Most of us are trying to 'get there'... my prayer is that this post will help us as we travel together the road toward being more and more spiritually mature...
So maybe the best way to begin the discussion is to discover what spiritual maturity is NOT:
Spiritual Maturity is not:
- Being baptized a long time ago.
- Intimate knowledge of and belief in your denomination's doctrines.
- Going to church services every week.
- Being old.
- Having a loud voice and a domineering personality.
- Being a "high ranking" minister.
- Being a deacon or deaconess.
- Having gray hair and dressing well.
- Being a master of the putdown.
- Being a great preacher.
- Spiritual pedigree.
- Hanging out with ecclesiastical big shots.
- Being excessively righteous (as in having a religious spirit).
- Being wealthy.
- Being highly placed in a church hierarchy.
- Knowing a lot.
Jesus, in teaching his own talmidim – disciples – said,
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" ( John 13:34-35).
The way the first Christians treated each other in public was the visible sign that they were Christians. Their interpersonal relationships were wholesome, selfless, giving, forgiving, and mutually supportive. Unlike much of the Church today, they were not competitive enemies. They were "in it together." At the same time, they had their occasional disagreements. After appropriate prayer and haggling, they worked out their differences and moved unitedly ahead (i.e. Acts 15).
Love, like faith, without works or manifestation, is dead. If we say we have love, but we do nothing that demonstrates it, we have no reason to claim it. Love, to be love, has to have legs.
And the result should be how we Christians treat each other...
The word used for love in the Greek Gospel that preserved Jesus' originally Hebrew words is agape. Its basic meaning is "love."
In short, Jesus taught that if one is a true Christian, one loves one's fellow Christians. How this love is manifested is determined by the need of the moment.
Love is the antonym for hate. True Christians do not hate other Christians for any reason. If they do so, it is a symptom of spiritual immaturity. It is one thing to disagree on a point, it is quite another to hate. There is no room in the Christian's emotional vocabulary for hatred.
Paul's vision of maturity is best described in his own (Spirit-breathed) words, recorded in his first letter to the Corinthians:
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me" ( I Corinthians 13:11).
Consider the nature of a child. The smaller the child, the more self-centered it tends to be. A small baby thinks only of its own needs, comfort and wants. It is a black hole of self, sucking everything into it. It sees the universe as revolving around itself.
As the child grows, its awareness of things, people and needs outside of itself is heightened. Instead of seeing all toys as its own, it eventually learns that some toys belong to other children. Gradually, incrementally, the child's world opens up. As it matures, it moves progressively outside of itself into the larger world of others. Over time, it becomes "socialized."
Children who freeze their emotional and intellectual progress at certain levels are said to have become victims of arrested development. We have all know adult men and women who appear to be emotional adolescents. Such people can become "emotional vampires" sucking the energy of all who come in contact with them. Like children, they use emotion as a weapon. Sometimes such arrested adults use "emotional blackmail" techniques to manipulate and control others. Volumes and volumes have been written on this subject.
The problem of arrested development occurs in people at both the natural level and at the spiritual level. When we find Christians who have been baptized for decades behaving as though they were "baby Christians" we are probably looking at cases of arrested spiritual development. If we find ourselves fighting the same old problems we fought when we were first converted, we may be suffering from it ourselves. Here are some ways of testing for arrested spiritual development:
- Do you still have just as big a problem with your temper as when you were first converted?
- Do you feel spiritually powerless?
- Do you have long dry spells in which nothing seems to be going on between you and God?
- Are you unable to generate love, care and concern for others?
- Do you live a fundamentally self-centered, self-seeking life?
- Do you still seek to manipulate and control others through tantrums, emotional blackmail and negative stroke seeking?
- Is it "all about you"?
- Do anger, hatred and jealousy play an inordinately large role in the way you express your personality?
- Do you put others down to make yourself look better?
- Does your life reflect more of the works of the flesh than fruit of the Spirit?
- Do you seek to get next to important church leaders in order to project "merit by association"?
These questions and their answers are revealing. They can be helpful in taking stock of where you are in a trajectory toward spiritual maturity....
So where are you?
(Brian's article may be read in its entirety at http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/how-can-we-achieve-spiritual-maturity.html )God Bless!
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