November/December 2025

All plant species have a maximum height that they will grow to. Sitting next to me as I write this in my kitchen is a ‘Money Tree’. Given the right conditions, this tree can grow up to 23 metres in height! The one to my side is just over one metre, meaning it has a long way to go if it were to reach its full potential. My house doesn’t have the roof height for a full-grown Money Tree, and so its reach will be stunted through pruning and restricting growth. We see this process in its extreme when bonsai growers maintain mature trees at deliberately small heights, some even less than ten centimetres.

Do Christians have a maximum height to which they will grow in knowledge of God and spiritual maturity? As a child, I remember feeling puzzled whenever adults would tell me that they still sinned. I couldn’t see them doing any of the sins I committed daily, such as losing my temper, fighting with my siblings, and disobeying my parents, so I assumed they didn’t sin. In my mind, they were fully grown Christians. Now, as an adult, I’m all too familiar with the sins of adulthood. I can recognise my own need to keep on growing. Will that growth ever reach its full height? Not this side of eternity. We can stunt our growth and turn ourselves into bonsai Christians yet surely our desire is for that growth to continue to the end of our days before glory.

The main means of growth in the Christian life are disciplines such as meeting with God’s people, regular prayer, sung worship and the Lord’s Supper, reading his Word and hearing it preached every week. Where we have these ‘ordinary means of grace’ in place, they can then be supplemented by other useful additives for growth, such as the Evangelical Magazine. Our hope for every edition is that the articles within might be a means of supplementing our other main sources of growth.

In this edition, as well as a few articles to start you focussing on the Christmas period (is November too early?!), we have our usual range including biblical, devotional, historical, global and practical articles. Our reviews and updates round things off at the end. Some will challenge or sharpen you, others encourage and inspire you. All is intended to deepen your thinking, stir your affection, and enable you in practical living for Jesus and his glory.