Last night’s sermon continued the series ‘Growing Up In God’, looking at leaving childish ways behind. (1 Cor 13:11) One of the best ways we can learn maturity is to look at the opposite and learn from it! After all, there never has been any such thing as a ‘perfect church’, for churches are made up of sinful people saved by grace and this growing up is an ongoing process. Most of the New Testament was written to correct wrong thinking and wrong behaviour: Paul wrote to the Galatians because they were trying to add salvation by works to salvation by grace and he had heard that they wanted to walk by works rather than by faith. He wrote to the Corinthian church about problems they were having with people pleasers and fitting in with their culture and with sexual immorality and church discipline. He wrote to the Ephesians because they needed to get back to the basics of their first love and understand how their walk with God shaped their everyday actions. He wrote to the Thessalonians because they were getting a wrong idea about the Second Coming of the Lord and were just sitting back passively waiting for this to happen instead of understanding what they needed to be doing right now. He wrote to the Romans about how God’s plans were worked out throughout all history for both Jews and Gentiles and also dealt with practical problems such as eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. He wrote to Timothy and Titus to help them know how to deal with problems in the church so that they could lead well. As Eugene Peterson says, “These churches were a mess and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clear up the mess.”! (‘Practise Resurrection’ P 16)
Growing up is a process, a movement from the ‘pure spiritual milk’ we crave as newborns in Christ (1 Pet 2:2) to the solid food we need as we grow. (Heb 5:14) We will never reach the stage of maturity defined by the dictionary as ‘having reached the most advanced stage in a process’ until Christ comes (1 John 3:2) and so in some respects we are all at different stages of development. Our attitude to growth is often one of impatience and frustration: we can become impatient with ourselves and with other people. The only effective long-term solution to this attitude is love: ‘Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.’ (1 Peter 4:8) Love is like the throw over an old, stained sofa: it covers over the mistakes and problems and helps us to live in the real world, where people make mistakes and fail on a daily basis without giving up. If we are to grow up and leave childish ways behind us, we need to understand that real growth is a slow process that will always involve grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, not simply self-effort and legalistic rules.