Inwards - Maturity

0:00 Morning everybody. I have to speak on the topic of maturity. I am one of those people that Lydia would doubtless call having more life experience, I think. Was that the way you put it? It's not everybody's idea of a good time, maturity. One dictionary defines it as ripe, nearly rotten. And who wants to be that? Basically, you're past it.

0:31 Life is as good as done. Who really wants to aim for that? Another dictionary defines it as being the state of being fully developed. Really? Am I fully developed? What do you think? I have probably reached my maximum height, perhaps not my maximum width. But my body, whatever way I grow outward, is changing all the time.

1:00 Cells constantly being renewed and yet overall aging. How does that work? And emotionally, intellectually also changing, developing in some good ways, I hope, and perhaps in some not so good. And spiritually, would I say that at the age of 70, I am now fully developed? Well, of course not. I need to be constantly developing, growing in my knowledge of the Lord and my relationship with him. So with spiritual maturity, there is no line that we cross. When I've read the entire Bible and shared the gospel with 10 people, I will be spiritually mature.

1:45 Well, of course not. There is no set age. It isn't like an investment policy we pay into for 25 years and then it matures, as we say. There is no maturity date, except the date when finally God says our time here is done. This is Paul's attitude in prison towards the end of his life. In Philippians chapter 3, he tells us, Not that I have already obtained all this or already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do, forgetting what is behind, straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

2:46 And that, Paul explains, is the attitude of the spiritually mature. When we're talking about spiritual maturity, we are talking of the process by which we develop from being spiritual infants to being God's grown-up sons and daughters. The full title of Bible teacher Sinclair Ferguson's recent book on Christian maturity is this, growing up and going on in the Christian life. As we express it in Glen Abbey's core value, the desire that each individual will continually be growing in their obedience to Christ, reflecting him more and more in every area of their lives. Now, any process by definition involves time, But the relationship between time and maturity is not straightforward. The playwright Tom Stoppard said age is a high price to pay for maturity. But in fact, aging doesn't equal maturing. It just equals getting old.

4:09 Of course, if you are a cheese or a whiskey, there is a close connection between maturity and aging. But when it comes to people, some people age and don't grow up like J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the boy who can fly but who never grows up. And that is not only true in life in general, it is also true, sadly, on occasions in the Christian life. Here's a little bit from Hebrews chapter 5, which will appear on the screen behind me. We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food.

5:04 Anyone who lives on milk being still an infant is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness, but solid food is for the mature who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. And here's a writer addressing a group of people who are under enormous pressure for claiming that Jesus was the Messiah. And he wanted to help them. He wanted to help them by telling them about an Old Testament character called Melchizedek. But he couldn't do it because they couldn't cope with it. This wasn't, of course, infant food. It was more like burger and chips. But they still couldn't cope with that because they hadn't taken the necessity of growing in the faith seriously.

6:04 And the result, says the writer, is not simply that they remain spiritual infants, but to translate it literally now, they had become dull of hearing, or as the NIV puts it, You no longer try to learn. The idea is dull of hearing. That is, their attitude had negatively affected their spiritual faculties. Just like a knife becomes dull, it loses its cutting edge. Their faculties of spiritual understanding have become dull and blunted. And as a result, the teaching that would have helped them meant absolutely nothing to them. And it happens. When people first come to trust in Christ, often they are excited to learn.

7:01 Everything is new. Everything is interesting. They love being with other Christians. They talk about Jesus with their friends. They engage in Bible study and prayer. They praise with joy and zeal. But then life intervades. Life gets harder, more complicated.

7:19 And under various pressures, they make this spiritually fatal mistake of denying themselves the resources they need to face those pressures. And they stop growing spiritually. They don't just become spiritually weak. They become virtually unteachable. They become so used to not growing spiritually that their faculties of spiritual understanding become dull and blunt and dry, just like my mouth at the moment. That makes it hard to start again. The longer you put off the decision, the harder it becomes. So Peter writes, In 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 1 to 2 he says, Therefore rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.

8:22 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk. So that by it you may grow up in your salvation. Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Now, babies are born both needing food and craving food. Babies don't generally need to be encouraged to crave food. Their cries make that very clear. When we become Christians, we are born again of the Spirit of God. We also need food, but here's the difference.

9:05 We need the food, but we often need to be motivated and encouraged to crave the food so that the desire drives us, just as Peter is doing here. He appeals to the fact that we have already tasted that the Lord is good. Haven't we? Haven't we already, if we're believers, tasted? that he is good, he is in himself magnificent, beautiful, good, holy and positive in all his ways. Don't we want to become like him? Doesn't he attract us? And then think of the way he has lavished his forgiveness on us, given us his spirit as a guarantee of our inheritance, which includes one day receiving a brand new body like Jesus' own resurrection body.

10:05 It tastes good, doesn't it? Even in advance. It's like thinking about your dinner and the pavlova and the roast and all of that and you begin to salivate because you're thinking about it in advance. It tastes good. But there's more than that. Salvation is a big deal. It is far bigger. It is far richer than we can imagine.

10:27 So, says Peter, train your appetites in response to what you've already tasted of the goodness of the Lord. Let that goodness inspire you, inspire your desires, create new cravings for spiritual nourishment so that we can grow. We all need food. The physical level, it provides energy for activity, growth, all the functions of the body, such as breathing, digesting food, keeping warm, materials for the growth and repair of the body, for keeping the immune system healthy. And if that's true physically, it is also true spiritually. And without it, we become spiritually weak, anemic, and incapable very often of changing direction, prone to spiritual diseases of all kinds. So how do we do this? How do we grow and mature?

11:29 Let's listen to Peter again. He says in his next letter, make every effort to add to your faith goodness, and to goodness knowledge, and to knowledge self-control, and to self-control perseverance, and to perseverance godliness, and to godliness, mutual affection and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. We grow, therefore, through a process of spiritual addition. Add to your faith goodness. How do you get good at anything? Well, through repetition and practice, whether it's football or reading or photography or whatever.

12:31 How do we get good at treating people well? Through practice. Adding goodness to our faith. How do you get good at encouragement? By doing it. And then you'll learn and grow and develop and mature in it. We do not become mature in the abstract, in a vacuum. Simply thinking it will not produce it.

13:04 And this is, says Peter, our individual responsibility. Each is responsible to some degree at least for his or her own personal spiritual development, but not in isolation. For example, how would you add affection and love to your life if there was nobody else in your life? It's very difficult to do. These are relational things. It's engagement with people. We don't add love in theory. In our heads, we add it in reality.

13:49 Not virtual reality, but actual reality. Where do we start? From here. You all know the story of the Irishman trying to explain instructions. It gets so complicated. He said, well, in the end, if I or you wouldn't start from here. But there's nowhere else to start from. start from here precisely where you are and who you are not playing comparison games as we contrast ourselves with others we see as more advantaged than us not daydreaming i wish i were or i wish i had this gift or whatever we start from where we are and each of us is unique a unique personality

14:35 Each impacted differently by our circumstances in life and by our particular genetic inheritance. So while we all have the same spiritual resource in Christ, we all start in a different place in ourselves. And God understands that. God measures progress differently than we measure it. In fact, it's a very difficult thing for us to measure, even in schools where you have tests on all kinds of things. Two Old Testament characters spring immediately to my mind, Esau and Jacob. And Esau was a great guy, a hunter, a shooter, a man's man, courageous, fine looking. He's a guy you'd want to go on holiday with.

15:24 Jacob was a twister, mean, full of guile, always plotting, always had an angle. You wouldn't want to go on holiday with him, or if you did, you'd keep holding your wallet. And yet, Esau never made any progress. He just remained the same. He was a profane man. He had no time for God, no time for spiritual things, just a decent guy. Jacob, on the other hand, he did make progress, even though at the end of his life he looks back and he says, few and evil have been my days, He still made progress as God counts progress. God knows who you are, who, what you are, your circumstances, everything about you.

16:10 He measures progress very differently from any system we have in the world. So while it's our personal responsibility, we do not grow solely in isolation. We grow by what others supply to us in the context of the body of Christ, the church. So for the final reading, let's listen to what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4. Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until, and listen carefully to these words, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge, not of Jesus, but of the Son of God and become mature attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blowing here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ.

17:58 From him, the whole body joined and held together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. It's a fantastic verses which we do well to take seriously, spend time in, in our groups and so on. The body of Christ, the church, is a reality created by God through the Spirit. One body, one church made up of all believers in Christ. We don't have to create the body of Christ. We don't have to create unity in that sense. The Lord has done that. Our responsibility, as the earlier verses in this chapter say, is to seek to maintain the unity in practical reality, which is tough enough, requires, says Paul, a lot of meekness and long-suffering and love for us to work actively to make sure that the unity that God has created is demonstrated in the way we are with one another.

19:13 But there is a second unity here, one that we are to create, one that we are to work hard towards. And Paul describes it as the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. That's the goal. And we haven't attained it yet. We're growing, we pray, towards it. unity in the faith. That is the objective truth of Christianity. Sharing deepening knowledge of Jesus as son of God.

19:55 His full deity. Not some just a carpenter's son or some prophet or some cool guy that we admire. but the Son of God. That's the goal. That's what we're moving towards. In his illustration, the head of the body is Christ. And God's goal is ultimately to have a body that fits the head. I know we've all seen cartoons I don't see them these days but there used to be cartoons that had a huge head and a tiny body do you remember those cartoons?

20:49 that's not what God wants Christ is the head his desire is to have a body that is commensurate with the son of God that's our goal that we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ. Now what we need to know as I finish is that there is opposition to this goal. There are powerful spiritual forces constantly at work to stop all growth and development in that direction. And Paul here, there's other kinds of opposition, but here he's thinking particularly of false teaching and false theology. May seem strange to you, but it is the fact that there are people who claim and profess to be Christian theologians, but they devote their time to deconstructing and undermining faith in young believers. They fill our universities. They fill our seminaries. They fill YouTube and even the church.

22:07 They're clever, says Paul, cunning, often academically very impressive or else have great charisma and communication skills. But fundamentally, they do not accept the authority of the head of the body, Jesus Christ as Lord, Son of God. They want free of that authority, free to admire him perhaps, but to criticize him, to reduce his status, to tell us that he's not really the Son of God. That was just a myth the early church invented to say something special about Jesus. They want to be free to chart their own course, to invent new theologies all the time, get their PhDs that way, so that they can follow their own desires and persuade others to follow them. And Paul describes their impact in very graphic terms. And I took a few photographs to illustrate the impact. He talks about their effect, like the waves of the sea coming and crashing in and disturbing, tossing new believers around like infants in the waves.

23:28 You look at that wave. Shortly after that, that wave nearly swept me away from the rocks I was standing on. It took my camera, my camera bag, and dumped the lot into the sea. That was a lovely day, but at least I got a photograph. But it's just to illustrate the sheer power that's involved here. Paul is not making a mistake when it comes to choosing his illustration. This is the reality. There is a tsunami of opposition to you, especially as a young person, but not just as a young person, retaining your faith in the Lord Jesus.

24:13 So what provision has the Lord made? Well, he's given gifts to the church, says Paul. Gifts of people like Paul, Peter, John, James, and all the shepherds and teachers and evangelists that have followed them. Amazing to think of it. Most people would have never had any access to Paul. He was a brilliant academic, the top of a tree. Normally, most people wouldn't have been able to touch him, but God captured him, turned him around and gave him as a gift to the church so that all could have access, and we still have access, to what the Lord gave to him. And God is still giving gifts to the church.

24:50 I think of my own experience, struggling to work out my faith at university under the onslaught of profoundly anti-Christian philosophy and morality. God gave gifts to the church. For me, it was Francis Schaeffer, Oz Guinness, John Stott, C.S. Lewis, and particularly the personal mentoring of a brilliant classics professor at Queens, a man I would have had no access to ordinarily if it had been based on my academic merit. But God had captured the man and given him as a gift to the church, including to me. Why does God do this? For the building up of the body that's through the gifts of the risen head, he might fill everything. He gives pastors and teachers and evangelists to equip us so that we can do the works of service and grow through that.

25:44 Please notice that. It's not so that we sit passively enjoying great teaching. These gifts are given so that we engage in service. Passivity is the great enemy of growth. Listen to Paul writing to his young friend Timothy. Set an example for other believers. Devote yourself. Don't neglect your gifts.

26:06 Be diligent in these matters. Give yourself wholly to them so that everyone can see your progress. Persevere in them because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers. How you go about your spiritual growth has the potential not only of saving your own life, but saving people around you. You'll never be an apostle Paul. I will never be an apostle Paul. But many of us have way more potential in spiritual service than we imagine. The temptation is to leave it undeveloped, especially if we're not preachers or evangelists, not realizing that so much of Christian work limps along because so many of us have not seen, for example, the application of our professional skills to serving God and his people.

27:02 God has designed the body to grow through serving, as we emphasized last week. So let's give ourselves to it because it is the Lord we're serving and because in serving lies our practical salvation and spiritual development. it's a battle as Paul says. Our deep desire in Glen Abbey is to repair one another and especially our young people and children for the constant onslaught of false theology and false philosophy on their minds and hearts. In school our young people and at university they're given the big things of life. Physics, math, biology, history, literature. We can't afford to give them only childish things in church. It is lovely when our kids learn to say thank you and please and be good to granny and care for nature, but that's not enough to grow their faith and protect it from the onslaught, the tsunami of so-called progressive theology or strident atheism.

28:14 They might well grow up. We hope to be kind and good and generous people, but with no living faith. Many of them because they came to think that the church has no answers to the real questions in life, and that the things taught them in church were fairy stories compared to the real thing. To fail to equip our young people is to send them out against tanks and missiles armed only with sticks and pillows. This is not a game. The learning of God's word, the learning of the faith is not a hobby for the especially keen. It is for all of us, and it is a battle for each new generation. I'm so thankful for all the good work being done to equip the children and young people in this church, including three of my grandchildren.

29:11 Let's make full use of the gifts God has given us to prepare for a life of spiritual growth and development towards unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God that as a church, we will continue to grow strong and deep in him. Let's pray together. how we thank you for the provision you have made for our growth and for our development for the gifts you've given to the church we thank you for the apostles and prophets we still have their writing it is the living word of God to us may this morning have reignited our appetite to crave the spiritual food that lies in it. And some of us, Lord, may well need to make decisions this morning as to whether we're going to waste our time in virtual reality or engage with actual reality, as to whether we're going to allow you to challenge and change our thinking of whether we're going to allow the opinion formers in our culture to do that. Lots of decisions to be taken at whatever stage we are. Thank you, Lord, that those of us who are 70 plus, we're still here. There's still an opportunity for growth and development.

30:56 May we follow you. Get to know your ways even more deeply so that we can pass them on to the next and following generations. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.