 Three things that will absolutely kill your spiritual growth. But first, I just want to give a huge shout out to everyone over on Patreon as a part of the Daily Disciple Club. Daily Disciple Club members are people that are passionate about Jesus and want to support me in my mission of helping people follow Jesus daily. So thank you if you're a part of the Daily Disciple Club and if you'd like to join, head on over to dailydisciple.ca slash club. The link is in the description. Thanks so much, guys. Today we're talking about three things that will absolutely kill your spiritual growth. This is serious stuff because we want to be progressing in our spiritual growth, but a lot of things, there's a lot of things that will stifle it. So the first thing is secret sin. Ultimately, there's no actual secret sin to God because God sees everything. Proverbs 28, 13, it says, whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper. But he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. Probably one of the most common secret sins is pornography. It is probably the most widespread just because it has infiltrated our culture. It has really torn people's lives to pieces. Even Christians' lives, like, we're not exempt from this. There's been many studies done in the church that's shown, look, pornography addiction is widespread even among pastors. So we've got to be thinking what is going to stop our spiritual growth. It's going to be the secret sins. So how do we get rid of them? How do we stop this? Well, we've got to be continually confessing our sins to God, not hiding them from God, even if that were possible, which it isn't, but confessing them each and every time because he is gracious and merciful to forgive us our sins. You see, the issue is sometimes when we partake in these quote-unquote secret sins is they draw us away from God instead of drawing us back to God. When we sin, we have to, you know, move back into God's presence and move back into right relationship with him. But instead, we often let us draw us further and further away from God, either because of shame or guilt or of pride. We don't want to admit it, but we need to humble ourselves and come back to God and say, God, I'm sorry. Can you please forgive me? And God will always forgive us. And for Christians, he has already forgiven us our sins past, present and future so we can draw back to the throne with confidence. So the second thing that will stifle your spiritual growth is intentionally spending large amount of time, a significant amount of time with people that are drawing you away from God. I want to make a couple of things clear here. Having non-Christian friends is important. It's actually essential for the Christian. You should never put yourself in some sort of spiritual bubble where there's only people that you, you know, agree with or only hold your beliefs at that would be bad too. Because we're called to go into all the world to make disciples. We can't just do that by, you know, excluding everyone else that doesn't hold our specific beliefs according to whatever denomination you're a part of. I want to make all that clear. But we also need to understand that, look, the people that we spend a significant amount of time with, we need to be discerning to see are the, is this person moving me closer to Christ or moving me actually further away? Larry Crabb said this, every conversation either stimulates or dampens our desire for God. Have you found that to be true? Because in my life, there's definitely people that I will talk to and they will just like, yeah, I'll stimulate that desire for God and my passion for Him and that kind of thing. And there'll be other conversations that actually walk away and I feel, I don't know, almost disinterested in God or less motivated to pursue my relationship with Him and my desire for Him isn't as awakened. And that's not to say that we never spend time with people that actually drain us, because look, that's life and also that's our calling, that's serving other people that might not be, you know, the best examples or whatever. But we need to be discerning about how much time we're spending with them as opposed to time we're being refueled and our desire for God is being awakened in the midst of relationships. It's a balancing act. It's a discerning act but we need to be aware of it because if it's all just with people that are gonna drain us and they're gonna pull us away from God, man, that's gonna stifle our spiritual growth. The third and last thing I have on my list of things that will kill your spiritual growth and obviously this list isn't all consuming through other things that will kill your spiritual growth but this last thing I have here is when we only listen to surface level teaching. In Hebrews 512, it says this, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child, but solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by consistent practice to distinguish good from evil. Now notice here in this verse it's talking about this idea of milk and solid food. When we have just become a Christian, man, we're taking in all this information and we're really drinking the milk of the word. The idea of just this simplistic gospel, the gospel in the Bible talks about that even a child can understand the gospel, which is true, which is the beauty of God's word is, it's very simple in some ways, but it's so deep in other ways. There's this quote, I don't exactly know who it is, but it's like the Bible can be understood by a child in some ways and yet understood and the depths of it can be discovered by scholars for centuries and millennia honestly. So it's like, oh man, this is really understandable stuff in some ways, but also if we wanna go deeper in our faith, we gotta move past just the basics, right? We gotta move past just the milk of the word. And so my encouragement to you is if you wanna grow in your faith, find those places, find those outlets, whether that's with your church or whether that's online teaching as well, like find those places where you can grow in your faith and your knowledge of God and your knowledge of him and his word. I think it was Vodibhakam who once said that the churches are filled with people that are very passionate about Jesus that they do not know. Look, we know, like we can get all amped up and we can get all excited about living for Jesus, but look, do we actually know him? Do we know about him? Do we know who he is? Do we know God's character? We gotta go deeper than just surface level teaching. Well, that's all I have to say. You can follow me at it's Isaac David on TikTok and Instagram and yeah, subscribe down below cause I'm putting out new videos every single Thursday. Give this video a like if you enjoyed it and comment down below. Maybe another thing that can stifle your spiritual growth. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you again to the Daily Disciple Club members on Patreon. Link in description to join. It is an amazing thing and really only through that support and I continue to do what I'm doing and I'm so thankful that I'm able to do it. So, I'll see you next time.