Today’s dive into the Book of First Corinthians brings us to the subject of maturity. What does it really mean to be mature in God? Sinclair Ferguson asked the same question. He states that our constant quest as Christians is to become mature. Whenever I think of the subject of maturity, Sinclair said, I recall a painful experience during my first couple of years as a young pastor. A visitor was addressing our young people. He was in his early twenties himself and had made his first discovery of Jesus while caught in one of the sub-cultures of the West Coast. After becoming a Jesus follower, he told us, he realized he lacked spiritual maturity. So, [these are his words now, this new born Jesus follower] — He decided to go to Bible school for a year, and [again these are his words] ‘when I got maturity’ I decided to go on overseas evangelism.
So, I am going to cut in here and comment on this before we get back to the rest of Sinclair’s story. This young Jesus follower thought he was mature after going to school for a year. Think about that as we go back to the rest of the story.
Sinclair said that the rest of this young man’s address displayed how little maturity of understanding he actually possessed. The thrust of his thinking [this young believer who went to Bible school for a year] was that if you were not absolutely certain that you were in the right place, you ought to be serving God overseas (as he was!).
Of course, spiritual maturity is not so easily obtained. It does not come with diplomas. Nor does it show itself by insistence that one’s own pattern of life must rule every believer’s life. [‘you know you’re only mature if you do things like I do them’ kind of mindset.]
What was even more painful about this whole story was to see the effect of this young man’s address on our young people. They were blown away with this guy – they thought he was the most mature super spiritual thing ever. It took a long time for some of them to recover. What’s the point here? None of these people really understood what spiritual maturity was all about.1 You know it’s no different today. There’s all kinds of thinking out there. People just don’t know. That’s why in today’s podcast, we’re talking about What It Means to Be Really Mature in God all on this week’s Light on Life.
