Baby Steps (Growing in Faith)
Originally Written on January 3, 2024. Edited on October 22, 2025.
HipHop Artist Lecrae, who is a professed Christian, wrote a book titled “Unashamed”. In this book, he talks about his testimony and how he found God. In the seventh chapter, titled “Welcome to Rehab,” he provides a metaphor to demonstrate what it’s really like to walk in faith. He puts it like this, “We fool ourselves into thinking that when we’re ‘born again’ we come out of the womb walking. But spiritual infants are like physical infants. When a child begins to learn how to walk, they fall a lot.” He then goes on to explain how as his first child was learning to walk, he did not condemn the child when they fell but continued to encourage and help them. He then gives this example, “After the apostle Paul was converted, he retreated to the desert for three years and came back in full force. But it took Moses forty years in the desert to get his act together. Because God is a perfect parent, He is patient with us whether we are more like the forty-year-old Moses or the three-year-old Paul. We need to have the same patience with each other and with ourselves as we make our way out of our deserts.”
My takeaway from this is that we are all on our walk and have our relationships with Christ, and each one is different. Two similarities though are that 1.) we will all stumble and 2.) God’s grace is sufficient for all of us. Lecrae adds later in that chapter that “…we tend to tell stories about the fast-learning ones who find walking easy, we don’t tell many stories about those of us who fall. We ignore them condemn them or shame them. And because we don’t know any stories of the many others who are falling, we assume that we are the only ones who do.” This hit me because I’ve been on both sides of this coin. I’ve judged or, in a way, shamed other Christians for stumbling, but I’ve also felt shamed because of my sins.
Within all of this, though, I was comforted by this, “…I realized that I had someone to help me learn how to walk, a parent who was patient when I stumbled and who would help teach me to walk if I’d let Him. Falling wasn’t the end of the world as long as I got back up and kept walking. After all, repentance is a continual act—a lifestyle—rather than a single event.” That last sentence hit me. The fact is that repentance is not one choice, but a daily act, a verb, something you do. On top of that, it should be something you do every day like putting your clothes on or brushing your teeth. I wrote about pursuing perfection and trying to be more like Jesus daily and this idea comes right off of that. We are not perfect, we will mess up and because of that, we need to be actively repenting daily.
So, to sum this up, Lecrae reminds us that everyone’s faith grows at different paces, but no one’s walk is perfect. With that said, though, growth needs to happen. We all need to bare fruit, though fruit takes time to grow. Some fruits take longer to grow, but there has to be fruit, or growth, in our walk with Christ. We need to encourage one another, pushing and challenging each other to grow. As Proverbs 27:17 reminds us, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” We can also be comforted by the fact that God is patient with us as we grow and stumble. When we surrender our lives and accept Christs’ sacrifice to cleanse us of our sins, we are then justified in the eyes of God, but that is not the end. After this comes sanctification, the process of becoming more like Christ, drawing closer to Him and following Him, daily. We will not be perfect, ever, and we will stumble, but we all need to be growing, even if at different paces.
Finally, because we stumble, we should be living a life of repentance, thanking God for His grace, and working harder to be more like Jesus daily. I think Psalms 37:23 and 24 is a good way to think about this, as it says, “The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he may stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.“ God is with us and for us, and we should walk with and live for Him as well.