What the Bible Says About Growth
The short answer
When the Bible talks about growth, it almost always reaches for images from the soil. Scripture opens with a God who commands the earth to "put forth grass" (Genesis 1:11)—a Creator whose first recorded acts include making things grow. That sets the pattern for everything after. The faithful person in Psalm 1 is "like a tree planted by the streams" of water, bearing fruit in season. Jesus picks up the same language in John 15, where the branch that stays connected to the vine "bears much fruit." And Paul, describing how faith spreads, says he planted and Apollos watered, "but God gave the increase" (1 Corinthians 3:6).
Two things stand out across these verses. First, growth is God's work before it is ours. Seeds, rain, seasons, increase—none of these are things a plant manufactures for itself. The biblical writers keep insisting that spiritual growth works the same way: we stay rooted, and God gives the increase. Second, biblical growth is never invisible. Trees are known by their fruit. Growth that stays locked inside a person's head, never showing up in how they treat their neighbor, isn't what these verses describe.
There is also a quieter kind of growth in Scripture: growth in understanding. Peter urges believers to "grow in the grace and knowledge" of Christ (2 Peter 3:18). That kind of maturing often happens not when the Bible confirms what we already believed, but when it surprises or unsettles us—when we sit with its complicated, flawed people rather than the simplified versions we may have inherited. Growth, biblically speaking, moves in two directions at once: outward into fruit that feeds others, and inward into a truer, less tidy knowledge of God.
What scholars say
The first excerpt shows Brueggemann answering why growth in faith can never be merely 'spiritual': the Bible's God lovingly sustains the real, plant-producing earth, which makes the neighbor's bodily well-being central to life with God. The second finds Goldingay describing how selectively packaged Bible teaching concealed David's ambiguity from a lifelong churchgoer—a story about the kind of honest reading that maturity requires.
“WB: What I did was to offer an introductory chapter about the incessant materiality of faith in the Bible, from creation to incarnation. The Bible begins with God’s generative love for the world, the real plant-producing, life-sustaining earth. And then Jesus came in the flesh to love the world. The real world cared for by God and the flesh of Jesus attest that God cares about material reality, with all of its economic palpability. But the church too often has preferred things “spiritual” and “other-worldly,” as though the material world were dispensable. The Bible is an insistence that the material world is God’s big preoccupation. The inescapable outcome of that claim is that the bodily well-being of the neighbor is a primary task of our life in God’s world.”
“A usually mild-mannered, placid member of our Bible study group blew a fuse the other week when we were discussing the story of David’s last days in 1 Kings, which describes the ineptitude of those last days in failing to take action about who should succeed him and relates the way he encouraged Solomon to kill various people against whom David had a grudge, even while exhorting him to live in obedience to God. She was indignant that she had been brought up to revere David as the man after God’s heart and that the ambiguity of his character had been concealed from her. That had been possible because she belonged to a church that paid great attention to teaching people the Bible and preaching from the Bible but that packaged the Bible’s teaching, and did so selectively.”
What it means for you
If you want to grow, these verses suggest starting with rootedness rather than effort—staying connected to God through prayer, Scripture, and community, and trusting that increase comes from him. Then look for fruit in the most ordinary places: how you spend money, how you treat the people nearest you, whether your faith makes anyone's actual life better.
And don't be afraid of the Bible's hard or confusing parts. Reading only the polished highlights can leave your faith brittle. Letting Scripture's complicated stories challenge you is not a threat to growth—it may be exactly how growth happens.
In context
Growth imagery runs through the whole Bible rather than sitting in one chapter. It begins in Genesis 1, where God creates a fertile, plant-producing world, and continues through the Psalms and Prophets, where flourishing trees picture the faithful life. Jesus builds his parables on seeds, soil, and vines, most fully in John 15, and the letters of Paul and Peter apply the image to churches and individual believers maturing over time. Reading these verses together shows a consistent thread: the God who makes the earth grow is the same God at work in people.