“I was shutting down my
computer and heading to bed when the phone rang. ‘I hate to tell you this.’ I recognized the voice of our head
elder. ‘Mary is not happy with our
decision to deny her homeschoolers group time to give out awards during Sunday
morning worship. She is offended.’”[1]
Offended! The weight of the word rings in our ears with
its frightening implications.
Offended! How in the world could
anyone be offended over children’s awards?
And yet, for those of us who have been around church for a number of
years, we know all too well how easily people can become offended over the
smallest of things. In reality, the
tendency towards offense or breakdown in relationships reveals a deeper and
more unsettling problem in today’s church.
Simply stated: The problem is
immaturity!
The Scriptures make it
clear that once a person becomes a Christian, he or she begins a journey
towards spiritual maturity. This means
that believers are not meant to remain as spiritual babes the whole of their
Christian lives. Instead, as the apostle
Paul says, “God wants us to grow up,” for we are to become “fully mature
adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.”[2]
The challenge facing
the church in the 21st century is to avoid watering down the message
of Christ for the sake of more people coming to a Sunday morning gathering, or
to boast of a larger annual budget.
While we do want to see the kingdom of God grow, we must always remember
that citizenship in the kingdom is offered to us on God’s terms, not our
own. Reducing the demands of the message
to make it easier for people to accept will, in the long run, make it harder
for them to grow into mature Christians.
Faced with this kind of challenge, we can understand why Jesus would say to
prospective disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt.
16:24, NIV, italics added).
In his classic book
entitled Mere Christianity, the late
Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis, makes it clear that beginning the path towards
Christian maturity will cost us everything.
He writes:
“Christ says, ‘Give me All.
I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much
of your work: I want You. I have not come
to torment your natural self, but to kill it.
No half-measures are any good. I
don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the
whole tree down. I don’t want to drill
the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the
desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will
shall become yours.’”[3]
The word “mature” can
be defined as “having reached full growth or development.”[4] Since the journey towards maturity is a
process that occurs over time, it is important that we make a decision right now
to press on towards maturity. In fact,
“maturity is not an option for the believer, it is essential! This is why the success of the church and all
that God wants to accomplish in His world is directly related to the level of
maturity that is found in each believer.”[5] Clearly, it is time to grow up!
[1] Lanny
Kilgore, “Pastor, I’m Offended,” in Leadership,
Spring 2000, p. 93.
[2] Eugene H.
Peterson, The Message, pp. 406,407.
[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1943), p. 169.
[4] Oxford Paperback Dictionary, compiled by
Joyce M. Hawkins, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983), p. 404)
[5] Bill Clark, Discovering the Foundations of Our Faith (Peterborough,
Ontario: Printer Paul, 1992, 2005), p. 6.
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