Text: 2 Peter 3:18; Ephesians 4:15; 1 Peter 2:2
Key Verse: "Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God..." (Hebrews 6:1)
Getting saved is not all there is
to the salvation experience. Many who have confessed Jesus as their Lord and
Savior believe that once they're born-again they can eat, drink, and be merry
until Jesus comes back to take them home to heaven. These people are greatly
deceived and will not fulfill their destiny if they continue to believe and act
this way.
Every person who has made Jesus
the Lord of their life has an assignment from on high for which they will be
held accountable at the judgment seat of Christ. The end is upon us and now is
the time to work and not play because life is a vapor and is quickly passing us
by.
Jesus is coming soon and the
kingdom must be advanced and the work of the ministry must be done. God is
raising up an army of believers right now who are being trained and will soon
be receiving assignments from above. Pay attention, listen well, and put into
practice that which you have learned. Take advantage of every opportunity to
learn and grow because your training is very important and will soon be
complete.
You are a soldier in the army of
the Lord and soldiers are not in training forever. They're trained and then
they're sent on an assignment. Without a doubt God gives us all things to enjoy
and we are to be happy and joyful in our everyday lives. However, having fun
all the time is not what we're here for. There will be plenty of time for fun
in the afterlife but in the here and now we've got a heavenly calling on our
lives and the fulfillment of that call is what living the good life is all
about.
Everybody has a call, everybody
has a place, but you must be trained until you reach a level of maturity where
you can perform and operate in the graces and abilities God gives you. In other
words, you have to grow up. It is the will of God for you to be perfected,
developed, and matured for the work of the ministry.
You can't serve God fully and
completely unless you are spiritually grown up. You don't give a five year old
a grenade launcher and send him into battle. But the more grown up and mature
you are, the greater your development in the things of God, the greater and
more effective your contribution to the overall building up of the body of
Christ will be.
It is a commandment in the Word
of God that you become like Jesus for He is the perfect example of being grown
up and mature. 1 John 4:17 says, "As He is, so are we in the world."
Jesus was not a whining baby nor was He childish. He is the King of kings and
Lord of lords! When you grow up and become a mighty warrior like He is, you'll
be able to endure hardness like a good soldier. You'll fight on the front lines
of battle and push through the adversary. You'll complete the mission you were
commissioned to do.
God needs warriors who don't sit around
and think about how they feel all the time. He needs grown up and mature
believers who press on in battle whose war cry is, "Greater is He that is
in me than he that is in the world! I can do all things through Christ which
strengthens me!"
Everybody has a call on their
life to advance the kingdom of God. He gives you special gifts and abilities to
help fulfill that call but you have to grow up to see the manifestation of
those gifts. If you remain a baby you won't see the full potential your spiritual
gifts can achieve. For this reason God gave to the church anointed ministers to
help all believers become all they were meant to be.
Ephesians 4:11-16 says, "And
He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some
pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry,
for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the
faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of
the stature of the fullness of Christ;
that we should no longer be
children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by
the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness by which they lie in wait to
deceive, but, speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things into Him who
is the head - Christ - from which the whole body, joined and knit together by
what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every
part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in
love."
God uses people who surrender to
the call on their life to do the work of the ministry and He has positioned you
to be His answer to the needs of those around you.
You are called to build up and
edify the church but first you must grow up to the full stature of Christ. The
Message Bible says we are to be "fully mature adults, fully developed
within and without, fully alive like Christ. No prolonged infancy among us,
please. We'll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy
mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell
it in love - like Christ in everything."
You must see the need to grow up
before you can begin the journey to spiritual maturity. There is an over
exaggeration of one's own maturity and most Christians won't admit they're
spiritual babies. People who get upset when they're told to grow up think they
already have but the fact that they are upset proves that they have not.
One characteristic of being
immature is to think you're more mature than you actually are. There are
Christian babies everywhere and this can be confusing to new believers because
there are spiritual infants in fifty year old bodies.
It is God's will for you to grow
up and He has anointed people to tell you where you actually are in your
spiritual development and what needs to happen next. You need to be told the
truth in love and this truth will set you free from the restrictions of
childhood. Babies can't do much. They have things decided for them. They don't
have the freedom and the responsibilities and the rewards that adults do.
Babies live in a small world that they are the center of. The only thing they
are aware of is what pertains to them.
Babies have themselves on their
mind all the time. They like to vent and it's not pretty and it's not nice.
Babies need somebody to do things for them. Spiritual babies look to somebody
else for everything. They want their problems fixed and be told what to do. More
than half the believers in the world want other people to pray for them and
believe for them. These people need to be confronted and asked,
"Why can't you pray for yourself?" Babies need to grow up and learn
to put on their own clothes and start doing things for themselves. They need to
work and carry their own weight and take on their responsibility to the body of
Christ.
The majority of your learning
comes from you doing the work of the ministry. You need to learn how to grow up
and not burden other people with what you're dealing with. You need to deal
with things for yourself. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3:1, "And I, brethren, could not
speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in
Christ." Babies can't handle much. Babies will ask you things you
can't tell them because they don't have the maturity and understanding to
comprehend the answer to their questions.
You can't feed a baby a T-bone
steak. Everybody has room to grow. You need to grow up from where you are right
now and you need to do it quickly. It is not okay to be a childish baby for thirty
years. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:14, "But the natural man does not receive
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he
know them, because they are spiritually discerned." You need a
mature, well developed spirit to evaluate and discern the things of God.
When you grow up you get very interested
in the things of God, for no longer is it foolishness to you but instead is the
source of life. Don't be fooled into thinking you can discern the things of God
with a great intellect. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are. A good
education only goes so far for it can't tap into the realm of the Spirit.
Some people are so dumb and
ignorant that they actually think they're smart, that they know more than
anybody else, including God. They'll dispute over doctrine or any little thing
that comes up like what color the carpet should be at church. They complain if
the church service went too long and they'll stay home if it's too cold out to
go to church. You say up, they say down. You say left, they say right. You say
white, they say black. It is time for these spiritual babies to grow up! Paul
said, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things"
(1 Corinthians 13:11).
The Message Bible says,
"When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any
infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good." Those who are
deceived into thinking they're more grown up than they actually are become
rebellious to the point where they won't let anybody show them where they're
missing the mark and failing to grow up.
It is shameful for a person to
while away the years of their life and not grow up and reach their full potential.
Jesus said in Matthew 5:48, "Therefore you shall be perfect, just
as your Father in heaven is perfect." People often neglect this
verse because they falsely believe the manifestation of it is not possible.
They assume the fulfillment of what Jesus said is beyond them so they pass
right over it and move on to the next verse. The truth of the matter is that
Jesus did not say try to be perfect, He said do it! Be ye perfect. He would not
tell you to do something were it not possible for you to do so.
In the Bible the word
"perfect" does not mean 'flawless.' Everything and everybody in the
natural realm is flawed in some way because of sin and the curse that is on the
earth. God is a Spirit and He's not holding a magnifying glass on your flesh. Thank
God for that. He looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). His eyes roam to and fro
across the earth to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is
perfect and loyal toward Him (2 Chronicles 16:9). That does not mean
'flawless.'
People say "nobody's
perfect" so they don't even try but the Word commands you to be perfect
and therefore you must be able to be perfect. The Hebrew word for
"perfect" is 'complete' and a composite of both Hebrew and Greek
means 'brought to its end, complete, lacking nothing necessary to completeness,
brought to its completion.' Philippians 1:6 says, "being confident of this
very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the
day of Jesus Christ." According to scripture, a person who is
perfect is mature, fully grown, and completely developed. The more mature you
are, the more you'll be like Jesus.
God intends for you to reach your full potential and for that to happen
you must grow beyond where you are now. You know you're grown up when you
become like Jesus. 1 John 2:6 says, "He who says he abides in Him ought
himself to walk just as He walked." Jesus emptied Himself and
walked the earth as a perfect and mature man proving it can be done. He is now
calling you to do the same thing and it is exciting to believe that you can.
--- Please click: "HERE" to read It's Time To Grow Up 2 ---
*** Written by Randall J. Brewer ***
THE TRUTH MEDIA
...building the body of Christ
We infer this from verses 13 and
14 – and look up and compare 1 Chronicles 12:32 and Esther 1:13. There is, however, a yet more important
knowledge that we must possess if we are to be ready for God to use us in
soul-winning service, and this is indicated in 2 Timothy 2:15. We must know how to use our Bible in pointing
someone to Christ.
