Thursday, March 28, 2024

Devotion Page

Posted

GUEST COLUMN

Spiritually speaking there are many people who become children of God who have a sort of Peter Pan Syndrome: They don’t go on to maturity. Sometimes we assume that with age comes maturity. But sometimes growth is stunted because they faced a challenge along the way and they didn’t rise to that challenge and so they didn’t move on. They were not equipped for the spiritual life.

When I was a kid, we used to catch tadpoles! You couldn’t have convinced me that it was a frog because it looks nothing like a frog. A frog begins as a shapeless mass with a tail and grows into a frog. But a human child is born with all the necessary parts and all a human child has to do is grow.

When you are born into the family of God are you more like a human baby or more like a tadpole? The Bible teaches that you have all the parts of a mature Christian, you just need to grow.

There’s no sin in being a spiritual baby, but the problems come when we get stuck. Few things bring more excitement than the birth of a baby. But it is exhausting right? Because little ones are fragile and they are very dependent and they require a lot of attention.

So how do we grow up? First of all, God uses the spiritual disciplines. It only takes about 71 hours to read the Bible. But consider this: the average American spends 71 hours watching television in two weeks. Spiritual disciplines create space in our life in which God can work. They put me in the right place and the right time to experience God.

Babies soon become toddlers and that is an entirely diff erent stage, spiritually speaking. Have you ever had to baby proof your house? It is important to create a safe environment for your child. This is why we need to find other believers to help us grow.

What about the next stage? After we have been believers for a while, we may be tempted to rebel. And just like teens, Christians at this stage have to decide, “Who am I going to let influence my life?”

Many of us are living as spiritual hermits—with interior lives kept a secret and known only to ourselves. That’s a contradiction to the way God intended for you to live.

And so those who just go off and do their own thing, let’s just call it what it is, it’s the sign of a diseased body. I can acquire a lot of things apart from the family of God, but there’s one thing I can’t acquire, and that’s character. Character is only formed in relationship to other people.

The final stage is adulthood. One of the evidences of a mature believer is an increased capacity for compassionate service.

Sometimes I hear someone say, “I’m burned out and I can’t do it anymore!” What’s the solution? Quit all that you’re doing, right? No. We have to rediscover our intimacy with the Lord. So rediscover and GROW!