It's Time To Grow Up 1

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 ***

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