How do you measure spiritual growth?

Love, joy and peace are more
than just hippie lingo.

Certainly not by the time you spend reading chapters from the Bible and praying, the amount of hours you spend at church each week, or the number of people you have convinced that your brand of Christianity is the truth. These things are measurable. Christian growth is not quantifiable, it is intuitively evident. The way you know someone is a believer in Christ is by determining whether his life, as a whole, shows the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If a person does not show this set of behaviors (in varying degrees), it doesn't matter how much Bible verses they use or how separated from the world they appear to be: he is not Christ's. Of course, "love, joy, and peace" sounds too vague, and it may even be reminiscent of 1970's pinko, commie, leftie language. The fruit of the Spirit is impossible to convert into numbers or dollars and cents; we cannot make a pie chart or a bar graph of how a person is growing in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. This is why, as partakers of the New Covenant, we are now commanded to love, to rejoice in and obey Christ, not bring dissenters to the elders in order to be stoned.