Having Faith vs Spiritual Maturity

It may sound obvious that to be a saved Christian is to have faith. That is true. God designed it so that we cannot be saved by any means but only through believing that Jesus died for our sins and has resurrected so that we can be born again.

However, I would like to pinpoint that even the devil and all the fallen angels believe in God.

Yikes.

Yet when I visit certain churches, that is all I see. I see others having this very weak relationship with God. I am not saying that they are not saved and will not go to heaven because they will. I am saying that instead of growing their relationship with their heavenly Father and becoming more mature, they rather stay the way that they are and use the fact that they are saved as a ticket to heaven. Having a weak relationship means having weak faith and having a weak faith means you are more likely to fall back into your old bad habits. Eventually, you will sin again until Sunday comes and you repent only to repeat that horrible cycle.

When I was younger, that was my life every week, every time I made a mistake, I would ask for forgiveness only to make that same mistake. The reason this cycle existed in my life was that I did not mature spiritually.

So, what does it mean to be spiritually mature?

In Ephesians 4:11-16 it states:

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”

Note that being spiritually mature does not mean knowing every verse in the Bible or being an excellent prayer, worshiper, or preacher. Instead, being more spiritually mature means to align ourselves with the word of God so we do not fall for every false doctrine that goes against the Bible, or old nasty habits and sin.

To become mature is a lengthy process, a journey I am still on to this day. I suggest to my fellow brothers and sisters that we take one thing at a time. Allow God into your heart and let him guide you to one thing he would like you to change. It can be a repetitive sin or a wrong mentality. Also, it might not be a terrible thing, it could be something good that you have done for years yet right now that thing has transformed into something bad. For example, I love to write. It is a gift that God gave me, yet now I have realized that I have been giving too much love for writing to the point where I have neglected God. It can be something as small as cleaning your room and making it into a habit.

If you treat each day as a fresh day as a new creation in Christ and continue to grow and become mature, eventually you can look back and see how much you have changed.

Maturing into a woman or man of God is not just something we have to do as Christians, it is also a part of God’s will for humanity. In Genesis 1: 26, God says:

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Other than being stewards of the Earth, God created humans so we may represent who is and what he stands for. Because of Adam and Eve’s sin, we have fallen from Grace. But thanks to Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, we can become saved and reunite with God once more. However, we can’t just be saved Christians anymore, we need to represent God and His likeness on Earth. By being Spiritually mature. Only then can we become a light to the nations and the salt to the Earth, representing God and his glory for all to see.