The Lord is not withholding blessings because He is uncaring or apathetic. Rather, He is cultivating capacity because He is wise. What He has prepared for you requires a version of you that does not yet exist. Said another way, God is preparing you for what He has prepared for you.

I’ve sat with a lot of people who are deeply frustrated with where they are in life. They’re not walking away from God, nor are they abandoning their faith. They’re just done waiting. They’re done with the slow pace and done with a process that should have yielded something by now. And the thing I can’t unsee, especially after years of watching this pattern play out, is that the most consistently dangerous moment in a person’s development is not the dramatic fall. Instead, it is the quiet, accumulating impatience that precedes a quiet, consequential decision to go their own way.

Maybe you’re in this place right now. If so, please stay with me.

I get it. The season is long, and the progress seems invisible. And so, almost without deciding to, you stop abiding and start strategizing (okay, just me?). You swap surrender for a plan. You trade the Vine for a spreadsheet. And then you wonder, months or years later, why everything tastes hollow.

This is real talk, my friend. And that’s why I want to introduce you to a man few people know anything about. His name is Epaphras.

Located in the fourth chapter of Colossians, Paul’s nod to Epaphras pulls back the curtain on a striking personal quality. Scripture says that Epaphras is “always striving earnestly in his prayers, pleading that you may stand firm and mature in spiritual growth, convinced and fully assured in everything willed by God” (Colossians 4:12, AMPC). The word translated “mature” there is the Greek word teleios, which connotes being complete, full-grown, and brought to its intended end. The Amplified Classic (one of my favorite formal equivalence translations) renders it with the image of “ripe character.” And while that amplification is the translators’ own expansion of teleios, rather than the Greek word’s native agricultural content, it is not wrong as a pastoral application in the least bit. Ripeness is a legitimate picture of teleios. It’s something brought fully to its intended end, on a timeline that cannot be compressed. And so, if we take that image seriously, it immediately confronts one of the deepest failures of the Western church: we want teleios without the season that produces it.

There Is No Miracle-Gro in the Kingdom

We live in a culture that has learned to grow tomatoes in January in a greenhouse in Nebraska, and we have unconsciously imported that same framework into our theology of formation. In other words, we want the fruit without the season and the harvest without the winter. And the market has been more than happy to accommodate us with conferences promising “breakthrough in a weekend,” devotional plans guaranteeing transformation in thirty days, and ministries built on the implicit premise that your stuck-ness is primarily a knowledge problem. Of course, I am not dismissing the means of grace. Reading the Word, gathered worship, prayer, and community are not optional accessories. But neither are they Miracle-Gro. They are the conditions of abiding on the Vine, and abiding is not a technique; it’s a sustained, costly, unhurried orientation of the self-directed will toward the Lord, through which the Holy Spirit does what only He can do.

Solomon’s words in Proverbs 14:12 (ESV) apply by honest extension here, even if we name it as such. Look at the verse: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” The point is not that self-directed formation leads to literal death in every case. The point is that the capacity for self-deception about the rightness of our own way is total, and the consequences compound quietly over time. We say “I’m going my own way” as though that were evidence of courage. “You do you” is the slogan of our postmodern culture. But Solomon called it a path to ruin. Why? Because the timing of ripeness (read: maturity and readiness) is not ours to determine. It belongs to the Vine.

The Gospel of Good Soil

Now, here’s some genuinely good news, even though your flesh will register it as anything but.

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