to change your attitude and go out to get a job. The stick at it no matter how awkward you feel or how hard it is. When I first got a job off the estate, my friends and family had a moan at me because they felt like I was leaving them behind. As it happened I was eventually able to employ some of them because I broke the curse/attitude. The way to break the chain of a personality disorder to learn how to behave like an adult. The majority of psychologists that I talk to don’t even believe in personality disorders. They thin that people just need to learn how to behave. A personality disorder is basically just someone having a bad personality. To break this generational chain, all you have to do is learn how to behave like any normal person in society.
If we break the chains of our fore-fathers we will multiply our friendships, our finances, and our lifespan just to name a few things. I bet you want some of that!
If have barely scratched the surface with this article, and yet I feel that it has plenty of information to multiply the Kingdom’s presence in your life. It’s up to you to dig further into it.
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