What is Spiritual Maturity? (2)

(continued)

That God consistently ties knowing to doing makes sense once we give the matter some consideration. Can you really gain a trust in God through doing? How can you do without trusting, and how can you trust without knowing? The only way to trust is to know God’s promises and to rely on them. If you don’t know God’s promises, you have nothing to trust in. In the same sense, how can you love that which you don’t know? And how can you know God, and truly understand who God is, without studying the Scriptures?

Let’s turn to the New Testament now, and see if we find the same chain of logic there.

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Mark 10:17-18

Jesus doesn’t say: “Why do you call me teacher?” He doesn’t say, “Can’t you see, I’m not here to teach you, but to get you to live a better life?” Jesus was called a teacher through his time here, and he never once rejected that title. Jesus taught. He challenged what people believed, from the Saducees who didn’t believe in the resurrection, to the Sarmitan woman who didn’t believe the Jews were right to worship God on the Temple Mount.

Probably the most relevant Scripture to spiritual maturity is to be found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Let’s see how he describes the final state of what a Christian should be:

….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. Ephesians 4:11-14

What is spiritual maturity? It is unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God. It is to be steady, not tossed around by every wind of doctrine or fooled by human cunning. And how are we to achieve this state?

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry…. Ephesians 4:11

By listening to the apostles, who speak to us today through the Scriptures, the prophets, who explain and “tell forth” the Scriptures, the evangelists, who teach the world about Christ, teachers, who explain the Scriptures to us, and the shepherds, who guide us in living a Christian life. Of the offices mentioned here that are given to bring us to spiritual maturity, all of them teach in some way, and only one has any sort of emphasis on doing. Paul’s opinion was certainly that spiritual maturity comes through learning. But what about the Church before Paul? It was certainly more focused on fellowhip and doing, wasn’t it?

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’s teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Acts 2:42

The original church, formed at Pentecost, also had a strong element of teaching, rather than doing. But even if we agree that we should be teaching the Word of God, we next have to agree on what it means to teach the Word of God. Are we to treat the Word of God as a self help book that shows us how to have a full and wonderful life? No, for this trvializes the Word of God. Instead, we should be using the Word of God to learn about God.

Knowing about God is the root of spiritual maturity.