For the past fourteen years our mailing address has been Route 1, Box 165.  Now our address is 1889 CR 273.  (The CR stands for County Road.)  But we haven’t moved.  We now have 911 service, which requires us to have a physical address.  So while some folks get the impression we have gone somewhere else, we are still in exactly the same spot.

    As I was thinking about that, I remembered an experience when I was pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in northwest Harris County.  Someone sent me a letter, which when I opened it had an envelope inside addressed (correctly) to the church.  Some postal worker had stamped across the face: “Moved.  Left No Forwarding Address.”  The church had not moved at all.

    And that reminded me of a favorite saying of Grandmother Thompson.  When commenting on a lazy person, she would say, “You have to sight him by a fence post to see if he is moving.”  Sometimes when I come across someone who needs to be measured that way, I have to laugh.  Is he moving, or not?

    All of which leads me to the point that things are not always as they seem.  It is often difficult to determine if there has been physical movement.  And in the spiritual area, it is harder still.  The spiritual doesn’t have the markers we need to determine movement, so we may make a wrong judgment.

    Part of the problem is that we accept as valid the criteria of the business or social world in which we live.  We may judge that we have moved, or advanced, because other people seem to think we have.  If they see progress, it must be so.  Or we may measure in terms of “more.”  Are we doing more, giving more, going more in our spiritual experience?  Then we must be making progress.

    But the progress others see may be “pseudo progress,” and not real at all.  They can’t see the motives that cause us to do the things we do.  Or the real person inside, who may be just acting a part, measuring up to someone else’s standard.

    Sometimes we even fool ourselves... until the Spirit brings us face to face with our Lord Jesus Christ.  And the more clearly we see Him, the more we are able to gauge if progress has been made.  The goal is to be conformed to the image of God’s Son.  We are not there yet, but we are on our way.

    Dear Lord, may the progress be real.