The Purpose of Christian Personal Development

Jimmie Burroughs is a retired pastor, Christian author, and motivational speaker who has written many articles for this website, focusing primarily on Christian Personal Development. He has also authored a book titled“A New Self in Ninety Days,” based on his own lifetime of experiences, personal research, hundreds of books read, thousands of sermons preached, Bible studies, and of course the Bible.

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Christian Personal Development’s Distinguishing Mark…Concrete Solutions For a Successful, Meaningful Life With Purpose.

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Secular personal development is about developing individual strengths, and Christian personal development is about diminishing them. If that sounds the opposite, it is. Not to say that secular personal development is bad because it isn’t. It’s just not the right fit for the believer in Christ. Is it good for anyone to strive to be a better person regardless of their faith? Indeed, it is. However, there is a difference in the concept; the Christian personal development’s distinguishing mark is stated in John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

The distinguishing mark lies in the objective; let me explain: A believer is indwelled by God’s Holy Spirit. Therefore, the aim is to allow the Spirit to instill his attributes. For this to occur, our usual ways have to be diminished for the Spirit’s ways to increase. Is the outcome the same? It is as for as the apparent personal improvement but different in that the improvement is not an improvement of individual traits, but a revealing of a much higher inner power that comes from God.

The objective is to allow the Holy Spirit to become more significant in our life while we become less; this is what Paul refers to as “Walking in the Spirit” in Galatians 5:14. The result is the perfect attributes of God are revealed through us, those Paul lists in Galatians 5:22: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, faith, hope, meekness, and temperance; this is personal development but of a different kind.

Paul says it this way, “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord,” (II Corinthians 3:18). The term Christian comes from the term meaning to be Christ-like. As Paul says, it is like looking in the mirror and seeing the glory of the Lord instead of our image. We are being changed from what we are to what Christ is. It would be hard to disagree with that approach since it is becoming a new person in Christ rather than remodeling the old person. It is actually Christ living through us.

When we consider the great Christians of the Bible or history, we will discover what characterizes their lives is they faded into the background while Jesus took the fore front in their lives. When this becomes the nature of our lives, then the saying of Jesus is true for us. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains a single seed, but if it dies it will bring forth much fruit,” John 12:24-25 (KJV); this is the true meaning of reaching one’s full potential. The fruit that is brought forth isn’t the fulfillment of personal greed but the fulfillment of God’s specific plan for our lives. No accomplishment, regardless of what it may be, is more significant than that.

A Christian philosophy of personal development begins with the same plan of issues as the secular personal growth philosophy. The distinction is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith, which credits the change to the power of God and not to self-improvement.

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