When you go on a hike, it helps to know your destination: are you hiking to an alpine lake, to a waterfall, to a viewpoint? This not only provides motivation to keep going, but also lets you know what to be looking for as you get closer. If you are ascending elevation to reach an alpine lake or viewpoint, you know that the scenery will change as you go higher up: shorter trees, different kinds of plants, etc. If, instead, you find yourself declining elevation and only ever staying in the thick woods, you know you’re going in the wrong direction.
In a similar way, it’s helpful to know where you are going as a Christian. I don’t mean whether to heaven or hell, but the type of person you are becoming as a Christian. What does Christian maturity look like? And how do we get there? Those are the two questions I want to answer, the first in this blog, and the second in a subsequent one.
What does Christian maturity look like?
This can be a difficult question to answer, not because it’s hard to find answers in Scripture, but because there are so many answers in Scripture. How do we synthesize what Scripture says about this?
Probably the best place to start is with Jesus’ answer to the question, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus responds,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Mt. 22:36-40)
Christian maturity centers around loving God with all our being, and loving one another. All of the commands in Scripture connect back to these two pillars. In other words, Christian maturity has both a vertical dynamic, between us and God. And it has a horizontal dynamic, between us and other human beings. Only giving yourself to love others, but not God, is moralism and humanism, and failing to see that God and his glory is at the center of all things. Only giving yourself to love God, but not others, is fooling yourself that you are really loving God (see 1 John 4:20). We are called to both.
But love is such a broad concept—with varying and contrasting definitions—that we need Scripture to guide us into what this love for God and others looks like. The Apostle Paul’s prayers for those to whom he writes help us out here. Consider a couple of them:
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. (Phil. 1:9-11)
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. (Col. 1:9-10)
You’ll notice many of the same terms and ideas in these verses: knowledge, bearing fruit, pleasing or glorifying the Lord. Christian maturity involves our love—for God and others—abounding not only in measure or intensity of feeling, but in “knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent.” Love that glorifies God has certain characteristics, certain concerns, certain convictions: namely, it is love that seeks and delights in that which is good, right, and pleasing to the Lord, and turns from and repents of that which is not.
Loving God is not simply feeling strongly about him, but beholding him as he really is, and coming to approve and love him as he really is. Loving others is not giving them whatever they wish, pleasing them above all else, but loving what is of God in them, and loving them unto greater godliness.
And as we grow in the knowledge and love of God, one of the things we will behold with more and more clarity is his grace: the undeserved kindness and compassion he has towards us, which is displayed and secured in Jesus. Our knowledge of God and our love for God are connected—rising and falling simultaneously—because of the loveliness and wonder of his grace, and all his attributes. Seeing him more clearly, we come to love him more dearly.
And so Peter ends his second letter, “But grow in the GRACE and KNOWLEDGE of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Pet. 3:17-18).
This is Christian maturity: Growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Beholding his grace. Understanding the depths of his grace for you specifically. Resting daily in his grace. Confessing your sin freely, in light of his grace. Seeing his grace as more desirable than all your idolatrous loves. Submitting yourself to him who is gracious. Extending to others the same grace he has extended to you.
And loving God and others with a grace-motivated, grace-tinged, grace-proclaiming love.
How are you doing loving God, and loving others? Are you growing “in the grace and knowledge of God”? Is your love “abound(ing) more and more with knowledge and all discernment”?