It's Time to Grow Up!

“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 21^st 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 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 to begin the path towards Christian maturity, it 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!    

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[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, 2^nd 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.