Chukwuma gave his life to Christ at a crusade when he was eleven years old, and he has hardly missed a Sunday since. He is fifty-four now. He sang in the choir for nineteen years. He has served on the church council, chaired the building committee and taught the adult Sunday school class more times than anyone can count. He can quote the whole of Romans 8 from memory, in English and in Igbo. When the pastor travels, Chukwuma is one of the men asked to lead the midweek service.
Last year his father died, and the family gathered in their hometown near Awka to plan the burial. Anyone who has sat through that kind of meeting knows how quickly it can turn. There were questions about money. There were questions about the land behind the old house. Chukwuma’s younger half-brother had contributed almost nothing to their father’s medical bills, and now he was speaking loudly about what was owed to him.
Chukwuma stood up. He told me afterwards that he did not plan what came next. He quoted Scripture at his brother for almost five minutes. “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” He pointed his finger. He raised his voice until the older women were begging him to sit down. Then he walked out of the compound and sat in his car.
The person who held the room together after he left was his brother’s wife. She had come to faith only four years earlier. She asked if she could pray. She poured water for the elders. She spoke to her husband quietly at the side of the house, and twenty minutes later he came back and agreed to a fair arrangement. Before Chukwuma drove back to Enugu that evening, she came to the car window and said gently, “Brother, everything you said about the money was true. But you said it like a man who wanted to win.”
He drove the whole length of the expressway without turning on the radio. “Forty-three years,” he said to me a few weeks later, sitting in my office with his hands folded. “Forty-three years in church. And a woman who has known the Lord for four years was the mature one in that room.”
He had discovered something that many long-serving believers never quite face. Time in church and growth in Christ are not the same thing.
Years are not the measure
The writer to the Hebrews was addressing believers who had been in the faith for a long time. He wanted to teach them something deep about Christ as our High Priest after the order of Melchisedec, and he stopped in the middle of his argument because he could tell they were not ready:
Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
“For when for the time ye ought to be teachers.” That phrase, for the time, is the heart of the problem. By the calendar, these people should have been mature. They had been taught. They had heard the gospel preached for years. Some of them had probably suffered for the faith (Hebrews 10:32-34). If maturity came automatically with time, they would have been teachers by now. Instead, they needed someone to teach them “which be the first principles of the oracles of God” all over again.
Notice the word he uses for their condition: “ye are dull of hearing.” The Greek word describes something sluggish or slow. The same word appears a few verses later, where he urges them “That ye be not slothful” (Hebrews 6:12). Nothing was wrong with their intelligence. Their hearing had slowed down. Truth came to them and settled nowhere. They had grown used to it.
That is one of the strange dangers of long familiarity. A new believer often hears the word with hunger. But a person who has been in church for decades can hear the same truths so often that they stop arriving. We can finish the preacher’s sentences. We have the vocabulary of faith on the tip of our tongue, and the vocabulary itself becomes a kind of insulation.
Then the writer describes the difference between a child and an adult. The babe “is unskilful in the word of righteousness.” The word means inexperienced, untested. A babe may have heard a great deal, but he has never had to use it under pressure. The mature, by contrast, are “those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
Look carefully at what maturity is measured by in that sentence. It is measured by use. It is measured by trained perception, by the capacity to tell good from evil when it matters. Chukwuma knew 1 Timothy 5:8 perfectly. What he lacked in that burial meeting was the trained discernment to see that being right about the money and being right in the room were two different things. His knowledge had never been exercised in the place where it would cost him something.
PunchlineMaturity is not measured by how long you have known the truth, but by how deeply the truth has been allowed to shape the way you see, speak and love.
Gifted, busy and still babes
If you want to see how much a church can have while still being immature, read Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Few churches in the New Testament had more spiritual activity. Paul thanks God that they were “enriched by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge” and that they came “behind in no gift” (1 Corinthians 1:5,7). They had prophecy, tongues, teaching and miracles. Their meetings were lively. They were proud of their wisdom.
And Paul writes to them, “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1). He had fed them “with milk, and not with meat” (1 Corinthians 3:2), and even now they were not able to bear more.
Babes in Christ. Paul calls them “brethren.” They were genuinely in Christ. But they were behaving like infants, and the evidence he gives is very revealing. He does not point to a lack of gifts or enthusiasm. He points to “envying, and strife, and divisions” (1 Corinthians 3:3). The proof of their immaturity was the way they treated one another.
The Corinthians had turned their favourite preachers into rival football clubs. “I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos” (1 Corinthians 3:4). They were taking one another to court over money (1 Corinthians 6:1-7). Rich members were eating well at the Lord’s Supper while poorer members went home hungry (1 Corinthians 11:21-22). Their spiritual gifts had become a stage for competition. All that activity, all that knowledge, all that giftedness, and they were still drinking milk.
This is why Paul places his great chapter on love right in the middle of his teaching on spiritual gifts. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). Then, near the end of that chapter, he uses the picture of growing up: “When I was a child, I spake 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).
Love is the sign of grown-up faith. A church can be loud, gifted and theologically informed and still be a nursery. A believer can lead the midweek service and still behave like a child when his inheritance is threatened.
That is a sobering word for those of us who have served for years. It is also hopeful. Paul did not give up on the Corinthians, because babes can grow.
The measure is Christ
So what does growth actually aim at? Paul gives the clearest answer in his letter to the Ephesians:
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.
Start with the gifts. The risen Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to His church. Why? “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” The word translated perfecting was used for setting a broken bone or mending a net. Leaders are given to equip ordinary believers so that the saints themselves do the work of ministry. A mature church is not one where a few gifted people perform while everyone else watches. It is one where the whole body is being made ready to serve.
Then look at the goal: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” The perfect man here means a full-grown man, an adult. And the standard of adulthood is breathtaking. It is not the most respected elder in your congregation, or the most famous preacher you have heard. It is “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Jesus Himself is what maturity looks like.
That changes how we think about growth. If the measure is Christ, then no amount of time in church, no title and no amount of Bible knowledge can make a person mature on its own. The question is always: Am I becoming more like Him? More like Him in humility. More like Him in patience with the slow and the weak. More like Him in truthfulness, and in the way He told the truth.
Paul then describes immaturity with a vivid picture. Children are “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness.” The word sleight comes from the language of dice-playing. Immature believers are easy prey for whatever new revelation is being sold at the latest conference, because they lack the anchored judgement that comes from knowing Christ well.
And the alternative is beautiful: “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things.” Maturity holds two things together that children usually hold apart. Children either tell the truth harshly or keep the peace by avoiding the truth. Adults in Christ learn to speak truth in love. That was exactly the lesson Chukwuma learned at his father’s burial meeting. He spoke the truth. He did not speak it in love. And a younger believer showed him what speaking it in love looks like.
Notice too that the passage ends with the body. “From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth... maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” Maturity is not a private achievement. We grow up together. The mature believer becomes a joint that supplies something to others, and the whole body is built up in love.
Growing up into dependence
NuggetHere we need to correct a common assumption. In natural life, growing up means moving from dependence to independence. A baby cannot feed herself. An adult pays her own rent and makes her own decisions.
Spiritual growth does not work that way. We never outgrow our need of Christ. Paul says we “grow up into him,” into the Head. The longer a believer walks with God, the more consciously he leans on grace. Jesus said, “for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5), and that sentence is just as true for a believer of fifty years as for one who was baptised last month.
Yet maturity does involve a real change. A baby is carried. A grown son is still loved, still dependent on his father’s provision and still welcome at his table, but now he carries responsibility in the family business. His dependence has become responsible. He trusts his father, and because he trusts his father, he works. Paul puts both sides into one sentence: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).
So the movement of Christian growth is from dependence that receives everything, toward dependence that also obeys, serves and bears weight for others. The immature believer wants God to fix his circumstances. The mature believer still asks God for help, often more urgently than before, but he also asks, What would You have me do here? Whom would You have me serve?
Compare the prayer “Lord, give me a job” with “Lord, give me a job, and help me to be honest in it and faithful to the people it puts around me.” Both prayers are dependent. The second has grown up.
This also means that maturity is never a reason to look down on those who are younger in the faith. Every grown son was once carried. The mature believer remembers how much patience was shown to him, and he shows the same patience to others.
A prayer for grown-up faith
Paul’s prayer for the Colossians gives us a portrait of what he longed to see in believers he had never met:
For this cause we also, since the day we heard it , do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness; Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.
Paul does not pray first that their circumstances would change. He prays “that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Then he says why: “That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.” Knowledge is for walking. Understanding is meant to become a way of life.
Look at the sequence. Knowledge of His will leads to a worthy walk. The worthy walk is “fruitful in every good work.” And as they walk and bear fruit, they keep “increasing in the knowledge of God.” Knowledge and obedience feed each other. You obey what you know, and in obeying, you come to know Him better. A believer who only collects information and never acts on it stops growing even in knowledge, because some things about God can only be learned in obedience.
Then Paul prays that they would be “Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power.” We might expect the next phrase to be about great exploits. Instead it reads: “unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.” God’s glorious power is given so that ordinary believers can endure difficult situations and difficult people without becoming bitter. Patience is one of the clearest marks of maturity in the whole New Testament. It is easy to look spiritual in a vigil service. It is harder to stay gracious through a long family dispute.
Finally, notice where the whole prayer comes to rest. “Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.” Made us meet means qualified us. Before Paul says anything about growth, he wants them to remember that the Father has already qualified them for the inheritance. Maturity does not earn our place in the family. It grows out of a place that has already been given.
That keeps growth healthy. A believer trying to become mature in order to be accepted will become anxious, competitive and harsh, which is exactly what Corinth looked like. A believer who knows he has already been qualified can grow with thankfulness, because he is loved and alive.
Discernment and love together
If we put these passages side by side, two marks of maturity keep appearing. One is discernment: senses exercised to tell good from evil, a mind no longer tossed by every wind of doctrine, wisdom and spiritual understanding. The other is love: the absence of envy and strife, truth spoken in love, patience and longsuffering with joy.
Paul brings them together in one prayer for the Philippians:
And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.
“That your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment.” He does not ask for more love instead of knowledge, or more knowledge instead of love. He asks for love that grows in knowledge and judgement. Love that can see clearly. Love that can “approve things that are excellent,” testing and recognising what is truly good.
We need both, because each one goes wrong without the other. Love without discernment becomes naive. It cannot recognise manipulation. It enables destructive behaviour and calls it kindness. It lends money to a man who has lied three times already, and then lends again. Discernment without love becomes harsh. It can spot every error in the room, but it uses that skill to wound. It is quick to label and slow to restore.
The mature believer increasingly has both. He can see what is wrong in a situation, and he can address it in a way that seeks the good of the person who is wrong. Paul describes exactly this in another letter: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). The spiritual person sees the fault. That is discernment. He restores gently, remembering his own weakness. That is love.
Here is a simple test. When someone in your church falls into sin, is your first instinct to talk about it or to pray? To distance yourself or to restore? When you are wronged, can you name the wrong honestly without needing to destroy the person who did it? Those moments reveal far more about our maturity than the number of verses we can quote.
What maturity is not
It may help to clear away a few things that are often mistaken for maturity.
Maturity is not religious vocabulary. Some people can pray in the right phrases, use all the expressions of a seasoned believer and still be very young in Christ. The vocabulary can be learned in a few months. The character takes years of yielding to the Spirit.
Maturity is not a title. Paul warns against appointing “a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6), but a title does not create maturity. Some of the most mature people in a congregation have never held any office.
Maturity is not sinless perfection. Paul, near the end of his life, wrote, “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect” (Philippians 3:12). The mature believer still stumbles. What has changed is how quickly he recognises it, how honestly he owns it and how readily he returns to grace.
And maturity is not a race against other believers. Comparing ourselves with others is one of the surest signs that we are still young (2 Corinthians 10:12). People grow at different rates, through different seasons, under different burdens. A believer who came to faith out of deep trauma may be growing remarkably even when the outward signs look modest. God sees the whole story.
How growth actually happens
PunchlineIf years do not automatically produce maturity, what does? Scripture describes several means God uses, and none of them is a shortcut.
The first is the word received with an open heart. Peter tells believers, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). Growth begins with appetite. When we lose our hunger for God’s word, we have usually stopped growing, however much we still hear.
The second is the Spirit’s work within us. Paul says we are “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We behold the Lord, and the Spirit changes us.
The third is obedience in small things. The Hebrews were dull because they had stopped using what they knew. Every time we act on the truth, especially when it costs us something, our senses are exercised a little more. A believer who forgives one offence today is better prepared to forgive a larger one tomorrow.
The fourth is the body of Christ. We grow up together, “by that which every joint supplieth.” We need people who know us well enough to tell us the truth, and we need to be the kind of person who can hear it. Chukwuma’s growth that year came partly through a younger believer who loved him enough to speak to him at a car window.
The fifth is pressure. James says that “the trying of your faith worketh patience” (James 1:3). We should never tell a grieving person that their loss was sent to teach them a lesson. But God does use hard seasons to deepen us, and many believers grew most in the years they least enjoyed.
Peter’s last recorded words gather all of this into one instruction:
Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.
Peter knew that believers can be “led away with the error of the wicked” and fall from their own steadfastness. His remedy is growth. Grow in grace. We grow within grace, as a tree grows in soil. We never graduate from it.
A month after the burial, Chukwuma drove back to his hometown. He did not tell anyone he was coming. He went to his half-brother’s house, sat in the small parlour and apologised. He did not take back anything true he had said about the money. But he apologised for the way he had said it, for the pointing finger, for the shouting in front of the elders and for using his Bible as a weapon against his own brother.
His brother was silent for a long time. Then he said, “You have never spoken to me like this in my whole life.” They talked for two hours. They did not resolve everything. Families are complicated, and some wounds are older than either of them. But a door opened that had been closed for thirty years.
Before he left, Chukwuma found his brother’s wife in the kitchen and thanked her. “You taught me something I should have learned decades ago,” he said. She laughed and told him she had only done what she had seen Jesus do in the Gospels.
When he told me the story, he said, “I used to think I was mature because I knew so much. Now I think maturity is when what you know starts showing up in the rooms where it costs you.” He has started meeting every Saturday morning with two younger men from his church, not to teach them, he insists, but to read the Gospels together and talk honestly about how their week went.
Years in church are a gift. They should give us a deep store of truth and a long memory of God’s faithfulness. But years are only the soil. What God is looking for is the fruit: a love that sees clearly, a discernment that serves, a life growing up into Christ in all things. And He is patient. Whatever your age in the faith, He has not finished with you.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- If someone measured your maturity only by the way you behaved in your last serious conflict, what would they conclude?
- Where might familiarity with Christian language have dulled your hearing of truths you have known for years?
- In which area of life is God inviting you to move from receiving help to bearing responsibility for others?
- Do you tend to lean more toward love without discernment, or discernment without love? What would growth in the other direction look like?
- Who in your life is younger in the faith than you but more mature in some area? What could you learn from them?
This Week
This week, read Colossians 1:9-12 each morning and pray it for yourself by name. Then choose one relationship where you know there is tension or unfinished business. Ask the Lord to show you one specific way you could speak the truth in love in that relationship, or one specific way you have failed to. Take one small, concrete step before the week ends: a phone call, an apology, an honest conversation or a quiet act of service. Afterwards, write down what the experience revealed to you about where you are growing and where you still need His grace.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You have made me meet to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, and that my place in Your family does not depend on how mature I am. Forgive me for the times I have mistaken years in church, religious words or busy service for real growth. Fill me with the knowledge of Your will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. Let my love abound more and more in knowledge and in all judgement. Teach me to speak the truth in love, to restore gently and to bear patiently with others. Grow me up into Christ in all things, and let the fruit of that growth be seen in the rooms where it costs me most. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.