Who do you want to be when you grow up? It’s not just a question for children, it’s a question for all of us. Because, if God has given us new birth by grace through faith in Jesus’ life substituted for ours on the cross, and if God has then filled us with his Holy Spirit who is teaching us to walk in His ways, and if every moment of every day is an opportunity to be with Jesus and learn from Him how to live so that we are transformed increasingly into the image and likeness of Jesus, then we are all in fact still growing up.
We all have a whole lot of maturing ahead of us if we are to become gloriously like Jesus forever.
In this passage, the Apostle Paul explores spiritual maturity with 3 vital insights:
- The Pursuit of Maturity: Spiritual maturity is not a destination, but a pursuit. This side of glory, we will never fully arrive, because we’re a work in progress. This is the process of being progressively conformed to the image of Christ.
- The Pattern of Maturity: Spiritual maturity is less taught and more caught. Imitation is the key to maturation. Be ever careful who you keep your eyes on. We become what we behold. This is why Paul warns against those who we shouldn’t imitate.
- The Prospect of Maturity: Spiritual maturity is living here, while belonging there. We reside as citizens on earth, but we belong as citizens of Heaven. The way of Jesus is to be in the world, but not of the world. Jesus showed us the way through the Incarnation when He embodied both presence and holiness at once. This is the call to live as fully engaged citizens of earth, whose real, true, ultimate home and allegiance belong to our citizenship in Heaven. We are to be in the world but not of the world.
Takeaway: stand firm in the Lord, my beloved.
Philippians 3:12-4:1
