Maturity is not measured in years; rather maturity is a measure of emotional and spiritual health. Maturity is being self-aware and comfortable with who God has made you to be. Immature people often try to copy others rather than developing their own identity in Christ.
Depending on our life experiences and trauma, we all have some aspects of our emotions that are not mature and that have not developed the way God intended.
For the Christian, maturity is Christlikeness. It means growing more like Jesus and dying to our flesh daily, finding satisfaction in the approval of our Heavenly Father alone.
In Ephesians 4, the Apostle Paul encouraged the church to be unified, to use their gifts and to mature as the Body of Christ. We see in verse 12 that maturity comes from doing the work of the ministry. We make a mistake when we think that we cannot do the work until we are spiritually mature. The truth is that we grow and mature as we exercise our spiritual gifts in the Body.
In verses 13-16, we see four traits of a spiritually mature person:
1: Maturity Involves Christlikeness
In verse 13, we read that Jesus is our example of spiritual maturity. The fullness of Christ is the expression of completion of our Christian walk, exhibited by the Fruit of the Spirit that we see in Galatians 5:22-23.
Sanctification is the process of becoming more like Jesus, as our old way of thinking and acting is replaced by Christ’s through the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We will only attain Christlikeness when Jesus comes again, but we need to be moving forward. If you are not more like Jesus today than you were a year ago, something is wrong with your walk with the Lord. We grow more like Jesus as we walk with Jesus.
2: Maturity Involves Doctrinal Stability
Spiritual maturity involves the mind. We must not think that Christian growth is purely an emotional and spiritual exercise and that we need to check our reasoning skills at the door. Verse 13 encourages us to grow in the knowledge of the Son of God. And in verse 14 Paul uses the example of children as the opposite end of the spectrum. Children can be gullible and easily swayed by false teaching.
We all begin our relationship with Jesus as spiritual children, with childlike faith. But we must not stay as children; we need to grow and be able to feed ourselves by reading and meditating on the Word of God.
The world is full of false teachers with false doctrines. We need to think, pray, and ask God for discernment. We have a very real enemy who will use every tool available to sidetrack us on our spiritual journey of becoming more like Jesus.
Knowing the Word is the best way to avoid being distracted by false doctrines and unbiblical teaching. We can only know God’s Word by spending time reading and meditating on it.
Sadly, the statistics show that most churchgoers do not read their Bibles, and this is why the church is prey for false teachers (see Hebrews 5:11-14).
3: Maturity involves Truth Joined with Love
Verse 15 has the often-misused text, “speaking the truth in love…” This verse has often been taken and used as a “baseball bat of brotherly love”. It’s one of those Christianese phrases that we like to use before or after saying something harsh.
This is more than simply speaking; the Greek word is complex here. John Stott describes it as “truthing”. Speaking the truth in love is truthing in love. This includes maintaining, living, and practicing the truth. We live out the truth as an example to those around us. It is the equivalent of the phrase: “actions speak louder than words.”
Mature people do not avoid tough conversations, but they speak from a firm foundation of love and not for selfish gain.
“Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love, love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth” John Stott
4: Maturity Involves Contribution
In verse 16, Paul goes back to the analogy of the body when speaking about the church.
The church is like a body with many different parts and connections; it is not a social club. The church is the Body of Christ, where each part has an important part to play.
As the church, we are dependent on Christ as the head of the church, and we are dependent on each other as working members of the same body. As we grow in Christ individually, we exercise our gifts, and the Body becomes healthy.
Sadly, many churches in the world have a static view of the church. The members of the church are satisfied if the congregation stays about the same size, with the same familiar faces. They are happy if the programs can all be maintained and the budget is enough to keep all the familiar programs running. In these churches there is no vision for growth through evangelism or missional engagement. This church may have already died.
This is a tragedy and not God’s design for the church. God’s design for the church is to be the salt and the light in our communities and to be the cultural influence for the glory of God.
As we focus on being a healthy church, the natural by-product is growth. But what is church growth? Is it numeric growth?
I believe church growth is first and foremost spiritual maturity, sacrificial living, healthy evangelistic relationships, and people feeding on the Word of God for themselves. Thereafter, the numeric growth will follow.
If you have been a Christian for any length of time, who are you feeding? Are you growing?