Living things grow. It’s true for every organic life form, but it’s also true of us spiritually. When we are born again in Christ, we are set on a trajectory of spiritual growth. The Holy Spirit is in us in order to empower this transformational process by which God grows us up into the likeness of His Son, and that growth fleshes itself in all different kinds of ways.

It means that we continually grow in the fruit of the Spirit as our character is developed. It means we continually pursue purity and godliness in our lifestyle. It means we share the gospel more and more freely with others. It means our priorities shift from safety and comfort to the priorities of the kingdom of God. It means we hold more and more loosely to the material things of the world as we pursue the imperishable things of heaven.

Yes, living things grow. And as soon as living things stop growing, they start dying. That’s a pretty thin line when you think about it – that either you are growing spiritually, or you are dying spiritually. Here’s how Jesus articulated the thinness between those things:

““I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned” (John 15:5-6).

Either, because of abiding in Christ, we are bearing fruit, or we are withering away. Growing, or dying. And there is one principle that actually applies to both – to spiritual growth and spiritual death:

You are always, always, always growing an appetite.

To explain a little further, you probably didn’t drink coffee in the mornings as an eight-year-old. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t really start drinking coffee until my early thirties. And when I started, I didn’t like it. At all. But because I felt like I was too old to have a coke at 7 am, I kept drinking it. And as I did, my appetite for it grew.

Lots of things are like that – including spiritual things. Perhaps when you first picked up the Bible, or tried to really have a time of sustained prayer, or memorized Scripture, you found it incredibly difficult. Even distasteful. But you took a disciplined approach – and your appetite grew over time. You desire things that you once did not desire, and you have capacity for things that you did not have capacity for.

Human beings are like rubber bands in this way – when you begin something, it feels very stretching to you. But the more you do it, the more you get stretched out and you find your capacity and your appetite for that thing increases.

But unfortunately, it works that way with sin as well. Right now, today, you might look at someone in your life who has fallen hard and deep into a sinful pattern and think to yourself, I’d never be where that person is. And yet that person did not get there overnight either. Likely, their appetite grew. And grew. And grew. They stretched and stretched and stretched.

It works both ways – for spiritual life and for spiritual death. We are always growing an appetite, either for sin or for godliness, and the means by which that appetite is grown is our everyday choices.

Such a principle ought to make us consider those seemingly harmless choices we make a thousand times a day, because whether we know it or not, those choices are food. They are helping grow our appetites.

So what is your trajectory? What kind of appetite are you feeding?